MiCandidate.eu – The Full Analysis

UPDATE/CORRECTION:

I have received some correspondence from The Irish Times “The Irish Times has paid no licensing fee and currently has no arrangement of any sort with MiCandidate”. This raises three questions -

1. Are the other media outlets paying a license fee?

2. MiCandidate have been saying they have deals done with certain media outlets, (I have an hour long interview with Paddy Cosgrave recorded where he says such) have they?

3. Does this legally constitute false advertising on MiCandidate’s part to candidates?

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Paddy Cosgrave, ‘Founder of MiCandidate’ says MiCandidate will “revolutionise” how citizens interact with electoral candidates.

Several people, myself included have questioned this assertion in the last number of months.

First, what is MiCandidate? Basically, it’s a database of candidates running in the Irish local elections, British local elections and European elections. There are two ways candidates can use MiCandidate, the free version, and ‘MiCandidate Pro’, for which candidates must cough up some cash.

The free option will allow candidates display basic info about themselves, name, contact, constituency, policies, party etc on several big name websites (i.e. media outlets and “citizen sector” websites in Ireland, the UK and some other EU countries). The Pro option is billed as the “complete online package” for candidates.

MiCandidate Pro will make working online “affordable and effective” for candidates, according to MiCandidate. It will give candidates “access to 50+ newspapers and 500+ journalists”. It will let you send text messages to your team (at a price). Emails too (at a price, yes, they’ll be charging candidates to send emails). It will also allow candidates to collect donations from supporters online.

“Affordable and effective”

The MiCandidate Pro package gives local election candidates access to several imaginatively prefixed features (miTwitter, miFlickr, miPress Release…) named ‘The Obama Tools’ by the MiCandidate team. This all comes for a once off charge of €239 plus €35 a month. European election candidates pay the same set-up fee and €99 a month, for the same features.

The Obama Tools are…

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A Twitter account

A flickr account (Flickr Pro not specified)

A youtube account

MiSMS

A calendar – to allow candidates display events they will be attending

MiEmail – the ability to send “amazing emails to supporters with one click” (at a cost of 1c per email – 98% of which are guaranteed not to get caught in the spam filter)

MiVolunteers which looks to be a fancy name for an online form to allow candidates sign up volunteers

The ability to send HTML based newsletters from pre-supplied templates

A “blog” that will not allow comments from anyone (but will be “automatically syndicated to Blogspot to “further drive your profile online”)

MiPress Release which will allow candidates to send press releases to 500 local and national journalists. Pre-designed templates also provided. The press releases will be listed on Google News also.

MiDonate – to allow local election candidates receive donations from supporters online, a report of all donations will be automatically sent to SIPO at the end of the campaign.

and finally – Integration. Which will place your profile on the websites of the media outlets mentioned earlier. This also comes as part of the free option.

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So, that’s what you get. I’ll get back to them later…

Paddy Cosgrave said at the recent MiCandidate “blogger-briefing”, some of which you can watch here, that candidates told him they would need circa €1000 to build a website. He said some of them were unsure as how they would post the content once the site had been built, so Cosgrave thought he’d make it “affordable and effective”.

The candidates he spoke to were not ‘internet natives’ clearly, which is completely understandable and not something to criticise. So he and his team developed MiCandidate which appears at least, to be designed like Facebook or Bebo, whose systems are famously (or notoriously) simple to use. WordPress and Blogspot are also famously simple to use. If the MiCandidate team have developed something that is easier than WordPress (which is in version 2.7) to operate then that is highly impressive, but unlikely. Therefore the value in this part of the MiCandidate product is essentially the fact they’re supplying a pre-packaged profile that is simple to use. It’s comparable to being sold a pre-designed wordpress website.

However, in terms of costs, its potentially far more expensive. Take a losing European election candidate as an example. They have paid €235 set-up fee and say, 3x€99 for three months displaying a MiCandidate profile. Once the campaign ends they are left with the option of continuing to pay the monthly fee until the next campaign comes around some years later or losing all the content they have uploaded by ending the monthly payments. If they instead invested the €1000 that Cosgrave said they had been quoted by web developers into buying what would be an extremely attractive and simple to use wordpress based site they would have a website they could use at no, or very little further cost, for years to come. That site could have wordpress plug-ins comparable to ‘The Obama Tools’.

To run a MiCandidate page for one year costs a European election candidate €1423, to pay for a website to be designed professionally that would do the same job would cost arguably nothing more… and candidates could use that for an infinite period while paying just the annual hosting costs (approx €50).

Cosgrave would argue that the advantage of MiCandidate Pro over a personal website is Pro gives candidates full control of their profile on the websites of a number of prominent media outlets. Correct, but those who don’t choose Pro will still have their basic information displayed.

It should also be noted, if a media outlet wishes to turn off the blog posts, video or picture tabs (all the Pro options) of all the candidates profiles to instead display equal amounts of information for all candidates, they can do so. Will RTE, who are constitutionally required to remain impartial, choose to do this? Or the Irish Times who voluntarily sign up to the same rules?… Should they?

A candidate who chooses to invest the €1000 in their own website as opposed to a MiCandidate profile would also have a much stronger influence over the information that is listed first when their name is searched in Google. With the MiCandidate option the search result that is returned in Google would likely be, www.rte.ie/micandidate/JoeBloggs, (or similar but with a URL for another media outlet) with the own-your-own website the first Google search result would usually quickly become www.joebloggs.com – and Joe Bloggs could have control over exactly what is on that website and exactly how it looks. Note with some media outlets all their recent stories, positive or negative, about a certain candidate could be displayed on that candidates’  profile.

But, candidates, before you decide anything, read about what the Pro package gives you…

“THE OBAMA TOOLS”

Flickr

Flickr is widely accepted to be the best photo hosting website online. Like MiCandidate there are two account options, Flickr Pro and a free basic account. It is unclear whether MiCandidate are including a Flickr Pro account as part of their Pro package. Flickr Pro allows an unlimited number of photos and various other advantages, the free option has a number of limitations listed here. There is no further information about which account option is included on the MiCandidate website.

Twitter

Anyone who uses Twitter will tell you it can be a great tool to help you engage with others online. For those who’ve been living under a rock for the last few months, Twitter allows people who may be interested, to keep up to date with what you’re doing. They choose to “follow” you and thus receive all the “tweets” (or messages) you send out. The point is to keep the content short and easily read so people don’t have to invest too much time, therefore tweets must be less than 140 characters in length, (although MiCandidate seem to think differently, according to their website last night Twitter was a 144 character-based network). If the things you tweet about interest the people following you they can tweet back to you and start a conversation. If you’re not interesting or continuously spam those following you with generic narcissistic tweets, as anyone who uses Twitter regularly will tell you, people tend to “unfollow” you.

The important word in the above paragraph is “conversation”. With MiCandidate any candidates who post a “blog” post or add a calendar event will have their Twitter account automatically updated with a summary and link to their profile. In essence it will allow candidates to spam anyone who follows them, unless they decide to invest some time in their Twitter account, which would mean taking a lump out of their time to converse with people who wish to converse with them. Having a Twitter account that is automatically updated does not promote conversation, it is not an online equivalent to knocking on doors, although arguably it’s comparable to putting leaflets in letterboxes. However, the “No Junk Mail” signs (unfollows) will be put up very quickly if all a candidate does is tweet automatic updates. Automatic updates do not add to the conversation, they annoy people. People are voters.

Simply looking at MiCandidate’s own Twitter account shows they do not understand how people operate on Twitter. As of 11pm on April 15th 2009 they are following 517 people, are being followed by 109 and have 26 updates. Of the 26 updates just two have been in reply to someone (one of whom is me), both of these were posted that day and were impolite. When someone did attempt to converse with them several weeks ago they did not reply (thus not becoming part of a conversation). So, not only does MiCandidate not realise that Twitter is a 140, not 144 character system, they do not understand the “culture” of Twitter, that, it could be argued, is the reason they only have one person following them for every five that they follow.

Even if you discount their ignorance as to how the platform works, Twitter is free and there are systems you can get free to automatically update your account when you post on your website.

Also, the value of Twitter to local, or even European election candidates is questionable. There are 6 million people on Twitter the vast, vast majority of whom are in America. In Ireland there are only approximately 15,000 people on Twitter. How many of those 15,000 are going to be living in the area that the candidate is contesting? How many of that number are going to chose to follow the candidate? And finally how many of that number are going to even consider voting for the candidate? You’re then left with a very small number of people, how many of them are you going to piss off with an automatically updated account? Is it worth it? MiCandidate gives candidates a presence on Twitter, any half-twit knows it takes far more than that to give twitter any sort of value.

Youtube

MiCandidate will “seamlessly link to youtube… [to] increase traffic to your profile and drive Google search results”. Youtube is a free (there’s that word again) service, placing a video from Youtube onto a website requires the ability to copy and paste in the correct location. Some would argue that many non-net-savvy candidates would not be able to do this, but if they can upload videos to MiCandidate they’re more than half-way there already.

Calender

When the candidate pays the €1000 to a web developer to design a simple to use WordPress site they could tell the developer to use this free plug-in that does everything the calender does on MiCandidate Pro. The website would be fully under their control and cost far less to maintain annually. It’s just as easy to use also.

MiEmail

The pitch for MiEmail makes it sound amazing. “Your profile page will allow your supporters to opt-in to receive your emails with one click. Their details will automatically be added to your list. And they will receive your email next time you decide to send a mail to all your contacts. No excel files, no adding contacts. Your database just automatically grows“. So, well, that means it’s a email system like GMail which is free. Note: MiCandidate will be charging candidates (who have already paid for the Pro package) 1 cent to send an email.

It continues under the headline “Never Touch a Spreadsheet Again” – “Your time is precious, very precious. Communicating with your constituents, knocking on doors, shaking hands is a full time job. You can’t afford to waste your synchronising spreadsheets and matching contacts. You need a system that is completed automated – just type and email and click send“. Ignoring the “completed automated” -and the fact that the word “time” is missing – don’t most email interfaces allow this, for free? GMail automatically saves all email addresses you have sent mail to and received mail from, all one must do is choose the addresses you wish to send mail to from a list and click send. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

“With our patented email system, over 98% of your email will go straight to your constituent’s inbox. No spam folders, no trash folders, no email blockers. Just simple delivery over 98% of the time“. This means the MiCandidate servers are white-labelled and will pass through most spam filters and get into 98% of peoples’ inbox. Fair enough. GMail has never mislabelled something as spam for me however, but I may be an exception and not everyone uses GMail.

“Ever wonder how many people open your email? How many people click on the link? How many people delete it? Forward it to friends? You can have all this information immediately“. Using HTML to collate which links people clicked in your email – this is the first part of the Obama Tools that may be worth paying something for. Not €235 set-up and €35 a month, however.

The pitch continues, repeating again that all candidates must do is “Type your message once. Click send once. Communicate with all your supporters“. Is a system that allows people sending an email to type their message only once and click send only once, really worth boasting about? Even once?

“With so much legislation surrounding email, privacy and spam you need to know that you are fully compliant with best practice. Every email sent by our system will automatically include unsubscribe buttons and if a recipient clicks this button then we will automatically remove their email from your send list. You will never have to manage unsubscribe requests again“. This is again a process that is widely available, easy to implement and free, ask the developer you pay to build your website to give you this option. It would take them ten minutes.

MiVolunteers

MiVolunteers, according to MiCandidate lets you “Grow your supporters” and “Collect the right details on new volunteers”. Local election candidates, ask yourself this, how many people who you don’t know personally are going to volunteer to help with your campaign? Are people likely to feel that strongly about the content of your MiCandidate page that they are going to sign up and become a volunteer there and then? Or are they more likely to know you personally and give you a call when they hear you are running and say “I want to help out”? Is this going to be worth anything to you? Honestly. How many people who you do not know personally or in the case of party candidates, who have not been assigned by your party, would you trust to work on your campaign team?

Would a website tailored to reflect your personality and political beliefs not be more likely to garner more interest as opposed to a website that is almost exactly the same as every other candidate in Europe?

MiSMS

Text your followers from your profile at the cost of 3c per text plus network rates. Alternatively you could use the free online texts Meteor, Vodafone and O2 supply on a monthly basis. I think they give each person 300 each a month, free.

MiNewsletters

Who are candidates going to be sending the newsletters to? The same people they will be sending their MiEmails to, it’s a duplication of service. Also, the HTML templates offered – fancy sending the same looking newsletter as your constituency rival? Didn’t think so. Alternatively, you could use one of these free templates, or one of the hundreds of others available free online. Hear that? Free.

The “Blog”

MiCandidate says it promotes interaction between the candidate and voters. One of the ways it says it does this is through the “blog” feature. Most people who know anything about blogs will tell you that comments must be allowed for it to be a blog, if comments are not allowed then it is simply a statement online. The idea behind blogging is that it allows people to question what you say, ask you about your plans, compliment how hard you work or tell you about their issues – that’s interaction. When people see politicians interacting with voters in public it humanises them, makes them a person more than politician, it’s the same thinking that’s behind the infamous baby kissing idea. A blog, in the accepted sense – with comments – would give politicians the option of humanising themselves online. People reading the blog could read what you say and give their opinion, you reply, everyone reading the comments sees you do care about what the voters think, and thus think more highly of you. A blog without comments is more like a column in a newspaper, people read it, disagree with or agree with you, think “typical politician” and their feelings towards you as a person don’t change. MiCandidate doesn’t allow comments. Your own website would allow comments.

MiPress Release

MiPress Release gives candidates “access to 50+ newspapers and 500+ journalists”. The figure of 500 journalists is questionable to begin with, are there 500+ working journalists in Ireland? I can only presume that number includes journalists from media outlets in various countries. Therefore, one must wonder, how many of the journalists who you will be emailing will be covering the area you are contesting? Would you not be better off simply calling the media that cover your area and asking for an email address to send press releases to? If you’re a local election candidate in Tralee is the email address for the newsdesk of The Daily Telegraph in the UK any use to you? They certainly won’t be covering you.

Believe me, the political correspondent in a national newspaper does not care what the first time local election candidate from Fianna Fail in Back-Arse-of-Nowhere is saying unless it’s something insulting and ridiculous. You’re more likely to get journalists annoyed and blocking your email address than any remotely positive coverage. For the candidates involved with a political party, does your press office not have a list of contacts? Pester them.

MiDonate

SIPO does not allow political donations from people outside the country so you won’t be getting a big packet in from the states through a MiDonate link, if that’s what you’re thinking. Some candidates are already using a donation link on their websites. The only possible thing worth charging for is the automatic report to SIPO. If you’re prepared to report it yourself you could tell the person you pay to build your wordpress site to use this free plug-in and get the exact same donation system.

Integration

The integration comes with the basic package. People will be able to see your contact details and policies on all the same sites as those who pay for the Pro package. The media outlets who will be displaying the MiCandidate profile may chose to show only the basic amount of information on their site, it’s their choice. The Pro option gives you the chance that the voter will see more, not the guarantee. The integration is the only part of the MiCandidate system that a person cannot get with their own website – it’s part of the basic MiCandidate option. Remember, the media outlets will be able to display relevant recent stories about a candidate on that candidates profile.

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So, TWO CHOICES

Invest your money in a MiCandidate profile that cannot be fully personalised, may be useless post-election, could display negative stories about you and costs on a month-on-month basis infinitely. You also lose all the content you have placed online should you chose to stop paying the monthly fee.

or

Invest your money in a website you have full control over, is just as easy to use, is far cheaper in the long-run, still has the vast majority of the ‘The Obama Tools’ plus the option to add more, allows real interaction with voters to make the candidate a person rather than a politician, if used correctly will place you first when someone searches your name in Google – while still having your basic information displayed across a range of media outlets with the basic MiCandidate option. All for the same, or potentially less, depending on how long one would plan to stay with MiCandidate Pro, amount of money.

That’s the choice.

But before you make your decision lets look at MiCandidate The Company

The same people behind MiCandidate were behind the Rock The Vote campaign from prior elections and referendums. The aim of Rock The Vote was to improve voter turn-out amongst 18-25 year olds. They got several respected, informed and influential ‘celebrities’ to appear in short adverts urging people to vote. They did so in a manner that clearly respected the intelligence (and in no way patronised) their target audience. During and after the campaign some public commentators questioned how they operated. Rock The Vote said they would release information after polling day proving they improved voter turn-out, they did not. The Rock the Vote campaign received €20,000 in government funding, the details of what they spent that money on are due to be submitted to government on June 5th of this year.

They were also behind the MyCandidate.ie website that was generally accepted to be a decent resource informing people about candidates during the 2007 election. Mycandidate.ie did not however, sell ‘The Obama Tools’ or attempt to become anything more than an information supplier.

They are also behind the Irish Undergraduate Awards.

The MiCandidate Company consists of between 10 and 25 employees, reports vary, Cosgrave “The Founder of MiCandidate” and “driving force behind” it could not confirm the exact amount when asked. They also have “around 100″ interns across Europe gathering information about candidates in their area, these are unpaid.

Senior College Dun Laoghaire, which is run by the Dun Laoghaire VEC (a state body) has given MiCandidate, a private company, use of twenty computers until a later date when they will be donated on to a secondary school.

MiCandidate have been paid a “small licensing fee” by RTE to allow rte.ie display the candidate information micandidate.eu collates. MiCandidate have similar arrangements with Sky News, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, Le Monde, Independent News and Media and potentially several other media outlets. Other revenue streams also include MiCandidate Pro – which may be the main revenue stream, but that is unclear – and automatically generated adverts placed on candidates pages.

Cosgrave says the adverts “will not be political” and obviously, the adverts displayed on a candidates profile should be neutral. However, looking at the website today, this does not appear to be the case. Andrew Montague’s profile (a Labour local election candidate) was displaying an advert for Catherine Ardagh. Catherine Ardagh is a Fianna Fail local election candidate standing for election in another area. Clearly the adsense software being used is allowing both political and non-neutral adverts to be displayed on candidates profiles.

More information -

MiCandidate sent this email to a local election incumbent last month. Note the tone.

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. Failing to return this form to us in the next 48 hours may result in your profile being entirely empty. Given that candidates profiles were viewed nearly 4 million times in 2007 on RTE and the Irish Times you are giving your competitors in your constituency a huge advantage over you.

This is a free service, but we cannot stress the urgency that we need you to fill out your details. Seats will be won and lost by a handful of votes, your competitors profiles will be viewed tens of thousands of times. Your profiles will be empty.

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A number people have also complained about receiving unsolicited emails from the company. If proven, this would contravene data protection legislation. Stephen Spillane said he received an unsolicited email from the company informing him about the opportunity to become a MiCandidate intern. He was unsure where they got his email address from until later realising he had signed up to the Rock The Vote email list. Another person who worked on the Rock The Vote campaign told this writer off the record that “Paddy likes to get his databases mixed up”. That implies Paddy Cosgrave mixes the email addresses he has collated from a number campaigns, which would also contravene data protection legislation.

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The argument for buying into MiCandidate Pro is that it will revolutionise the way candidates will be able to “interact” with voters. This is simply not true. There is no added interaction – an email address is supplied for people viewing the page and users can give a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” to the policies listed. Placing a email address on page does not revelutionise voter interaction. The thumbs up/down item is laughable.

There is merit in the idea behind supplying voters with information in one location. This is why Mycandidate.ie was a good resource. However, charging ridiculously high rolling fees to candidates who do not understand how little the product is worth is not, in my opinion, morally correct. Some of the information on the site is trivial, some of it is wrong too. I also question the staffing structure whereby there are five unpaid interns for every one paid employee. One most also point out that a private company obtained the use of twenty computers from a state body when there were surely more than enough public secondary schools or libraries that would happily have made use of them.

All in all it’s a mockery of the intelligence of both voters and candidates. Unfortunately, if this was done correctly without charging candidates it would be an excellent public resource, now, it’s a joke.

“The complete online resource”, it is definitely not. Any candidate looking to invest online should realise that it makes no financial, political or marketing sense to buy into MiCandidate Pro. A personalised website is cheaper, more effectient, and more long term than any MiCandidate Pro option.