Jack McLaren's Email

A follow-up to a previous post which you should read for background. In short: the provincial Libs think PCPO MPP Randy Hillier allowed his website to be used inappropriately. Their evidence is an email "blast" Jack MacLaren--a candidate for the PCPO nomination in Carleton - Mississippi Mills and an old Hillier favorite--sent out in an attempt to drum up support so as to wrest the riding from Norm Sterling, the PCPO MPP that currently holds it. Here's a screen-shot of the problematic bit from Jack's email:
When you hold your cursor over one of the links-- "Like", for example, or "Share"-- you can see at the bottom that the link will take you to randyhilliermpp.com. Originally, you would then get redirected to Jack MacLaren's facebook pages, twitter accounts, and etc.

(Note: I thought these all went directly to Hillier's pages, and said as much in the comments of my previous post, but I was wrong about that).

Anyway, that's what is meant in the original complaint about links being "routed through" Randy Hillier's website.

More recently, though, if you click on the appropriate links you get:

The url reads "williamrosssolutions", so its pretty clear that Mr. Hillier's web people were involved in handling the click-throughs from MacLaren's e-mailout. What is at issue, though, is how likely Hillier's explanation for all this is:

Hillier's spokesman later said it was a technical mistake by Hillier's web provider, William Ross Solutions, which accidentally routed the links in MacLaren's email through Hillier's account.

Well, its not very likely, I'm afraid. Note firstly that William Ross Solutions does not appear to be Jack MacLaren's web designer (they are Hilliers). At least, the registrant of JackMaclaren.com (and .net) is one Dino Iannuzzi, who, much like William Ross, does Social Media Marketing. (Note: I emailed William Ross asking if they've ever done work for MacLaren, but had recieved no reponse as of this morning.). Nevertheless, Hillier's response implies that William Ross was doing something--some form of work--for the MacLaren team in regards to this email solicitation. Since MacLaren does not appear to have been a client of WRS, who paid for the work? If it was billed to Hillier's constituency website, then he may be in trouble.

In any case, according to Hillier, this work was not supposed to wind up involving his website at all. That it did was a mistake on the part of William Ross. We are therefore invited to imagine that the people from William Ross were providing urls to MacLaren that contained the phrase "randyhilliermpp.com" in them without realizing that they would, in fact, route the reader of the emails through Randyhilliermpp.com. That's pretty hard to imagine.

And what would be the point of redirecting the email respondents in this way? Dunno, but it might allow information to be collected on click-through rates, and how many readers of the MacLaren emails were doing what. Such tracking is usually something that costs money. So, again, if this was the reason for the re-routing, who paid for the bills? If it was charged to Hillier's constituency website, then the Lib complaint could stick.