The Web Uncovered

While in a previous post we talked about how Obama’s 70 person team for online presence dominated in the area of social media, an interesting reports suggest there were weak parts in his campaign.  For instance, when it came to Pay Per Clicks, John McCain brought his A-game.  

In fact, as Obama began dominating in traditional media in ways that John McCain could not afford to keep up with, his team began focusing online.  At that time his ad impressions jumped by 250%.  Furthermore, the McCain camp mobilized quickly to dominate in buying up keywords for PPC ads.  For instance, immediately after Obama chose Biden as his running mate, the McCain team put bought up related keywords and had landing pages ready.  Similarly, they bought up all keywords relating to “Branchflower,” “troopergate,” and “Palin.”  They did this so well that that the actual articles covering this story were burried behind their ads and related websites created to refute the claims against Palin.  

The Takeaway:

Quick mobilization and clever keyword choice will assist in keeping the available content available to voters in your control.  Be sure to find related words that could similarly drive traffic to your site, or if you are inactive, to your opponent’s website.

Web 2.o developments have significantly changed the way political campaigns are executed.  The Obama campaign championed some of these technologies with a team of over 90 people working on just their internet presence.  While virility is much easier to attain with a presidential candidate, it did plow a path for for more local political campaigns to follow in how social media can make a difference on election day.

First of all, not only did Obama have a Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, and every other social network page, he also created his whole own social network Mybarackobama.com, which had millions of registered users.  While this is a good start, it was only the beginning.  Obama kept a blog, a text message list, email list with 13 million names, and more.  What this signifies is not just a move of campaigning to the internet, but utilizing the less formal aspects of online marketing.  Getting a text message from Obama is much more humanizing than seeing him on CNN addressing a crowd.  

This feeds into consumer psychology.  If politics is a business, representation is the product.  People want to believe they have access to their politicians, and that their voice is truly heard.  Utilizing these technologies, Obama was able to address many more nuanced concerns of his constituacy.   Following in suite, many other politicians began using Twitter to Having new ways to both reach out to your audience and have them feel as if they are reaching you, this has greatly changed the way campaigns will be done.