One of the talks which got a fair bit of coverage from ThinkVis on Saturday was this one by Karyn Fleeting from Tinderbox Media. Not being a day to day SEO its always good getting another perspective (albeit one closely aligned with SEO). Karen’s talk was a bit of a move away from traditional day to day SEO conversations however I wouldcertainly advise reading it if you get a chance

Apart from gaining a fascinating insight into her work – there are a number of great tips to the presentation including how to write a great press release as well as some links to some great resources.

Thanks to Karyn I have included the full presentation below

Today through up a great example of the new issues facing public relations organisations in the 21st century. A random tweet from the official Vodafone UK account through up this gem

Whilst many organisations are used to dealing with the dillemas of offline media but there are more and more examples of organisations having to make the transition to online media – and having to make that transition quickly

Its another case of what can happen when social media goes wrong and looking at my Twitter stream at the moment, it looks like it could be a long afternoon for Vodafone

After months of planning, we are pleased to announce the launch of SASCon (Search, Analytics and Social Conference) 2010. The event is being held at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester – and will bring together some of the best digital marketing speakers in the UK including Jon Myers, Richard Gregory and Dixon Jones, but also bringing in some of Europes finest such as Fantomaster and Joost de Valk. More speakers are to be confirmed too.

The event is being organised by a number of industry prominent national and regional search marketeers including Ben McKay (MediaEdge), Richard Gregory (Latitude), Simon Wharton (PushOn), Nicky Wake (Dont Panic), Peter Cobley (iSpy Search) and Peter Young (MediaVest).

SAScon Event Details

Date: April 28th 2010

Venue: The Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, UK

Early Bird Tickets: £225 + VAT (Available until the 1st March 2010)
Early Bird SEMPO / Manchester Digital Member Tickets: £195 + VAT

SAScon is going to be one of the UK’s finest search and social events for those agency and client side looking to excel in their field.

For further information or to book tickets please go to the SASCon website which can be found at www.sascon.co.uk.

If you would like to sponsor the event, please go to our sponsors page or contact Nicky Wake @ Don’t Panic on 01706 828855

To follow SASCon on Twitter go to twitter.com/sasconference

I was recently involved in a conversation regarding the best fit for brand reputation as many legacy PR agencies were arguing that this function should be purely a PR activity rather than a combined, holistic approach to brand reputation. I hadn’t really thought more of that conversation until recently, whilst evaluating potential companies from which to buy a new kitchen from.

As with most people, our purchase process began with research. A simple search for kitchens was the starting point for the purchase, and a number of initial organisations were shortlisted for further evaluation. In the end we decided to bring a couple in for further discussion including Company A. Company A came into present their product and service, and after a 5 hour sales process we ended up suggesting there was a reasonable likelihood of further progress. That was until further evaluation was undertaken regarding Company A.

Company A brand search results

Such a search however produced a wide range of results, both from generic promotional activity such as Local Directories to the usual republished press articles. However it was the overwhelming response from a number of high profile forums which was the major factor that started ringing alarm bells. It is generally accepted that people only naturally leave comments when they are unhappy with a product or service – however the extent of the feedback was surprising to say the least.

The first 5 results post brand were all review forums, all containing 98% negative feedback regarding the organisation of which 50% contained the term ‘Do not touch this organisation at any cost’ (or variations thereof). Many traditional PR responses are often tailored to one-off responses – however online these responses can manifest themselves within the online brand space for a significant period of time, and can (and do) have a significant effect on both click through rate and ultimately the number of conversions. According to a recent report by Microsoft 9 out of 10 people use the internet for shopping and as a result ignoring these search results is just something that cannot be ignored.

It is therefore surprising little further activity has been reviewed in the circumstances. Certainly PR has its place to play in the whole remediation of this process particularly as the tone of the response in such a circumstance is crucial – and a dearth of 10 best types of kitchens type articles is not the type of response mechanism one should be considering in these circumstances. Instead one should be focussing on:

• Identifying the most vocal contact points. Identify if any brand advocates do exist in these areas. Understand what people are writing about you, and whether there is any truth in what they are saying (honest appraisal is the best approach here)
• Formulate a response where applicable. I would always suggest engagement with a PR Practitioner in these instances as you should only be correcting fact, not entering into a slanging match as this is only likely to compound the problem. Be personable and where applicable personalise this to the target audience – don’t standardise a response – people can tell a mile off.
• Get an Online PR campaign under way. Wires such as PRNewswire are great at hitting touchpoints like Reuters, Bloomberg, Topix and the Press Association (amongst others) – however again it is imperative, you have a good story not just an advert. Keep this regular, a simple one-off will not suffice
• Utilise internal assets. Many organisations have group websites, microsites, subsites etc, all of which could be optimised in their own right in response to such issues. This could allow you to dominate a greater proportion of brand search space than just the typical 2 results (+ sitelinks)
• Engage with social media if applicable (Obviously this will be more applicable to some brands than others), but sites such as Twitter are very quick to respond to breaking news and very viral in nature.
• Work with brand partners. Some of the best instances of such partnerships of this can be found in open source programming areas with hosting providers such as Rackspace providing hosting to PHP.net – saw one recently between Total Jobs and the Home Learning College as well). Often (not necessarily in that last example), these partners can aid with promotional opportunities.
• Don’t forget your PPC. For example, blagger.com (one of the examples in the image above, runs PPC ads at the bottom of the page. Content Network targeting would allow you to run ads on these sites, which via site-targeted would allow you to respond directly to these instances (indirectly)

There are a number of other small things that could be done in these instances, however the main point of this is leaving such feedback to stagnate is not necessarily the best approach. It IS affecting brand perception, it IS affecting your conversion, and it IS affecting your bottom line

Can you really AFFORD to leave it alone?

In keeping with their recent raft of improvements through the range of Google products, Google announced the introduction of comments to  Google Reader. This follows a number of improvements over the last year or so which have included the ability to choose friends and share with notes, however I would suggest this is possibly the biggest change introduced to the product since launch.

To get started, click “Comment View” at the top of your Friends’ shared items in Reader, or just write a comment by clicking “Add comment” at the bottom of any shared item.

If you need any further information as to how comments work, check out the Google Reader blog.

There is an interesting debate in the offing, started on Twitter – and one Stuart Bruce, the founder and managing director at Wolfstar has covered on his stuartbruce.biz blog in a post ‘Public relations is about reputation, not SEO‘. In his post, Stuart suggests that ‘Public relations is first and foremost about reputation and behaviour’, and that PR is better placed as ‘guardians of the brand’ (not Stuarts quote) to manage the reputational needs of a client, rather than SEO.

I have to agree with aspects of what Stuart says – but I wholly disagree on a number of other points. This is a debate I have had on a number of occasions, particularly when working as part of a large regional agency of which the PR part of the organisation played a prominent part. Stuart is indeed right to a certain extent when he suggest that PR understand the facets of reputation management better than most (not all) search practitioners do – and SEO is by no means the answer to all online reputational management needs (and neither will it ever be).

However, it is a tool of the trade (as Stuart) puts it, and in the modern day communications environment environment, a very important tool of the trade. I think it is important to stress there as well modern day. The communications environment over the last couple of years has changed significantly. In the ten or so years I have been in online, I have seen online take a larger and larger chunk of the pie, not just because products are packaged better, however I would suggest this is reflective of user behaviour, as broadband in particular has revolutionised how people buy, talk and interact.

Reputation is no longer purely confined to offline. Certainly some of the biggest PR issues have started online – and it is the ‘viral’ speed of online that means Search (not just SEO), Social Media and PR should be working together now more than ever. Reputation is not a PR function, it’s not an SEO function it’s a corporate function, and as such the organisations that should be best placed to exploit this are the organisations that can bring all facets to the table – both online and offline.

I would like to come back to the point – search above. SEO is just one facet of that jigsaw. SEO is no longer just about ‘write a compelling news release’ and ‘make it SEO friendly’ and to a certain extent it never was just that. It’s a facet, but as a search practitioner I wouldn’t be doing a job, if I didn’t look at the bigger picture. With so many more tools to bring to the table such as PR and Video, it’s more a case of combining skillsets and specialisations like never before, and there is obviously the implications of brand association of search (and obviously the implications of negative results with Search (and social media channels – such as YouTube). Modern day users to an extent trust search results and as a result search has to play an important part of the reputational management mix ( I draw your attention at this point to the Enquiro Research piece on brand association)

So ultimately who is better placed? I would suggest neither. In Stuart’s piece, he states

However, one danger of SEO agencies getting involved is that they just focus online and therefore miss the bigger reputation management issue, potentially causing significant damage to a brand.

I hate to say it but I personally feel that comment is wholly unfair, and the reverse can often be the case in terms of traditional PR agencies. PR’s (for whatever reason) often do not understand the implications of digital, and as such are just as likely to cause ‘significant damage to the brand’ (just look at the Edelman/Wal-Mart issue from a couple of years back).

Not until both parties come to the table – and work together do I think clients will see the full value of a holistic reputation management service. In the modern day environment, neither can and neither should do without the other….

Over the course of the last couple of months, I have unfortunately become quite addicted to micro-blogging site Twitter. I am constantly suprised by Twitter, not just in terms of its uptake, but also in terms of its functionality and usability,  not just in a pure financial sense but also in terms of context.

Last night was just such a night. Whilst a lot of noise has been made of Twitter from a networking perspective, Twitter from a thought leadership perspective, it was last night that I saw Twitter as a citizen journalist tool. Its not the first time to be honest. When the plane recently went into the Hudson River, there was a post on Twitter within minutes of it happening.

Last night was similar. In the early hours of Friday morning (UK wise anyhow), a story started doing the rounds regarding Martin Schaedel (@martin), a well respected person within the Silicon Valley community had died in a plane crash in Santa Monica. People like @btabke (Brett Tabke) @Jenstar Jennifer Slegg)( and @DannySullivan (Danny Sullivan) posted a number of comments relating to the crash over the course of a three hour period or so, keeping many people in the loop as to proceedings. A live stream of condolenses has been building within Twitter, many from prominent internet and search marketing individuals.

Whilst in the grand scheme of things this was a fairly small incident, from a personal perspective it has opened my eyes as to the power of Twitter from this sort of perspective, particularly when you combine services such as Twitpic to the whole Twitter mix. All of the sudden you have a real-time, interactive overview of breaking news in some cases from a 1st person perspective. How many other communication channels can do that….

It was alleged on Friday that Belkin, the developers of IT hardware were involved in a fake blog review scheme using Mechanical Turk -  a side business of Amazon. Mechanical Turk is a site where users can go and get paid to do things that computers can’t do in exchange for small contributions – generally a couple of pennies to a couple of pounds

Mechanical Turk Homepage

According to the article, a number of requests were posted for people to post ‘positive reviews’ for Belkin products as follows

Arlen Parsa from ‘The Daily Background’ goes on to say

That’s a request from somebody named Mike Bayard to review a product and “give [it] a 100% rating (as high as possible).” It doesn’t matter if the reviewer doesn’t own the product or has never tried it– the requester has helpfully written, “Write as if you own the product and are using it.” It even goes a step further, asking the Mechanical Turk user to “Mark any other negative reviews as “not helpful” once you post yours.”

Users are paid 65 cents for every positive review they leave. There are dozens of these requests from this Mike Bayard guy on Mechanical Turk.

So who is Mike Bayard. Mike Bayard just happens to be a Business Development Representative from …. you guessed it… Belkin, and his activity appears not just to be limited to Mechanical Turk – other posts have been identified on both Buy.com and NewEgg.

Now this activity – known as ‘Astroturfing’ is not just unethical and against Amazons terms and conditions, if it were taking place over here (UK)  it would also be illegal. Astroturfing is a word in American English describing formal political, advertising, or public relations campaigns seeking to create the impression of being spontaneous “grassroots” behavior, ie fake grass = AstroTurf. It is not the first high profile example of Astroturfing, back in 2006 Wal-mart was found to have developed a couple of blogs which were later discovered to work undertaken by Edelman – their PR agency – however it is an activity that has become less common over the last couple of years.

To their credit, Belkin have been quick to respond. In correspondance printed over at CrunchGear, Mark Reynoso, President at Belkin announced he was unaware of the activity and that they would be taking action

Belkin has always held itself to the highest standards of corporate ethics and its employees to the highest standards of personal integrity. Similarly, we support our online user community in discussion and reviews of our products, whether the commentary is good or bad. So, it was with great surprise and dismay when we discovered that one of our employees may have posted a number of queries on the Amazon Mechanical Turk website inviting users to post positive reviews of Belkin products in exchange for payment.

Belkin does not participate in, nor does it endorse, unethical practices like this. We know that people look to online user reviews for unbiased opinions from fellow users and instances like this challenge the implicit trust that is placed in this interaction. We regard our responsibility to our user community as sacred, and we are extremely sorry that this happened.

We want to stress that this is an isolated incident and to re-instill trust with you, we have taken the following courses of action:

- We’ve acted swiftly to remove all associated postings from the Mechanical Turk system.

- We’re working closely with our online channel partners to ensure that any reviews that may have been placed due to these postings have been removed.

It’s also important to recognize that our retail partners had no knowledge of, or participation in, these postings.

Once again, we apologize for this occurrence, and we will work earnestly to regain the trust we have lost.

Sincerely,

Mark Reynoso

President, Belkin

This does highlight one important thing to any person or people representing commercial ventures online. Nearly everything you do online is accountable and nearly everything you do has a trail.

I guess the lessons here should be two fold

1. Just because you can do it online, doesn’t mean you should
2. If you wouldn’t do it offline, don’t do it online.

Link development remains one of the most important aspects of any search engine optimisation campaign. Whilst the mechanism of acquiring links may have changed over the last couple of years, the desire for good quality link certainly hasn’t. A few years ago, many search engine marketing experts could acquire links via various directories (paid and otherwise) and via various paid link networks such as TextLinkAds (and for some sectors the use of various link networks (no names mentioned of course )

These days Google is a lot more fussy about what it determines to provide value in terms of linkage. Many sites have seen a significant impact on performance as Google tweaks its algorithm accordingly. For that reason we have put together a list of link acquisition tactics, ranging from simple to implement to the more far out suggestions.

Get Creative with your link building

• Use badges. For example – If you are a retailer who has resellers who sell on line. Let them put an ‘authorised reseller’ badge on their website with a link back to your website.
• Provide something useful – For example – mortgage provide -> Mortgage Calculator, Debt Specialist – Outgoings overview. One of the best blog related examples is how much is my blog worth
• Develop a useful tool (and don’t forget to promote it) – SEO is full of such examples. Using for example Joost De Valk @ Yoast.com – developing wordpress tools or Dave Naylor’s multi-browser SEO Tool
• Offer awards – for example Lee Oddens BigList of search marketing blogs (PS Any chance of an add Lee )
• Hold a contest. One only has to look at the success of HP’s 31 days of the dragon campaign to see this in action. Not only did they see significant increases in sales, but a significant increase in linkage as well for both them – and the people involved
• Acknowldege good work by others. Our recent post on ‘10 UK search marketing people you should be following on Twitter‘ has not only enjoyed significant buzz, but also generated a nice amount of inbound linkage
• Promote Local relevant activities. Local Conferences, charities etc could be great ways of doing this.

Don’t forget the basics of search engine marketing

• Submit to Quality directories only. Paul Teitelman over at SearchEnginePeople has compiled a great list of good directories
  
• Submit your blog posts to search engine friendly social media
• Swap links with partners, suppliers and related business. This can have secondary benefits in terms of credibility and the like -  For example – http://www.tesco.com/clubcard/clubcard/partners/?page=EONEnergy
• Distribute your offline press releases online. Services such as Marketwire and PRNewswire will allow you to target both national and regional news sources, as well as online news sources including Associated Press.
• Distribute articles to article sites. Not everything is newsworthy so a range of different sources is always good
• Engage with blogs. I use again the example of the HP ’31 days of the dragon’ campaign which used 31 prominent blogs to promote their products. Perhaps send a product sample of your product to key blogs – ie if you are a chocolate blog – you may send a product sample to various food or chocolate blogs to see what they think.
• Trade articles with other webmasters. Donna Fontenot aka Dazzlin Donna recently did a great article on ‘How to create No-Fail Hot Content’
• Search for sites with dofollow ‘trackbacks’ and link to some of their blog posts. Google for example is great for this – and a great source of subsequent traffic.
• Study competitors banklinks via Yahoo Site Explorer, and request backlinks from many of the same sources. Competitor Analysis can be a great source of links you may not have considered
• Include links in your RSS footers, so content scaped from your site contains links back to you.
• Don’t forget other blended search opps. Video and Images on sites can be a good source of traffic and potentially linkage. For example lets not forget the Cadbury’s Gorilla ads from last year.
• Don’t forget to submit your blog to RSS feed directories
• Linkbaiting can be a great way to get linkage – however it is not without risk
• If you have other sites – don’t forget to link to them. Don’t overdo this but it makes sense for customers not just search engines
• Work with affiliates, maybe even go as far as developing your own search engine friendly affiliate scheme.
• Don’t forget to offer secondary support, social media platforms that arent SEO friendly may still offer secondary promotional opps (ie Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook etc)

Thought Leadership

• Develop whitepapers
• Participate in survery and questionnaires. Good responses can often be included in any subsequent promotion
• Build definitive lists and resources for others (This being just one such example)
• Offer to do guest posts on other peoples blogs. For example I do guest posts for both Marketing Pilgrim and E-Consultancy
• Develop guides as to how something can be done – For example MoneySupermarkets top ten ways to cut insurance costs
• Release unique research results – For example iProspects study into ‘Offline channel behaviour on Online Search behaviour‘
• Be the first to news stories – For example the Blogstorm/Nokia/I-Spy comment spamming story that broke late in 2008
• Comment on the blogs of others in your industry, or those of related sites. Not all blog comment links are no follow
• Engage in speaking opportunities. For example – many of the sessions at SES/SMX are covered on various blogs and forums.
• Get yourself known by industry, national and regional media. This may result in ongoing coverage and a regular source of linkage. In the UK this may include NMA  and the like.
• Search keyword “add url”, keyword “add site”, and don’t forget to add your site to those sites

One thing is apparent when looking at the list above. SEO has become more closely aligned with traditional marketing practises than ever before. SEO is not about automated link acquisition, SEO is a social activity. Anything less is likely to result in reduced performance and ultimately a short lived campaign.

Think, be creative and ultimately enjoy your link building.

Other sources on this subject

8 ways to buy links without buying links
The Definitive List (75+) of Link Building Techniques in 2008
101 Link Building Tips to Market Your Website

Brand Reputation is becoming a big word in marketing circles. Warfare is taken place on the search engine results pages for many brands, and is becoming an important part of the Search Marketing professionals armoury. However what should you have in your brand reputation toolkit.

1) Know where you stand

It is very difficult to understand how and where to react to an issue if you do not know what is being said about you, and there is really no reason why you shouldn’t be able to setup even the simplest of monitoring tools without spending hundreds or thousands of pounds on brand reputation software.

Simply implementing a Google Alert on your brand will give you some sort of idea of who, what and where your brand is being talked about. I would add however there are some fantastic brand reputation monitoring tools out there that do pick up a wide variety of content, across a range of different channels, and if you are considering some of these tools some of the better ones are:

• Magpie Brandwatch
• Radian 6
• Market Sentinel
• Sentiment Metrics
• Asomo
• and even Trackur from Andy Beal.

2) Dominate your brand search.

Thomas Cook - Dominating brand

There are various ways of doing this, however it is imperative you make it as difficult for a potential brand detractor to influence any searcher, by reducing visibility below the fold. The example above shows an organisation that does this very well by utilising a mixture of subdomains and domains to dominate the top 10 of searches for ‘Thomas Cook’.

3) Use your paid search tactically

Often a lot of brand reputation issues will arise in public forums such as blogs and forums. A large proportion of these sites will carry various forms of online advertising such as Google Adsense advertising, or other forms of online advertising as a way of monetising their sites.

Use of sponsored search for brand reputation

Where particular issues may arise on a suitable site, it is possible to tailor adverts to particular sites – such as Google Adwords – site placement. These ads may carry creative developed particularly for a particular issue advising browsers of where they may be able to find more applicable factual data.

4) Use your offline channels online

Modern day search pages allow search marketeers to influence a far greater proportion of the search engine results page than ever before including

• Video
• PR
• Product Feeds
• Local Listings
• and Images

Blended search allows greater brand infiltration than ever before

Using the example above, for the iPhone, advertisers are able to use a variety of channels to attract potential custom, including

• the traditional organic listings – where Apple (as you would expect dominate)
• the Paid Listings – allowing advertisers such as Carphone Warehouse and Vodaphone to advertise on these terms

but also

• PR – Taken from Google trusted news sources
• Products – taken from advertisers who have submitted Google Base Feeds.

All these channels allow a far wider variety of usage outside of pure search results, for example the video used above is obviously pulled from Youtube – and has already received nearly 6 million views since it went live.

They also tend to dominate key areas of the page, for example

• Google Products – often visible between positions 1-4 (above the fold of the screen)
• Local – Generally the first result – and highly prominent in terms of eye catchment
• PR – Often within positions 1-5
• Video – Depends but normally anywhere between 1-10

They are in many cases ‘eyeline breakers’, often breaking the natural browse of a results page, and meaning users spend more time on search pages – something Enquiro looked into recently.

5) Use Your affiliates

This is obviously going to be more pertinant to some advertisers more than others, however it is worth noting how much real estate can be taken up by affiliates. Whilst this may be a more expensive way of taking up search page real estate, it can result in some significant coverage, all of which is likely (as long as you treat them right) to result in good brand (and sales focussed) coverage.

The role of affiliates on brand searches

And more:

• Use social media (Will cover this in a later post)
• Is Wikipedia relevant – WHilst you aren’t likely to get any link juice – this does take up valuable real estate
• Create a Squidoo lens

One thing is for sure – don’t just ignore the problem. There are a number of high profile examples out there in, that highlight what happens if things are simply left to fester. Certainly people like Dell have developed a brand reputation response learned from the ‘Dell Hell’ days.

SEO in any ones book, seems to be in a purple patch. Certainly in the UK it appears to have gained traction into many mainstream organisations, and is now part of my FTSE 250 and Fortune 500 organisations marketing strategies. However it unfortunately is still tainted by a dark undercurrent of black hat SEO’s and link spammers which continue to create some negative association with the profession – whether that is justified or not justified is another question.

However it is a couple of posts that have been made that have got me thinking, namely Rand Fishkin’s 8 ways to buy links without ‘buying links’ and Chris Hart’s ‘What if SEO was spelled TSA’

Indeed Rand’s post is indicative of just what a different beast SEO has become. ‘Traditional’ forms of marketing such as Online PR play a far more important role in SEO than ever before – not just from a linkage perspective, but also in terms of branding and standalone traffic acquisition tools – with social media bringing a facet of marketing not previously available to marketeers (either online or offline) to the table.

Just look at metrics for measurment these days. Gone are the days when rankings were the only way to measure SEO success. Blended search has certainly created food for thought here – as well as new channels for savvy marketeers to exploit. ‘SEO’ is far more tactical than ever. Online Brand Reputation for example should have ‘SEO’ at its heart, with brand exposure and coverage more important and high profile than ever.

Surely we (as search marketeers) have evolved from merely optimising for search engine rankings alone. Is search engine optimisation therefore the best term to describe what we do?  The term ‘search engine optimisation’ appears to have been around for around 11 years or so now (one of the earliest references I can find is fom David Stoddard from Frontiernet in August 1997) – however Danny Sullivan gives a great breakdown of this on the Search Engine Watch Forums. I would suggest SEO has changed significantly since then – lets face it Google was nowhere near the beast it has become, search marketing industry still in its infancy and social media just a glimmer on the horizon.

In the absence of any suitable replacements, bar ‘digital asset optimisation’ (coined by Lee Odden in 2007) it appears it is still here for a while, however one can’t help thinking whether SEO 3.0 could see a new beginning, and potentially a new name?

[ This post from Peter Young's blog contains only his personal opinions. ]

I, like many have been following the recent events in the US election, with the fight for the White House. It was therefore interesting to see the influence online has played in the campaign. Two recent articles have really struck a cord as a result.

Firstly, Sage Lewis highlighted the importance of online (and in particular Search and Social Media) played in Obamas rise to the White House. In his article, Sage mentioned a number of interesting statistics, namely:

• There are nearly 2 million links to Obama’s website, nearly twice as much as those pointing to John McCains website.
• According to statistics released by Rubicon Consulting, “Democrats are more active online than Republicans. Democrats are more likely to participate in online communities, and say they’re more heavily influenced in their voting decisions by information they find online.”
• Obama’s campaign had social media at its heart, not just in terms of the site itself, but also in terms of the personnel involved. The involvement of Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, shows the importance of social media within the strategy.

The second article of particular interest to search was Kate Kay on Clickz. In the article, Kate highlighted that Obama’s campaign spent nearly $8 million through October to Google, Yahoo, Facebook, news Web sites, ad networks, and in-game ad firm Massive (which I talked about at the recent Interactive Marketing show in Manchester). In particular it is interesting to see where the money was spent.

• Just over $4 Million on Paid Search – roughly broken down $3.5 Million to Google, with Yahoo accounting for about an eighth of that, with $673000.
• Nearly $8 million spent on online ads.
• Interestingly, the spend on Social Media comes to the fore. Nearly three quarters of the social media budget used in September alone, with Facebook taking the lions share.
• The use of MSN owned Massive Incorporated (well worth a look) was interesting alone. The campaign placed ads pushing an early voting message in EA games, including a racing game called “Burnout Paradise,” targeting them to players in 10 battleground states.
• Ad networks were a particular focus with more than $600,000 was paid to a variety of networks throughout the year, including AOL’s Advertising.com, Collective Media, Undertone Networks, Burst Media, Quigo, DrivePM, Pulse360, Specific Media, and online video networks Broadband Enterprises and Tremor Media.
• Local online media targeting also saw significant spend with around $100000 being spent.

Politics is an area many people have an opinion about, and it is therefore suprising it is often not integral to modern day political campaigns, however it is encouraging to see more and more focus given to Online. In particular key channels such as Search (inc Online PR/Blogging), Display Online Brand Management (and monitoring in particular), should be a fundamental part of any modern day political framework.

Given the noise that has been generated on Twitter by many of my search colleagues with regards to the US Elections, it is suprising that McCains camp didn’t use online as a bigger battleground, and I personally think this is the first of a more digitally focussed policital landscape moving forward, as even we in the UK start using online as part of the political juggernaut.