Thursday, February 21, 2008

The value of social media is no secret to this year’s United States Presidential Candidates. Beyond the beautifully designed, Web 2.0 websites of candidates like Obama, McCain, and Clinton lie incredible social media infrastructures that are fully developed and extremely connected. In fact, most SEO’s have a thing or two to learn from these intense Internet marketing campaigns. Some existing for only a year, they have accomplished more than many businesses have ever considered, and thus social media makes history as a powerful player in the Presidential race.

For starters, every candidates’ website has buttons or links to multiple social media sites for bookmarking or social profiles. Check out the bottom of Hillary Clinton’s Website at hillaryclinton.com. There you find links to Facebook, MySpace, Youtube, Flickr and Eons profiles, each of which are thoroughly developed and active. Her Flickr page is studded with outstanding photos that are titled and tagged, her MySpace page is customized and has over 186,000 friends, and her Youtube channel is enormous. There are currently 264 videos posted!

Obama is no stranger to the online community either. Notice at the bottom right of his campaign website (barackobama.com) a fairly extensive link list of social media connections. These include the sites mentioned on the Clinton site as well as Digg, Twitter, Eventful, LinkedIN, Faithbase, Glee, BlackPlanet, and more. These candidates are taking the social networking world by storm in a way that is unique to our modern times, executing social media strategies that have SEO’s drooling. Their efforts are explosive but honest and real at the same time, and I don’t see any black hat operations going on here.

Part of the reason these types of social media campaigns are so successful is that they are not overly burdened with the need to build links and get noticed on the search engines. They are using social media largely as an intensive viral marketing strategy with the goal of saturating political, social, and economic channels with content. Presidential candidates are more concerned with branding and image than how they rank for particular keyphrases, and as a result their online presence is huge, subsequently showing some impressive search engine rankings as well.

Now, I know that they also have incredible budgets. However, many of the avenues they are using are free, the only cost being a knowledgeable social media teams to organize and execute the campaigns. Compared to paying for network television commercials or spreads in national magazines, social media costs are minuscule, and if you don’t think social media can have a huge impact on the success of your business, ask yourself, “Why are these political campaigns so invested in social media?” I guarantee you it is not just for kicks and giggles.

About the Author: Peter Hamilton is the Project Manager in charge of the Seattle office of ArteWorks SEO. He has a Bachelor's degree in radio, television and film and extensive experience in social media marketing. Mr. Hamilton also heads up the ArteWorks SEO educational video series on topics related to Internet marketing and search engine optimization.