Who is the Fake "Obama Tech Guru"?

Politico reports:

In capitals across the globe in recent months, the face of Barack Obama’s groundbreaking 2008 online campaign has been one Ravi Singh, a self-styled “campaign guru” with a colorful turban, a reassuring smile and a killer sales pitch.

He has been called the man “responsible for the Internet campaign of Barack Obama,” in Poland, the “election guru” of Obama and Clinton” in India, “el guru tecnologico de Obama” in Colombia, and “homme qui a géré la campagne d’Obama sur Internet” in France.

There’s just one major thing wrong with this international portrait of Web wizardry — Singh never worked for Obama.

And it is easy to see how his international partners got the wrong impression.

Singh rolled into Warsaw, Poland on April 8 for a private meeting to advise the Civil Platform political party on their online campaigning.

Polish journalist Wojciech Lorenz was told by sources who attended the meeting that Singh was a former Obama strategist and the rest of the Polish media followed him, reporting it as a fact.

“This is how it was presented to me, that Mr. Singh was one of those who were responsible for the Obama’s Internet campaign,” said Lorenz, a reporter for the Polish daily newspaper Rzeczpospolita.

“I also don’t know whether he did it himself or [some] PR guys wanted to show off. But he was mentioned in the context of Obama’s campaign,” he said.

Singh didn’t ask for a correction for the error, or for similar ones elsewhere — or for their translations into English language media like Huffington Post and GlobalPost. He denies that his foreign promotional materials have ever described him as an Obama adviser, but cannot explain how so many misunderstandings have happened.

Yet his appearances in a half-dozen countries have been accompanied by remarkably similar publicity campaigns announcing the arrival of “Obama’s guru,” even if Singh himself is not quoted directly in local media accounts claiming the role.

“What do U.S. President Barack Obama and Euro politician Antonio López Isturiz have in common? Their common denominator is Ravi Singh,” wrote the European social media blog Sociable. “The self-acclaimed Campaign Guru was credited with the overwhelming success of Obama’s online electoral campaign. But now he is turning his sight to Europe.”