Joe Rospars, one of the main guys behind Obama’s online presidential campaign, was in Dublin last night. I was blown away to hear that someone as high profile in the tech scene, someone who has genuinely used technology to change the face of the political world was doing a talk/Q&A for bloggers. Better yet, it was free.

Quite a bit of blogging/twittering etc. amounts to little more than saber rattling, and isn’t all that relevant in the real world. But that’s what’s so amazing about what Obama/ Joe Rospars/ Blue State Digital achieved. I’d go as far as to say, I don’t think Obama would be in office today if he hadn’t harnessed the power of the Internet the way he did.

Suffice to say, I arrived at the Camden Court hotel in Dublin, really interested in hearing what Rospars had to say.

Right off the bat, I was a bit surprised that they were harvesting emails at the door. Weird, I’d already given them my details (including mobile) when I registered. Why not just have a printout and tick people off as they arrive? I completed my painless (but unnecessary) registration, and proceeded to the main event. I was really surprised to walk into a room of suits. I don’t want to be a hypocrite here, I often wear a suit myself, but these were starchy shiny, sell-you-a-car/do-your-confirmation-in suits. Not a very bloggy crowd at all. I initially mistook them for over-dressed marketers.

So anyway after a few minutes, up pops a projected image of Fianna Fáils new website. Okay, weird, but I figured Joe was going to use it as an example of what not to do/ how to get it wrong.

A minute or two later, and the whole event is revealed to be the launch of Fianna Fáils new website!

WTF??? This was not what I’d signed up for. I felt the blood drain from my face. There had been absolutely no mention of this when I registered for the event. A quick (possibly sloppy) twitter search hadn’t shown anything up either. I had quickly checked earlier because I had been curious about who was paying the fiddler.

Anyway Rospars talk itself was okay, he wasn’t given enough airtime and the mike seemed to stray to the political side of the room during the Q&A. To be honest though, I really had to ground myself to even listen to Joe because I was so pissed off about being duped into coming along.

I’m pretty sure Rospars wasn’t aware that the event had been misrepresented. He seemed to think it was a one party room. I have no political agenda and I’m certainly not staunchly anti-Fianna Fáil, I’d have been just as annoyed if any other political party had pulled a similar stunt.

I imagine there’s a fair few out there that don’t see the problem with this, we still got to see Joe Rospars speak. But the key issue here is the omission of information / lack of disclosure from such an obvious point of entry as an online registration form. One extra sentence on the page stating it was a Fianna Fáil event, and I’d have been okay with it. As I said, I probably would have still gone to it on account of Rospars involvement.

I think FF wasted an opportunity to engage in an open and honest dialog with the blogging community. I doubt Joe Rospars or Blue State Digital come cheap, lets face it they are absolutely top of their game. I do however think that they lack local knowledge, and maybe their fee would have been better spent in engaging the local community a bit more. I am aware and do appreciate that there was a local partner that developed the new FF website and was heavily involved in the event, but I have to wonder how between them all they got it so wrong. I’m not a conspiracy nut, I don’t really think people deliberately schemed about tricking bloggers into handing over their email addresses and mobile numbers under false pretenses. But if they’d thought about it, surely they’d realise that’s how it came across. Online reaction to the launch hasn’t exactly been fantastic.

I am always impressed when a brand or in this case a political party, attempts to engage with people in an online environment. I generally believe that anyone making those first steps towards engagement deserves to be cut a bit of slack. I also appreciate that online etiquette can be confusing and is ever changing.

While I think there was some very basic common sense lacking in this site launch, I am really keen to see where FF take it from here and how they engage with people going forward. The critical thing to remember, is that people need to opt in, and tricking them into engagement rarely works.