techPresident - The Silent Online Majority - Comments

Ads != Earned Media

Patrick Ruffini — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 18:10:34 -0400

Any experienced campaigner will tell you earned media is more explosive. And by and large, I can't get earned media through portals, except as a highly filtered MSM end-product. I can move narratives through blogs that I could never get straightaway through the portals. Or the New York Times for that matter -- which tells you something about who the portals are emulating.

I could easily conjure up examples where good blog buzz with lots of inbound Technorati links gets better traffic and ROI than a run-of-site on AOL or Yahoo. But then I don't necessarily expect the portals to deliver the best ROI -- mainly just impressions.

It's not that blogs and YouTube are better. It's that they're free.

If the portals built a real community where word of mouth organically spreads, they'd be buzz engines many times more powerful than the blogosphere.

Portals are bottlenecks and expensive

Philip de Vellis — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 17:46:39 -0400

Patrick, I agree. A big part of the problem is that the web editors on a lot of those sites are anonymous. I can't remember once bumping into an AOL news person. We all know Jackie and Abbi at CNN, but who is the person who picks stories for CNN's website?

But the traffic they can drive is massive. I saw the same thing you mentioned about Obama girl with my videos.

I think at some point campaigns will just need to pony up and buy ads. They are cheaper than TV, and if voters are there it is worth it.

Social networks vs. portals

Patrick Ruffini — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 17:29:36 -0400

Cyrus is exactly right. For an example of what he is saying, just take a look at the Obamagirl video. It got 240,000 clickthroughs from AOL's Newsbloggers blog, vs. 8K from the New York Times Caucus blog and 6K from HotAir. Clearly there is an audience for political content beyond the blogosphere that isn't being tapped.

But I'd also submit there's a bottleneck with the portals themselves. Political content on AOL, Yahoo, and MSN is heavily editorialized. It's a news story with that *maybe* has a link to the campaign website at the bottom. Their doors are always open for advertising, but Yahoo! Answers is the only platform that lets candidates pro-actively engage the audience. In this respect, they resemble online newspapers more than social networking hubs to which campaigns can contribute unfiltered.

Contrast to YouTube and MySpace. They've opened their doors to the campaigns, driving tons of free traffic to candidate channels through the YouTube spotlight with banners placed throughout the site. (YouTube is even hosting debates for heaven's sake.) On MySpace, candidates get a free link on the homepage. Major portals like Yahoo and CNN have only recently started to link to external sites from their homepage.

Candidates communicating through MySpace and YouTube isn't entirely about being short-sighted or following the latest trend. The fact is that it's much easier for them to communicate through those channels. We'll get a true apples-to-apples comparison when Yahoo et al. open the floodgates with candidate spotlights on their homepage and links to campaign websites or profiles on Yahoo! properties (Flickr, Yahoo Groups, del.icio.us, etc.)

The Silent Online Majority

Philip de Vellis — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 15:37:45 -0400

It is conventional wisdom these days that Republicans are playing catchup on the Internet -- David All and GOP techPresident contributors excepted.

But Democrats shouldn't take their perceived online edge for granted. The GOP is aware of the gap and just hired a big gun to get its Internet operation back in the game.

Ben Smith at the Politico reports today that the RNC has hired Yahoo! exec and former Slate co-founder Cyrus Krohn as their eCampaign Director.