eMarketing Trends|Verbal Acrobatics & Graphic Gymnastics

In a recent blog How the Internet is affecting (y)our world?, I made mention of how the “Interent has shaken up the US Elections”. Another article on this topic caught my eye this morning which made for further interesting reading.

The article, written by Greg Jarboe, asks the question whether the more seasoned Hillary Clinton was out-Googled by the more search savvy Barack Obama for the 2008 US Presidential Campaign.

I personally don’t follow too much of US Politics, Presidential Election Campaigns and their respective efforts to lead their respective parties, but what I did find interesting was that there has been a significant change in marketing efforts toward the Internet with a new focus to online digital solutions.

Clearly, advisors to the Barack Obama 2008 campaign knew how much influence voters (as Internet consumers and end-users) could have on the outcome of the elections, so what did they do?, they took advantage of “Voter-generated content” (end user-generated content) such as shared Videos on YouTube and blogs to secure Barack Obama’s Democratic presidential nomination.

Not only that, they also used Pay-Per-Click Advertising on Google to achieve this. This was confirmed by senior editor of ClickZ, Kate Kaye, saying that Clinton spent far less online than Obama in an interview by BNN (Business Network News). She explained that the Barack Obama 2008 campaign used pay-per-click advertising on Google for different purposes than the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

So there you go, not only does it prove that online Marketing works when used effectively but it also indicates that there is much more confidence in people’s opinions and interactions online than ever before. We need to take notice of online conversations and opinions and not only monitor it but use it to our advantage. This is what the US government started doing, shouldn’t we?

Here is the video of the BNN interview with Kate Kaye.