Bad idea – pretend you’re inviting the Irish blogosphere/twittosphere to a talk by Obama for America’s New Media head honcho, but instead have them realise as the event starts that they’re actually at the launch of the new Fianna Fáil website.

(For those who don’t remember “Good Idea – Bad Idea”, take a look at these clips from Animaniacs.)

This evening, two events were held in the same room at the same time.  One was an “open seminar with Joe Rospars, founding partner of Blue State Digital and New Media Director of the Barack Obama Presidential Campaign.” (source).  Bloggers and others active in the blogosphere were invited and welcomed to come along to hear what Joe had to say.

Cowen, Lenihan, Coughlan? Don't know who "The Brain" is, but Paul Gogarty must in line for "Pinky"

The other was the launch of the new Fianna Fáil website, to which FF members were invited (see comment #14 here) (update: Gav has the actual text of the internal FF invite).

A Bad Start is Half the Work…Down the Drain

This is an extraordinarily bad way to start off in “new media” for Fianna Fáil.  Even as the event was starting, those of us there were burning up Twitter with comments.  (Despite FF’s apparent love of new media, they didn’t seem to have anyone Twittering themselves.)  Most of the non-FFers I spoke to there, who included Fine Gael, Labour Party and Green Party members as well as various non-party people and two journalists (apparently some journalists had been invited to it as an FF event), felt that they’d been tricked into attending a Fianna Fáil event.  That’s a really bad way to start off your relationship with any group of people.  It looks like dishonesty.

Right now, people are having a hard time believing anything Fianna Fáil say or do.  This is yet another tiny chink in that armour.  As Simon put it, “It is strange that when the tide goes out on a party, everything they touch turns to ashes.”  Mark reports that this will make the papers tomorrow.

But there are other failures in the new site too.  The branded Flickr account is empty (not a single photo lying around the FF offices that could have been used?).  Twitter has little more than press release headlines.  The YouTube account has one video that’s two weeks old, the next is nine months old, and the next dates from May 2007!  (Compare that to Labour’s YouTube account)

Anyway,  time to get back to work.  Suzy says it all better than I could anyway.

For balance – Damien Blake, who organised the event and has been working with Blue State Digital on the site for Fianna Fáil, blogs his response here.