As I was eating brunch at Yankee Stadium today (July 4th) before the Yankees lost to the Twins, I received a phone call from Becki Donatelli to tell me that CNN wrote a very favorable analysis of the search campaign that my Connell Donatelli team is running for John McCain. The article called Study: John McCain leads pack in online search campaign picks up on a report issued by iCrossing which you can find here. ClickZ also picked up on the study and scooped them a bit with an article written by Kate Kaye called Study: Edwards Search Campaign Lacks Efficiency, McCain's Is Strong. Highlights from both articles include:
- Sen. John McCain may trail in recent polls and fundraising totals, but when it comes to paid online visibility, the Arizona senator tops the list of all presidential hopefuls,
- The report, titled “How America Searches: Election ‘08″ found McCain’s presidential Web site has the most paid visibility in search results for several common issue-based web queries as of the end of May.
- McCain “has clearly embraced paid search as a way to gain exposure for both his name and his stance on issues,” the report states. Meanwhile “Edwards appears to be spending a lot of money to achieve some level of visibility, but not doing so with optimum effectiveness.
- "McCain is taking a very sophisticated approach to Google search engine marketing," said Michael Bassik, vice president of interactive marketing at political consulting firm MSHC Partners. At this point, said Bassik, most candidates "are still really focusing on using search to solicit e-mail addresses and contributions." Therefore, many care only about targeting ads to keywords associated with issues that generate the most action for the least amount of money.
I can't go into details on my search strategy, but if you are one of my clients than you know that you are getting the highest possible expertise in this area and if you are one of my Political clients, than you now have confirmed that we at Connell Donatelli are "The Political Search Gurus" and everyone else is just playing around in this field. A couple of other observations regarding these reports:
- I've been doing Search Engine Marketing for quite a long time and I have plenty of other best practices that we are implementing that will make McCain's search campaign second to none. I've also been with Google since their beginning so working with them is like spending time with an old friend.
- Election 2008 will not be about who can get the most friends in MySpace or Facebook or even YouTube views. Election 2008 will be about who can use Google and the other search engines to their fullest potential.
- Not only is McCain's search campaign very sophisticated and the biggest, it is also the most effective by bringing in more money in contributions than we are spending; that my political search novices is called having a positive Return on Investment.
- Finally, will people and bloggers STOP TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHO IS BUYING SEARCH WORDS BY SPENDING THREE MINUTES ONLINE SEARCHING? It is a complete waste of time and shows your inexperience. It takes a company like iCrossings to actually do a thorough study.
Anyway, good news on the Fourth of July. At least CNN, WSJ, and ClickZ are starting to notice effective uses of online advertising, especially something that is outside of MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube.
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
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