Note To Politicians: There’s an Internet Beyond YouTube
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | February 14, 2007 | Share This
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2008 is already being called “The YouTube Election” thanks to the scores of viral videos being uploaded by presidential hopefuls to attract popular support. Today Michael Bassik on TechPresident writes about how candidates have used search marketing in their online campaigns. He reports, “To my surprise, only five of the 17 presumed candidates have purchased keywords on search engines,” and furthermore, “no candidate seems to be using search to reach voters searching for information on specific issues.”
Bassik notes, however, that Republicans seem to be doing a better job of leveraging search. Back in October, I wrote about the linguistic mistakes that liberal politicians were already making in SEM,
“A proper…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 [such as politicians names]… 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.”
Searchviews ran a three part series about the implications of politicians becoming search savvy, parts of which reverberate what Bassik and others have already attested:
“Search gives politicians a window of access to the public conversation. It puts them in touch with voters that they might not reach through conventional means…Search helps interested citizens find the campaign. Just as the primary goal of a campaign is public outreach, the primary value of SEO and SEM is public visibility.
“For efficiencies sake, “grass roots” marketing no longer means traveling door to door to generate support - it means reaching out to individuals in niche communities, which are no longer defined strictly by geographic location. People gather information and communicate via the internet, so traditional campaign techniques - the stump tours, hand-shaking, distributing fliers, and cold-calling are far less effective than search at reaching the mainstream audience. Think about the last time you physically cut out a newspaper article to give to a friend, as opposed to just emailing her the story (or in my case - blogging about it). In the past two years with the explosion of social media, political conversations are taking place almost exclusively online. Promoting politics through search is not only more efficient, it’s more effective.”
We just finished a huge Scorecard report that pointed out how Super Bowl advertisers leveraged search techniques for their cross-media advertising campaigns. The same criticisms we held against the advertisers (namely that, “few companies put together all the elements necessary to translate interest and buzz into web activity”) apply to political candidates launching multi-million dollar campaigns. If you’re going to promote your candidacy through the internet, start with a proper search strategy.
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Topics: Advertising: Distribution, Google, SEM: Paid Search, Search: How-To, Search: News, Search: Video |
I think youtube has become the social playground for all - from pokers to politicians.