Written By Noah Mallin | June 23, 2008 | Share This |

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The Personal Democracy Forum is a chance every year for advocacy and political groups to find out how the internet can help them connect to their audience. I had the pleasure of attending Day One of the conference today at New York’s TimeWarner building and to hear the thoughts of folks like Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington, Chuck DeFeo of Townhall.com and Yahoo Political Advertising honcho Diane Rinaldo. They all agreed on one point: whether political groups want to raise awareness or just raise dough there is no doubt that we are in the midst of a revolution in the way citizens connect with politics.

The word “personal” is a key part of what’s changing. The internet has given campaigns and marketers the ability to engage with a target audience like never before. They are able to understand this engagement better as well, thanks to the precise metrics available from most search engines and web advertising campaigns.

Different groups are taking different tacks to harness this power. As we have pointed out before John McCain has become very aggressive in buying keywords that are issue oriented. Take a look at the ad that came up when we searched for the term “gas prices” on Google. Note that New Jersey Senator Lautenberg is also in on this one:

Obama has spent more money than McCain on search but he’s also focused more on variations of his name and stayed away from issue keywords. Why might McCain be interested in issues keywords? Take a look at this Google Trends graph showing searches this month for “John McCain”, “Barack Obama”, and “Gas Prices.”

Not only are there more Obama searches, there are more searches for “gas prices” than there are for McCain. Theoretically he’ll get more eyeballs and hence more clickthroughs from the “Gas Prices’ query. That having been said, we did hear in one of the sessions from a Giuliani campaign staffer who found that issues like “9/11” and “War on Terror” were much less effective than variations on the candidates name in raising money – their ultimate goal in search advertising.

Where Obama has been more aggressive is in social networking. Take a look at what he did on LinkedIn last week:

This question, calibrated to the LinkedIn audience of professionals, also functions as a great driver to Obama’s site profile which helpfully leads users to his homepage and his LinkedIn group (McCain’s profile is set up similarly.) Obama first asked a question 9 months ago, “ How can the next president better help small business and entrepreneurs thrive?” To be fair, McCain also has asked a question recently but it doesn’t really target the typical LinkedIn user as precisely as Obama has: “What is the biggest challenge America faces?” Unlike Obama’s business oriented questions, which fit with the business oriented nature of LinkedIn, McCain went broad – which doesn’t really take advantage of the social media platform.

As one participant noted from the audience – we won’t know how truly effective either side has been until the campaign is over and they “show us their underwear.”

Topics: Advertising: Online, Conferences & Events, Google, Google: AdWords, SEM: Paid Search, Social Media |