Obama Wins the Web SEM Game

One of the cool sessions at SMX East was Search and US Presidential Campaign. It included online marketers for campaigns of Mitt Romney, McCain-Palin, Ron Paul, and John Edwards. The session was covered live- very nicely by Virginia Nussey of Bruce Clay.

Since then I've seen some other editorial pieces on how bad McCain's PPC program is doing and other articles on the scope and strength of Obama's online marketing.

So I decided to look at the SEM differences.

A Google result for John McCain provides

John McCain 2008
Get Involved and Support The GOP's
Nominee for President John McCain.
JohnMcCain.com

In comparison a search for Obama results in

Obama Campaign Website
Help elect Barack Obama President
of the United States: Donate today
BarackObama.com

The Obama ad is much more compelling, so I decided to look at the Obama website.

instantly he continues to use smart direct marketing tactics - starting with a subscription generator splash page. You immediately start receiving auto generate emails with strong calls to action. But it's done it very professionally, it doesn't come off as spam, and works well to build a brand relationship.

After subscribing I was then taken directly to a nice page breaking down the issues.

I wanted to see how the site reacted upon a second return, and it landed me on a donation page with little else I could do. A very well planned execution to get people to remember to contribute, and get trained not to use the PPC ads to get to the official website.

One you figure out how to get back to his website he makes use of blogging, flicker photo sharing, YouTube videos, and links to every one of his 16 social network accounts.

Really impressive is an option to join his SMS mailing list. This has to give him extra points with the the teens.

It's no wonder that between focusing on the young; recruiting new voters; and keeping the conversation going via email and SMS, he's been able to easly raise 200 million dollars online one form at a time.

This is no presidential endorsement, but I have say - Obama has already won the online marketing race.

Interview with Bill Scully

Nice interview of me about being a search engine marketer by Duane Forrester. Covers everything from how I got my start as search marketer and biggest SEO challenge to my opinion of the future of careers in search engine optimization.

Check it out.

Speaking at SMX East

I'm speaking at SMX East in NYC Oct. 8, 2008.
Here me at 9:00 AM on Wednesday morning during the In House Day Session called a Day In The Life Of A Successful In-House SEO.

High Tech Global PPC Spend Analysis

A new paid search report from Covario (http://www.covario.com) titled “Global Search Spend Analysis” reviewed 128 high-tech company brand trends. The report is their first of this type, and compares Q1 2008 vs. Q1 2007. A big shock is a 52 percent increase in overall paid search spending. This is very different that the industry benchmarks of a 20 percent increase.

• The majority of total spend growth has been in North America (58% to 63%)
• International budgets decreased 10%. (33% to 23%)
• Japan and China spending increased 3.5% (8% to 12%)

B2B Online Marketing Budgets to go up in 2008

BtoB's "2008 Marketing Priorities and Plans" survey shows 60.1% of marketers plan to increase their overall marketing budgets next year predominantly in online, events and direct mail. Despite the softness in the overall economy only 10.3% plan budget decreases.

The biggest budget increases will be seen in online marketing, with 79.1% of marketers planning to boost their online budgets this year.

Last year, in the BtoB 2007 survey, 62.6% of respondents said they planned to increase their marketing budgets; 29.4% said budgets would be flat, and 8.0% said they planned to decrease their marketing budgets.

In 2008 the primary marketing goal is customer acquisition, cited by 62.4% of respondents, followed by:

Brand awareness (19.3%)
Customer retention (11.7%)
Other objectives (6.6%)

Of those planning budget increases next year:

27.8% plan a 5% to 9% increase in spending
24.6% plan a 10% to 14% increase
12.7% plan a 20% to 24% increase
10.3% plan an increase of less than 5%


BtoB's survey found that the average percentage of the marketing budget spent next year on online marketing will be 33.8%, up from 26.5% in 2007. Among the online areas that will see increases next year are:

Web site development (cited by 74.0% of marketers)
E-mail (70.1%)
Search engine marketing (64.3%)
Video (39.5%)
Webcasting (39.1%)
Banners (36.4%)
Sponsorships (29.6%)
Social media (26.2%)


Of the 19.8% of marketers currently using social media applications:
53.8% use them for thought leadership
40.4% for customer feedback
30.8% for market research
28.8% for advertising
26.9% as a sales channel