Watching the Primary candidates experiment with digital marketing and social media has been a great source of entertainment for me over the past few months (got me through an entire season of no new Big Love episodes) so I was eager to read Click Z’s interview with Google’s Peter Greenberg about the candidates’ use of paid search.

Now, I didn’t track any of the candidates activities in a formal way, so I’m sure I missed a lot, but I was a little surprised at Greenberger’s praise of Obama and McCain’s paid search campaigns.  From what I saw, they missed a lot of opportunities.  I remember thinking (very early on in the Primaries) that I had small nonprofit clients who were being a lot more creative with paid search than the candidates. 

Perhaps much of the candidates’ strategy was based on geo-targeting (which I would have missed) such as the example Greenberger cites of the Obama campaign in Texas (targeting voters as they searched online for voter information.)  Anyway, now I’m really curious…Did anyone analyze this in a more formal way?  I’d love to know more about out the specifics of the candidates’ PPC strategies during the Primaries.

Greenberger also noted that the Clinton campaign seemed to focus her PPC campaign on fundraising.  This sounds right to me — from what I saw, this was the focus of almost everthing the Clinton campaign did online.  At one point, I used a little trick (shared by Steve Rubel) to compare the Tweets of the Clinton campaign to those of Obama’s.  The most common word in Clinton’s Tweets was “house party”.  The most common word in Obama’s was…”change”. (Again, I didn’t track this over a long period of time, so take my observations with a grain of salt.)

I found this difference in Clinton and Obama’s Twitter usage fascinating, and comparable in some ways to companies who still haven’t figured out that beating people over the head with “buy now” messages isn’t such a great way to initiate or sustain a conversation in social media.

 I’m looking forward to watching McCain and Obama slug it out in social media as the race progresses (especially if Big Love is still dark -  Margene’s Blog just isn’t doing it for me.) 

Filed under: Non-Profits, PPC, Social Marketing on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 by Nan Dawkins | No Comments
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