MiCandidate – One Week On

UPDATE: MiCandidate have dropped their prices – but their attitude remains. See Suzy for more details.

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There were a number of interesting developments that stemmed from the analysis of MiCandidate.eu posted here last week.

Firstly, The Irish Times got in contact to say they have no arrangement whatsoever with MiCandidate to display information collated by MiCandidate on irishtimes.com.

This means that any candidate who bought into MiCandidate Pro believing their information would be on The Irish Times’ website (one of the most visited media websites in the country) has been misled.

It also means that MiCandidate were falsely using the name of The Irish Times in an attempt to increase the value of their product. See these extracts from emails sent from MiCandidate to candidates:

…benefits of miCandidate for your campaign:

** Direct input of your issues and policies into RTE.ie,

Sky News, TV3 and Irish Times websites and many more in the pipeline.

and another, as published originally by Suzy Byrne…

We are very concerned that you are one of only a few remaining candidates who has not completed the information form that we sent you. Your profile will appear across dozens of Ireland’s busiest websites from RTE to the Irish Times…

but, leaving aside the issue with The Irish Times…

RTE have said they will only be showing the basic amount of information on each candidate on RTE.ie. This means all the ‘Obama Tools’ that are displayed on a candidate’s Pro profile (blog, videos, images etc), will not be displayed on RTE.ie. So, in simpler terms, the candidates who paid €235 and continue to pay €35 or €99 a month, depending on which election they are contesting, will have the same amount of information displayed on RTE.ie as the candidate who paid absolutely nothing.

The Guardian/Guardian.co.uk, the biggest newspaper website in the UK last year, do not have a contract with MiCandidate. Although I reported that there was a deal done between MiCandidate and the Guardian in The Full Analysis, this has proved inaccurate. I believed MiCandidate had an agreement with the Guardian due to these comments (and a lack of correction to a follow up question) made by Paddy Cosgrave in an interview a number of weeks ago. That combined with the fact that as I left the MiCandidate offices Cosgrave asked me to keep the information about the Guardian to myself until “next week” – unfortunately I did not record that request. I called the Guardian News Media press enquiries office yesterday and after the senior press officer I was speaking with made “a number of queries with anyone who might know” was told there nobody there aware of a company by the name of MiCandidate.

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Last week MiCandidate sent an email to candidates claiming that MiCandidate.eu had received 110,000 views in the last week. I think it is worth pointing out that “views” is a very vague term.

There was no information in the email about whether views meant ‘unique’ views – as in 110,000 individual people viewed the the website – or if views included what are known as ’spiders’ which is when an automated search engine (e.g. Google) accesses the website to collect all the information on every page and make it searchable for outside users. Also worth noting – as earlier reported by Simon, Alexa.com (an independent website that collects information on the amount views a website attracts) statistics show that only 52% of people who accessed MiCandidate.eu were from Ireland – this means approximately 48% of the 110,000 ‘views’ were almost worthless to Irish candidates standing in both the local and European elections. There is no way of telling a candidate how many people who viewed their profile are living in the area where they are standing for election – if you are a candidate who received an email telling you that your profile was viewed 3,000 times this does not mean 3,000 Irish people, let alone 3,000 people in your constituency, viewed your profile. It does not even necessarily mean 3,000 people viewed your profile.

Contrary to prior reports, MiCandidate have not been granted High-potential Start-up status by Enterprise Ireland. Paddy Cosgrave did use the term “high-potential start-up” during the MiCandidate ‘blogger-briefing’ but it seems he was referring to MiCandidates participation in the DIT Hothouse system. It appears ‘high-potential start-up’ is not a term exclusive to Enterprise Ireland.

In the interest of balance – a comment was left by Steve Boggis, a volunteer with Votewise.co.uk, (a UK website that does similar work to MiCandidate without charging candidates for profiles or offering the ‘Obama Tools)’. The comment stated…

Micandidate seem to have set up a UK version over the top of them. I asked the Votewise guys what they thought about this – they were very polite. They pointed out that they were not allowed to offer upgrades or anything that the candidates could pay for as this would incur Notional Expenditure on top of the cost. I asked what micandidate were doing about this and they said that Paddy had phoned them earlier this week asking what it was!

Looks like they might be inviting candidates in the UK to break the law.

Although it is true that Paddy Cosgrave called Votewise to ask about the UK law which, it was suggested, may cause MiCandidate problems (the law in question is known as ‘notional expenditure‘) it turns out it will not impact how MiCandidate operates in the UK. This writer called the UK Electoral Commission who, after I explained how MiCandidate will be operating, told me it would not constitute “inviting candidates in the UK to break the law” unless candidates failed to report their purchase and usage of a MiCandidate Pro profile to the commission.

To round up, here are a few MiCandidate related items that may make you smile (or groan, depending on whether you have paid for a Pro account or not)… they also display the value, or lack thereof, of the ‘Obama Tools’. Like I said, having a presence on Twitter does not give it a value, automatically generated posts are not the same as posts interacting with voters.

See Fianna Fáil local election candidate for Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown (Stillorgan) Liam Dockery tweeting into the abyss via his MiCandidate Twitter profile. With nobody following Liam, and Liam following nobody he is doing the online equivalent of hanging up a poster in an empty windowless hall, walking out of that hall, turning the lights off, closing the door behind him and telling nobody where he put up his lovely poster. Completely useless.

See MiCandidate themselves demonstrating how not to use Twitter – sending 21 public tweets in 16 minutes annoying several people (me amongst them admittedly) and causing a number of people to stop following their tweets. To their credit, they apologised afterwards to some people saying that they got “a bit over eager, it’s late in the office”.

And lastly, see a candidate with experience of how to work online, IT consultant and Socialist Party candidate in Howth-Malahide, Brian Greene tweeting to MiCandidate and asking if his profile is a “walled garden”. A walled garden is a place online that refuses to offer the user a link to somewhere they may find out more information. Alternatively, it could be described as a room where most of the doors are locked closed… but I’m not a fan of door analogies. Predictably, there was no reply.

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If you are a candidate who feels they have been misled by MiCandidate regarding their claims of partnership with The Irish Times, please get in touch with me. All my information can be seen here.