Pete Quily has put together a case study on the search and social results of the Barack Obama and John McCain online presence among Google, Google News, Image and Video Search, Technorati, Wordpress and Yahoo along with subscriber numbers from Youtube, Flickr, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and Friend Feed.
Key findings include :
- Obama’s site had over 1 million pages indexed in Google, 5828% more than McCain
- Obama’s site had 25% more pages linking to it than McCain’s
- McCain has 173% more mentions on Google News
- Obama has 2254% more Twitter Followers
The numbers are pretty interesting and make a good case for the importance of social media marketing not only for Presidential Candidates, but also for business online presence and social media management.
More numbers from Obama Vs. McCain Search Engine and Social Media Showdown
Maybe next time you pitch social media marketing and reputation management to your CEO, show them some of these numbers which show how a smart Internet marketing campaign led to someone winning the White House, and how a business can learn from this, build a social following and brand loyal community, and leverage that community when needed.
Comments
8 responses so far ↓
Nick Stamoulis on Nov 7, 2008 at 9:41 am
This is great, I thought I was the only one that noticed Obama’s superior online marketing approach. Obama had PPC ads running with a search tool to find out where you can vote for almost every city. Brilliant is all I’m going to say.
David on Nov 7, 2008 at 1:05 pm
Yep, that looks about right. I think it’s important to note also the vigor with which the Obama supporters both promoted their candidate and also attacked the McCain camp.
If anyone happened to be participating in Twitter’s election pages, they know what I mean.
I don’t know for sure whether or not Obama’s camp had plants that sat on there all day posting negative comments towards McCain and Palin (if they didn’t, it sure did seem like it) - regardless, it would be well worth every penny for them to have done it.
What would it take, realistically? 10-20 people in shifts with 3 or 4 different twitter logins and you could DOMINATE pretty much any social media forum. Way more effective than TV ads.
Joel McLaughlin on Nov 7, 2008 at 6:09 pm
I am personally a republican, But I believe that Obama was more inspirational and incited more curiosity because hes not the “norm” when it comes to leaders. Not saying he is bad, he is very interesting and very eloquent.
dymphna boholt on Nov 8, 2008 at 4:39 am
I think the whole world has just woken up to the power of social media optimisation.
It will never be the same again. This has in a funny way validated the importance of the net as now a mainstream medium, no longer second fiddle to tv and radio.
Canvas Art on Nov 10, 2008 at 6:29 am
Good comparison and provided importance of social media marketing
Dave on Nov 10, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Of course Obama had 5828% more pages indexed that McCain. Obama was openly backed by Eric Schmidt. It seems like a no brainer to me.
J Milken on Nov 20, 2008 at 11:39 pm
Check out this blog - interesting stuff
Richard Vanderhurst on May 9, 2009 at 1:32 am
Nice stuff here… Thanks for sharing.
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