I hope that in future MySpace doesn’t allow this sort of thing to happen. Joe can create a supporter group, or he can call his profile ‘Barack Obama Fan’ or whatever. Obviously he meant well, but a profile should be a profile of the actual person named. A line has to be drawn somewhere, and imo that’s a good place to draw it.

This was the fundamental lesson of the Dean campaign, and I think Dean and Trippi learned it together at some point around late summer - early fall of 2003. Too many supporters were too eager to engage the campaign, with too many wacky ideas, in order for Dean for America to try to control it all. Instead they provided tools, like meetup and to a much lesser degree Deanlink (or whatever the heck their myspace clone was called), which allowed supporters to find each other and self-organize. It looks like that lesson has been lost to some degree, but it will likely be learned again very quickly.

The successful campaign will be the one which understands that the message is the community, to some degree. That is, a successful campaign will be one which encourages its supporters to do their own thing, and which encourages its supporters to extend that DIY attitude to the practice of governing, not just campaigning. Dean did this in 2003 masterfully, Deval Patrick extended this work in 2006, and I’m quite positive that we will see it rise again. Obama’s take on this lesson is that engaging the community is merely a matter of providing good social networking technology; I hope the campaign will soon learn that it means letting supporters do their own thing and drive the message as well.

I think we actually agree more than we disagree, since I think building community is a powerful tool. I’d just argue that it’s going to require a serious shift in thinking for campaign staffs.
– cpd