This article was written following the 2008 Presidential Election.  It highlights how the effective use of social media impacted Obama’s successful campaign.  As the 2012 race for the White House heats up, it will be interesting to see which candidates learn from Obama’s example — and whether Obama himself will be able to expand and enrich his use of these important tools.

Change: the political platform touted by both presidential candidates on the 2008  campaign trail. With differing objectives, Barack Obama and John McCain promise  dramatic shifts in government policies upon entering office, but the remarkable transformation that has already materialized is the dramatic increase in voter engagement — a social movement brought about by the Internet. The social web has been utilized by the candidates for spreading political news and philosophy, tracking voter interest, generating awareness and organizing communities. Voters also use the media tool to their advantage, voicing their opinions and creating political content on a national stage. The Internet has fostered a vocal, involved citizenry in the current election. Change isn’t on the horizon; it’s already risen.

From gathering election news to watching political videos, the proportion of Americans accessing the Internet for content and information has dramatically increased since the 2004 race. 40 percent of all Americans received news and information about the primary campaigns from the web, according to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project developed in June. The study also found that younger voters and Democrats make more use of online media for political consumption and sharing.

Both politicians are highly invested in SEO as a mechanism for growth in their online strategies. AdGooRoo released a recent study analyzing the high stakes search campaigns of both candidates, finding that Obama-related sites receive more than five times the amount of traffic than McCain-related – 22 million versus 3.5 million visitors. Pro-Obama websites are 57 percent more popular than pro-McCain, but the Republican nominee receives 11 percent more traffic from  websites not affiliated with his campaign. In terms of search marketing, the candidates employ similar levels of sophistication. McCain has a slight advantage in keyword selection, but Obama wins in targeting topical keywords, such as “lipstick” and “Paulson”. The Obama site clearly wins in natural search rankings: McCain is seen on Google’s front page for 67 keywords, while Obama ranks for 117.

Especially influential during the election has been social networking sites. The  Pew survey found that two-thirds of Internet users under 30 have a social networking profile, half of which use these sites to gather or share information about the election. Social networks have streamed politically-related entertainment, data and interactive content throughout the web in massive quantities.

“New media offers candidates with an alternative or complement to their traditional media spending,” says Gary Drenik, President of BIGresearch. “By actually listening to potential voters and using all media, not just traditional, candidates can build an ad strategy that is more likely to influence votes.”

The White House hopefuls have accessed the benefits of using alternative media forms, like social networks, to reach an audience often neglected in the presidential race. Presently on Facebook, Obama has about 2,250,000 supporters and McCain has 579,000; On Twitter, Obama has over 100,000 followers (a social site for which he himself, apparently, actively participates) and McCain has a little over 3,000.

Expanding outside the popularly established networking sites, both candidates have created their own social forums for addressing current issues and fostering supporter interaction. Obama has especially caught the attention of social media users with MyBarackObama.com, created by the stealthy digital team Blue State that remains rather mum about their role in Obama’s campaign. The site is an instrument of organization for Obama; its 850,000 members have already planned over 50,000 events with the help of the site’s innovative tools –- not campaign officials –- and raised $200 million for the Illinois senator. MyBarakObama.com is an excellent example of the power of social media to incite participation on and off the web. An Obama iPhone application and video game advertisements are also part of Obama’s interactive media repertoire.

McCain’s approach to social networking has not been as successful. McCainSpace.com is also aimed at young voters, but it hasn’t reached the level of user participation as Obama’s site. To step things up, in June WhereIsTheRed.com was launched — a blog following three college students as they travel the red states and broadcast the widespread appeal of the Republican Party. But the lagging presence of McCain in the social media sphere sends the message that he’s out-of-touch with the demographic and out-dated when it comes to technology.

Video streaming has been a massively popular toy in the election/social media playground. On the official Obama site, video streaming increased 155 percent from July to August, according to Nielsen Online, reaching 1.3 million views. The site also saw a 173 percent increase in unique video viewers in the same time frame. The same metrics for the McCain site shows increases by merely 16 and 5 percent, respectively. Though Obama is leading on the video front, McCain did make strides in August by attracting more women viewers to his site, clearly due to his choice for running mate.

YouTube has been a major platform for user-generated spoofs and memorable campaign moments. The celebritized Obama effort “Yes We Can” and the “Obama Girl” music videos each drew 10 million views. And, of course, there is the  content phenomenon that is Sarah Palin (and all her various interpretations). The Republican Vice Presidential candidate’s network news interviews and SNL skits permeate the web. More than half who watched the recent SNL satires featuring Tina Fey viewed the skits on the web, according to a Solutions Research Group survey, with 11.7 million views on YouTube alone. Without a doubt, content sites and political videos have mobilized the campaign effort. Hosted by YouTube are YouChoose’08 and VideoYourVote — election channels that measure candidate support by user participation. Not surprisingly, Obama-related content exceeds in the total number of views and subscribers.

The pervasiveness of social media has been leverage for both candidates to reach a widespread audience. The obvious winner of the web is Obama. He took voter outreach to another level, transforming the landscape of election campaigns by investing in social media programs that heightened Obama activism in the real world. But the race isn’t over just yet. As noted by Jon Gibs, vice president of media analytics for Nielsen Online, “The question that remains for both candidates is whether web visitors and online video viewers will translate into votes in the general election.”

Whatever the final result may be, it is evident that social media has emerged as a principal transmitter of citizen opinion and a space for political participation — an aid in bridging the gap between disconnected policy-makers and the American public. On November 4th, in the moments before the next president is elected, the Blogosphere will echo with silent anticipation, and the ultimate test for ROI in search and social media campaigns will be revealed.

© Elixir Interactive 2008

Obama Wins the 2008 Presidential Election – in Social Media is a post from: Elixir Interactive

If you’re attending SES San Francisco this week, you should know that Elixir’s own CEO & President, Fionn Downhill, will be speaking on what promises to be a lively panel on whether or not SEO is still relevant in 2011.

Downhill, who is also a co-Founder of SyCara, Inc, will be part of a panel entitled “SEO is Dead. Long Live SEO!” which will be held tomorrow (Day 2 of the Conference) at 4:45 p.m. The panel will encourage audience participation in the discussion, which will be moderated by Performics VP of Performance, Dana Todd. Other panelists include David Naylor, Todd Friesen, and Mark Jackson.

Attendees will also get a chance to chat with Downhill at a new event, the “Meet the Speakers” luncheon being held on Wednesday at 12:30.

Fionn Downhill Speaking at SES San Francisco Tomorrow is a post from: Elixir Interactive

If you’re trying to find good ideas for ways to build traffic and credibility to your website, it’s always a good idea to look at what the big guys are doing — especially if what they are doing works. Then you can find ways to adapt that strategy to fit your own industry and niche and, maybe, duplicate a fraction of their results. When we’re talking about Google, unless you’re a major international brand, a fraction is all you will need to make a significant difference in your traffic.

Last Saturday, Google replaced their standard logo with a Google Doodle that paid tribute to Lucille Ball’s 100th birthday. Google does this periodically, but this particular logo was fully interactive, with video clips from some of the most famous episodes of “I Love Lucy.”

Within twenty four hours a search for “google lucy logo” returned over 6.8 million results.  Today, less than a week later, that same search returns more then 8.3 million results.  That means that a simple logo running for 24 hours on their homepage generated them over 8 million inbound links – and counting.  And many of those links are from major news outlets, monster tech sites, and marketing authority sites.  That’s a lot of link juice flowing their way. And the hype translates to more traffic as many people took to their favorite social media and shared the site with their friends, family and communities, sending millions more people to check out the logo for themselves.

You may not have the resources to create such a high quality piece of media (I wonder what the licensing fees were for showing those clips and using copyrighted and trademarked music, graphics, and content?), but you can do a number of things to attract attention, traffic, and links to your site:

1. Create a useful tool, such as a calculator or date generator that is tied to your industry.  Think of those sites that let visitors calculate the amount of calories they burn doing specific exercises and apply the same principle to your work.
2. Make a video that is both informative and entertaining and features your product.  A good example of this is the guys over at Blendtec who created the now legendary “Will it Blend?” series of videos.
3. Generate an interesting flow chart, infographic, or even a cartoon that is both informative and humorous.

Once you create this piece of viral content, you need to make sure you publicize it.  After all, you won’t have the built-in audience of Google to discover the content and share it: on mobile media as well as traditional computers.  You need to make sure you get the word out about it to others.  You may also want to take a page from Google’s book and only display the item for a short period of time.  That makes people more likely to check it out before it expires.  You can always copy another tactic from the search giant and archive a copy of it elsewhere on your site for future use by visitors.

Use Google for Viral Inspiration is a post from: Elixir Interactive

Many website owners are worried about the affect of Google’s Panda update on their site’s traffic.

Elixir’s CEO, Fionn Downhill, recently gave the following presentation to help websites master the SEO best practices to succeed in a Post-Panda Google:

Post Panda SEO Auditing is a post from: Elixir Interactive

The number of mobile internet user continues to trend upwards. Internet analyst Mary Meeker predicts that “more users will connect to the Internet over mobile devices than desktop PCs.”

Google has also been ramping up for the mobile web. In 2007 Google released AdSense for Mobile. In 2010 Google acquired a mobile advertising company call AdMob for $681 million. Let’s not forget to mention the search engines advancements into voice technology including voice search.

So how does this affect SEO? Consider the size of the users cell phone screen. This is much smaller than the screen of a desktop PC. Also consider the user who does a voice search and is listening to a list of results. Appearing in the top 3 results will continue to become more important. Your title tags and page descriptions should also be clear and to the point. The page descriptions should interest your target users and give them a reason to select your result.

The Mobile Internet is a post from: Elixir Interactive

There is nothing more important in a business than its reputation. Its reputation is what will attract and keep customers. While word of mouth is a very powerful tool for spreading such reviews, the Internet has become even more powerful. A dissatisfied customer can write a review online that will forever be available for potential customers to view. That is why it is important to take the steps now to manage your online reputation and not leave it in the hands of fate.

One of the first steps to managing your online reputation is getting your pages ranked within the search engines. Typically this is done through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It helps you put your sites and information where they are visible and will beneficial to your business. This is the part that you have the most control over.

Secondly, online reviews can be a good thing. Most reasonable people will understand that you cannot possibly please every single person that walks into your business. Encourage your customers to write online reviews and you can even offer an incentive, such as a discount off of their next order, when they do so. If you run a good, honest business that works hard to please your customers then you have nothing to worry about and potential customers will see that when they read the reviews.

Every business has a reputation, the question is whether you want to have a say in it or if you want to have it dictated for you.

Elixir Interactive Review: Managing Your Online Reputation is a post from: Elixir Interactive

It is important for SEO and online reputation management strategist to be able to know what the base Google results are. Base results are the results you see without personalization and localization filters. Google automatically opts every Google user into personalization.

“Google sometimes customizes your search results based on your past search activity on Google. This customization includes searches you’ve done and results you’ve clicked.”

First we will look at personalization. On the surface it seems straight forward. Google even tells users how to turn this off at http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=54048

One of Google suggestions is to delete your bowers cookies however major sites such as Google have been known to use cookies that are difficult to delete and are not deleted by simply emptying your browser cookies.

There are multiple browser add-ons designed for Firefox to help aid in disabling personalized searches and deleting supper cookies:

• Yoast search plugin – An Add-on to disable Google personalization when searching from the browser search box.
• NoScript – This add-on allows you to decide what scripts to run from any website and “protect yourself against XSS and Clickjacking attacks” (This plug-in can be very annoying FYI)
• Ghostery – This add-on blocks hidden tags, images that are from a list of domains known for tracking, iframes that have a source that matches a domain from the list of known tackers, and scripts. It also deletes Flash and Silverlight cookies.
• BetterPrivacy – This add-on detects flash cookies, aka LSOs, and allows you to delete them from your computer.
• Google Analytics Opt-out – This is Google’s add-on that allows users to opt-out of sending data collected during the website visit should not be sent to Google Analytic. This could be useful for webmasters to not count their own visits to their website if the site uses Google Analytics
• Google Global – This add-on for Firefox adds the ‘pws=0′ parameter (this parameter tells Google not to show personalized results) to a Google search and attempts to show results from other geographic locations.
  Make sure the box labeled ‘De-personalize Google search results’ is checked.

  

  This will add the ‘pws=0′ parameter to your Google Global search
  

Turning off personalization the way described by Google seems to do the trick for turning off personal results but local results are still visible. Also Google likely is still collecting data about your search habits even with personalization turned off. The tools above help to protect against this but there really isn’t any way to stop Google from gathering data. It’s what Google does.

Despite multiple efforts all these tools do not turn off localization in organic results. One way of changing localization is to use a proxy but then the results are localized to the proxy. Changing the IP, country code, and zip parameters the way Google Global add-on does has no effect on changing or turn off Googles localization. The results are still localized to your current IP.

Your browser stores information about your geolocation. This is called location-aware browsing and there is a way to turn it off. However turning this feature off in Firefox and telling your browser not to share location information does not stop Google from returning local results.

Google looks up your location given the IP address used in the internet communication protocols it received. This means when your computer connects with Google it has to send out its IP so Google knows where to send the information back to. Google takes that IP and looks up where the IP is geographically.

Google believes that localization is an important part of returning relevant results and has no way to turn this feature off. Yet you can set it to a broader reach, such as the country level instead of the zip code level, by setting changing your Google preferences.

So is it worth it? Well personalization is relatively easy to turn off and usually the results are still relatively close to what you see with personalization enable (if you clear you cookies every now and then). Localization has the largest impact but only if you are searching something with local suggestion and/or result. Otherwise the results are pretty standard. Lets be clear: The search local results were dramatically different for generic place/service/product terms like “restaurants”, “pest control” or “cleaning supplies” but did not have an impact on non-local niche terms like “sink repair books” or “vegetable garden videos”.

Google Personalized Search: Turning off Personalization and Localization is a post from: Elixir Interactive

Elixir Interactive President & CEO, Fionn Downhill, will be speaking later this month in Chicago on “Brand, Trademark & Reputation Management”. Downhill brings her extensive experience in both online reputation management and search engine optimization to this discussion on the importance of both leveraging and protecting one’s brand and online reputation.

Downhill will be appearing as part of SES Chicago, one of the top search conference series in the world. The session on Reputation Management will cover such topics as how to handle trademarked terms in Google AdWords, both your own and those of your competitors and what to do, if anything, when someone uses your trademark terms in their ads. On the organic side of things, Downhill will address the options available when someone posts negative and /or false claims about your company, or you personally, on blogs, forums, or review sites.

“Brand, Trademark & Reputation Management” will be held on Day 1 of SES Chicago, October 19th. Downhill will also be speaking on October 21st (Day 3) on the topic of “Digital Asset Optimization” and moderating a panel on “Selling Search to the C-Suite” also on Day 3.

Elixir Interactive’s President to Speak at SES Chicago is a post from: Elixir Interactive

There’s still time to register for the latest Online Marketing Institute (OMI) workshop  . Focusing on the content development and content marketing aspects of social media marketing, this two-hour workshop will feature Fionn Downhill, CEO of Elixir Interactive, and Mint Social’s Matt O’Brien.  Attendees will be able to earn credits toward OMI’s certification programs as well a discount toward enrollment in the program.

This Social Media training will feature case studies and tried and tested strategies for creating assets, developing content, and ensuring those assets are indexed by Google.  Topics and case studies presented will include “The Link Between Content Marketing and Social Media,” “Why is Social Media Marketing so Important Today,” and “Social Media Marketing Successes and Failures.”

The event will be held Thursday, September 9th from 7am – 9am at the MadCap Theater, 720 S Mill Ave, Tempe, AZ.  Details and registration can be found at this site.

Social Media & Content Marketing Training in Tempe this Thursday is a post from: Elixir Interactive

How to measure the impact of online brand and reputation management – Ashley Reichelt – ORM Strategist

Many reasons have been cited as to why reputation management is neglected until after an attack has already occurred. It is often a misconception that only bad companies have bad reputations. That they deserve the reputation they have, when the truth is that many complaints are false. Many of these complaints are posted by competitors with malicious intent or the former employee who feels they did not deserve to be fired for hitting their colleague!

Cost could be another reason. However, reputation management is far less costly than reputation repair (both in price tag and in revenue lost). It is more likely the lack of a solid matrix to show the value of online brand reputation is to blame. Another factor that we have found is that reputation management is typcially seen as a PR function and PR budgets are usually not allocated to online PR.

Online reputation management companies need to be held accountable. Reputation management needs to be measurable and clearly define the value of the campaign. But how you measure something as ambiguous as an online reputation? The answer is actually quite… complex.

Because this is about online reputation management, the logical place to start is with how users find your brand. Search is how the majority of users will find your brand online. It is a good bet that most of your brand’s organic traffic will be driven by Google searches. Users often search directly for your brand and can be influenced by the results that appear.

The first step in developing a model to measure the value of your campaign is to gather search volume estimates of your branded terms. To do this a couple tools should be used to conduct keyword research for your brand. Using more than one tool will help you get a better idea of what the search volume actually is for your branded terms. Focus in on the terms that have the highest search volume and generate the most revenue (revenue can be determined by the traffic tracking system being used on your main web site). The next step involves analyzing your users search experience.

As research has taught us, people use search in different ways – to investigate, navigate, and transact. Where investigative and transactional searchers are likely to go further in results, navigational users are more likely to click on the first result. Some brands have more investigational searches while other brands have more navigational or transactional searches. User intent is also a huge factor in whether a search is navigational or transactional. A user with a credit card in their hand ready to buy are usually transactional, but a user still not sure what to buy is more likely to be navigational or browsing.

Despite the type of search there are two main actions someone can take when conducting a search for your brand. They can view the results and not click on any of the results or they can view the results and click on one of the results. Not all searches will result in a click. A negative result could be damaging even if the user does not click on that result. Just seeing the result could be enough to create a negative impression of the brand. The number of impressions made can only be estimated by considering a few statistics.

The first element to look at is what will be immediately visible to the user. Google labs recently released a very interesting study about browsers size. Google browser size shows us what users are seeing when they search for your brand.

Using the search volume from your keyword research you can calculate and estimate the number of searches where each result is above the fold. For example, if my branded term gets 20,000 searches a month, I can calculate that 19,000 searches will have the first three results above the fold and only 16,000 searches will have the first four results above the fold. 3,000 searches will not have result four above the fold.

Google browser size is great to show what is above the fold for a percentage of users conducting the search for your branded term. Some of these users will scroll down and look at the results while others click without scrolling below their fold. What users look at is different than what is above their fold.

To get an estimate of what users are likely to view, we look at the famous “Golden Triangle” eye-tracking study of 2005.

2005 eye tracking research study from Enquiro

Rank 1 – 100%
Rank 2 – 100%
Rank 3 – 100%
Rank 4 – 85%
Rank 5 – 60 %
Rank 6 – 50%
Rank 7 – 50%
Rank 8 – 30%
Rank 9 – 30%
Rank 10 – 20%
*Data extracted 2005 eye tracking research study from Enquiro

This image shows the elixir results with an overlay of the browser size and the “Golden Triangle”. Notice that the results that appear in the 80% mark of the browser size search results align nicely with the “Golden Triangle”. This is the most valuable space in online reputation management. From the “Golden Triangle” study and using the search volume estimates for keyword research we can calculate that 100% will likely view the first 3 results. Yet only 85% will view the fourth result (this is probably closer to 90% given the placement of the fourth result in the browser of the above search results).

The next important measurement has to do with traffic. In most cases your corporate web site will rank in the first position of Google search results for your brand. It is a good idea to analyze the keyword traffic data to find what branded keywords drive most of your traffic. This will help to give value to the branded keywords.

Although analyzing your traffic data will help identify some important keywords and assign value to them, your sites traffic data does not necessarily show how other results affect user behavior. A trend should be developed to show traffic from branded keywords with the search results for these keywords in Google. This could help create a correlation between positive results and traffic for those keywords. The same kind of correlation can be made for revenue.

At this point you may be wondering about traffic to those negative results. Although data for the competing negative sites is not available, it is possible to gain estimates of traffic to those negative sites for the targeted term by using the leaked AOL data from the 2006.

AOL 2006 data – Image from SEO Book

Rank 1 – 42.13%
Rank 2 – 11.9%
Rank 3 – 8.5%
Rank 4 – 6.06%
Rank 5 – 4.92%
Rank 6 – 4.05%
Rank 7 – 3.41%
Rank 8 – 3.01%
Rank 9 – 2.85%
Rank 10 – 2.99%
Page 2 – 10.18%
Note: The number 1 position has a higher chance of receiving a click for branded searches; usually approaching 46%. You should always hold this position and ensure that your site is also set up to rank the 8 site links available in Google search.

Again here you can turn to your search volume estimate to calculate the estimated traffic that negative result may get. This is traffic that could be going to a positive result such as a social media page for your brand or an informational microsite page.

It goes without saying that estimates are not a substitute for actual data. Implementing tracking on all assets used for the ORM campaign is essential and will give accurate data.

The traffic from these sites in relation to their position should be closely monitored. This data can be compared to baseline estimates to better refine them and give a more accurate picture of the progress and true impact on the brand.

Other important measures of an online reputation management campaign should not be excluded.

Many reputation management matrices revolve around tracking sentiment in social media mentions. Social mentions should absolutely be monitored but it should not be the only matrix you rely on for a couple for reasons. First sentiment is difficult to detect and no one has perfected the art of measuring it accurately (although I will admit that some tools are pretty good at it). Second most of your customers are likely to be spectators (individuals who do not interact in social media with your brand).

Many companies have also reported negative results have affected their share prices. Monitoring share prices in relation to the progress of the ORM campaign is advisable as there may be interesting correlations.

To summarize the real goal of ORM is to ensure you maintain a positive top10 for your branded name and it is essential based on this data to keep your results above the fold under your control or populated with friendly sites.

Online Reputation Management Metrics is a post from: Elixir Interactive