Politics and Search: Bidding on Failure (Part Three)
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | October 30, 2006 | Share This
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On Friday, I wrote about the natural connection between politics and search, in response to Google’s recent political activities. Debbie followed up with her view on Google’s financial incentives for encouraging politicians to bid on Adwords. Today I thought I’d look at the issue from a linguistic perspective. In the context of George Lakoff’s widely renowned ‘framing’ theory, the use of search to promote a politicians’ agenda is more a linguistic strategy than it is traffic builiding. Though liberal bloggers have been under fire recently for “Google bombing” with SEO and SEM, their search strategy is no more than a modern response to conservatives’ own offline linguistic campaign. Just as Republicans have injected metaphorically-weighted parts of speech into common language over the past 30 years, liberal bloggers are manipulating search terms to negatively portray the Republican party.
George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at U.C. Berkeley, recently published a series of books on how politicians influence voters through metaphor and language. In his books “Don’t Think of an Elephant” and “Whose Freedom?“, Lakoff argues that conservatives have for decades been actively using specific words in speeches and debates to “frame” them within the context of the Republican platform. By encouraging the common adoption of these re-framed terms, Lakoff says that conservatives have polarized progressive ideas against the language of the people. How does it work? Lakoff uses the term “tax releif” to illustrate his theory:
“The phrase “Tax relief” began coming out of the White House starting on the very day of Bush’s inauguration. It got picked up by the newspapers as if it were a neutral term, which it is not. First, you have the frame for “relief.” For there to be relief, there has to be an affliction, an afflicted party, somebody who administers the relief, and an act in which you are relieved of the affliction. The reliever is the hero, and anybody who tries to stop them is the bad guy intent on keeping the affliction going. So, add “tax” to “relief” and you get a metaphor that taxation is an affliction, and anybody against relieving this affliction is a villain.
“Tax relief” has even been picked up by the Democrats. I was asked by the Democratic Caucus in their tax meetings to talk to them, and I told them about the problems of using tax relief. The candidates were on the road. Soon after, Joe Lieberman still used the phrase tax relief in a press conference. You see the Democrats shooting themselves in the foot.”
Lakoff’s book “Whose Freedom?” looks exclusively at how Republicans have appropriated the words ‘Freedom’ and ‘Liberty’ for the conservative agenda. As with “tax relief”, he argues that the excessive use of these two words by Republican politicians has turned them into terms metaphorically representative of paternalism and other authoritarian morals. Thus, conservatives have leveraged the seemingly non-partisan historical context of two distinctly American values, “freedom” and “liberty”, to promote their own agenda as being ‘American’. They’ve used a perceived non-biased source of information (American historical precedence) to inform public opinion on conservative politics.
Likewise, the recent Google bombing campaign by liberal bloggers contextualizes specific words within a percieved non-biased source of information (the Google search engine) to inform public opinion on conservatives. Just as Republicans have been “keyword stuffing” their speeches for years, Democrats are optimizing their websites against specific Republican senators. Furthermore, just as Republicans have coordinated the use of specific language across the party and over several decades, Democrats are finally capitalizing on their network of liberal bloggers to manipulate search algorithms. So, it seems that in discovering search, the Democrats have finally come up with a way to combat the conservative linguistic “frame”.
There are some analysts who are skeptical that the liberals’ Google bombing will work. They argue that the targeted congressmen’s names are difficult to optimize, that Republicans can easily retaliate, and that eventually, Google will ban them for spamming their search index. That being said, I’m inclined to agree with the skeptics, but for a different reason. In my opinion, the Google bombing campagn is flawed not because it’s easily replicable, but because it’s targeting the wrong search terms.
To begin with, people searching for “Jon Kyl” or “Rick Renzi” (both exact-match terms) are likely to already be politically knowledgable, with pre-established opinions about the two congressmen. Thus, ads for name-specific keywords are going to attract traffic from either established liberals or established conservatives. Undecided voters are much more likely to search on issue terms like “illegal immigration” or “death penalty”, or generic verticals like “arizona senate race” or “arizona election candidates”. By focusing on exact-matched candidate names, however, liberal bloggers are targeting the wrong audience.
Secondly, a proper linquistic response to the conservatives’ “framing” campaign would target buzz words with ‘pain points’ - or, words that trigger an emotional response. These are terms based on metaphors, cliches and commonly-used language. Conservatives have already come up with a dictionary’s worth of viral keywords that isolate Democrats from mainstream America. They use personalized terms to attack specific candidates - for example, John Kerry’s alleged “flip-flopping.” Democrats, on the other hand, are investing in paid search with a list of keywords that don’t trigger an emotional response without prior knowledge of the candidate. As I said before, the wrong audience is being reached, and even then, the Democrats have failed to establish candidate-specific buzz that would polarize conservative congressmen from the American public. Without proper buzz words, there’s no “frame” from which to spread politicized terms into everyday language.
Finally, of the generic terms that Democrats are bidding on, they’ve chosen to target the very same terms that were invented by conservatives to attack liberal candidates! For example, MyDD.com appears to be bidding on “flip-flop”, to point readers to a story titled “Bush’s Top Ten Flip-Flops.” Not only does this ad place Democrats in a defensive position, it reinforces the validity of ‘flip-flop’ as a neutral term! Instead of coming up with their own politicized “frames”, Democrats are recycling the very terms that put them at a linguistic disadvantage.
So, while I’m impressed by the networking effort launched by liberal bloggers, and happy to see them utilize search so effectively, I’m disappointed by their evident lack of linguistic strategy. Ultimately, the failure of this campaign will not be an issue of visibility or traffic, it will be a matter of poor keyword choice.
Topics: Google, SEM: Ad Creative, SEO, Search: News |