The 2008 Presidential election is shaping up to be the most networked political contest in our nation’s history. All the contenders have fairly interactive Web sites, and most have social-network profile pages too. Obama belongs to half a dozen Web interest communities. Mitt Romney and his family run several channels of online video. John Edwards’ fans can track every Iowa corn dog and New Hampshire donut their man eats by signing on to his Twitter account.
But being on the Web also means that pols’ Internet performances can be tracked, measured and compared to their counterparts in the private sector. And a couple of recent reports suggest that they could become a lot more effective by taking some tips from commercial marketers.
For example, a long-term study of political search marketing by digital agency The Rimm-Kaufman Group found that most of the candidates were failing to hook undecided voters with pay-per-click ads run in Google and Yahoo! searches on terms related to the issues, or in some cases, even on their own names.
RKG marketing vice president Steve Bosley said the agency did daily Web searches on the major candidates’ names on both Google and Yahoo! starting in February 2007, and in October expanded those searches to include likely campaign issues such as “health care” and “illegal immigration”. The searches were done at random times of day and from a Virginia IP address. And for each one, RKG took a snapshot of the paid search ads running on that results page at that date and time.
The finding, Bosley says, is that 6700 searches on candidate names from February through November of last year produced 22,476 pay-per-click search ads. Only 14% of those name-brand search ads came from either the candidates or their opponents. The majority (31%) were placed by what RKG termed “interest and opinion sites”, business sites selling political merchandise (30%), and news and information providers (20%).
In terms of individual advertisers on candidate names, Google’s video sharing site YouTube led the study, followed by merchant sites Café Press and Zazzle, then teen voting site DeclareYourself.com and conservative site HumanEvents.com. The RKG study found only Republicans John McCain, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani among the top ten paid-search political advertisers; Barack Obama ranked eleventh.
By comparison, RKG searches on terms such as “cat food” and “clogged toilet” produced multiple pages of results, all of them filled with paid search ads by the businesses most directly involved in the industry. “It’s ironic that cat food makers are trying harder to get their message out to the people than presidential hopefuls,” Bosley says.
“My sense is that this is just not on their radar,” he says. “They’re so focused on the whole YouTube thing and social media—rounding up eyeballs, things a campaign would traditionally look at– that they’re walking right by this more commercial tactic and ignoring the fact that search is how people start looking for information on the Web.”
Meanwhile, another online analysis suggests that some of those crowd-gathering tactics may not be as crucial as expected. Digital agency Zeta interactive includes a division called Relevant Noise that mines the social media landscape, from blogs to consumer-generated content such as forums and message boards. According to a statement from Zeta, republican candidate Mike Huckabee’s buzz showed a substantial boost right after October 22, the day that his campaign debuted a humorous online video endorsement from action star Chuck Norris. The volume of Huckabee-related posts shot up 66% after that launch.
By contrast, Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of Democrat Barack Obama on her November 26 TV show and in a series of large-venue personal appearances had relatively little effect on the candidate’s online buzz, according to the study. Nor did it affect what Relevant Noise calls the “tone” of the online discussion; Obama got the same proportion of positive to negative comment as before the Winfrey win.
On the other hand, Huckabee may have found the Norris endorsement a two-edged sword. While it gave him more buzz among Internet commentators, his tone dropped from 82% positive three weeks before Chuck came out for Huck to only 77% positive three weeks after.
Network
