Today we released a 2008 Presidential Candidates Internet Marketing Report, which analyzes how the major candidates in the upcoming election are using Internet marketing to promote themselves. Nothing in this report or post is meant to be a political statement, so please keep the comments on marketing related issues. Below are some of the findings from the report that I thought were surprising.
2008 Presidential Candidates Internet Marketing Report - 2 Mistakes the Candidates are Making
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Blogging - Most of the candidates websites have blogs, usually written by staffers who talk about the campaign in general terms. But blogging is a lot more about a personal connection and discussion than preaching from the safety of an ivory tower. Only Mitt Romney uses blogging to create a personal connection with the audience. Mitt's wife and sons frequently post to the blog, and Mitt himself even writes some entires. John Edwards and his wife and daughter do have "diaries" but the posts are very infrequent. All the other candidates are missing out on a huge opportunity to personally connect with voters - which is important.
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SEO - The search engine optimization performance of the candidates is pretty weak if you ask me. They have tons of inbound links, lots of people in the blogosphere who love them, and they are just not doing the things they should do to get qualified traffic from search engines. How cool of a PR stunt would it be for one of the candidates to dominate the first page of google for "President" or "Best President". Plus, if someone is researching "war in Iraq new policy" and I were running for president, I would be pretty pissed if I was not mentioned in the search results.
If you want to see an older post I wrote that inspired some of this analysis, you can read Presidential Internet Marketing - Data Comparing Obama, Clinton, Edwards, Romney, Giuliani and McCain. And again, here is a link to the full Presidential Candidate Internet Marketing Report and the Press Release about the Internet Marketing Report announcing the report and results.
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