Search and the US President election – Wow! A lot of search and political campaign strategists are on the panel.

Motivations in getting involved in search and politics are varied but unlike other business it never shuts off and your in it to win.

There is no budget and there is a lag in knowledge in running campaigns for search and current spending is only 40-60 million in this election, and that is a drop in the bucket of all spend.

Also, the lady from Yahoo said there hasn’t been many or any studies on campaign effectiveness and paid search. But you need to communicate directly with the campaign manager and to a lesser effect, the canditates, need to understand the utility of paid search marketing and political campaigns.

Long Tail approach (misspell Sarah Palin‘s name in every way possible).

Duh! Candidates don’t seem to understand geo-targeting and micro-targeting! They understand TV and Radio and media markets, but seldom do they yet understand the precision avaiable.

McCain’s campaign is very active in gel-targeting and Eric Frenchman, who runs McCain’s online search advertising, said so.

What I don’t hear is micro targeting on the actual DISTRICT level, or anything with RSS feeds.

Interestingly, just as I wrote this, a question came up about bundling to the District level, did come up and Google and Yahoo, while they allow custom maps of Geo-Targeting, don’t actually facilitate that level of targeting.

And nothing about RSS feeds and Twitter integration on the local district level. It’s amazing to me how much of modern technology is not being utilized.

Amazing how campaigns use speeches of Biden (in the case of McCain) to a negative landing page on the candidate.

Also, Google and Yahoo haven’t yet offered geo-targeting on District Level but….. They are not, as yet willing to set up that specific a level if targeting yet, but are studying doing so in the future.

For some candidates, easing fund online is easier than others, and some times they can’t spend it all, so managing expectations is necessary.

Online Persuasion.

Do you need to be a true believer in the candidate and party ideology to work for a campaign as a search strategist for them.

However, now, there are many online digital strategists are on both sides.

Social Media and Search with political campaigns. Blog or not? Tracy Russo says no, not enough worth while content. I disagree. And Obama had people who were hired to write to the blogs, etc.

However, the community forming around a blog often continues after a campaign is over, win or lose, and, honestly, not fostering and nuturing that is foolish, I believe.

The idea that there is not much worthwhile to say is lunacy.

Twitter? Again, not as used as much as you’d think, by candidates. Amazing how much is being left, on the table, so to speak.

But, then again, I’m more of a visionary than anyone on the panel, or, for that matter, in the room, judging from the questions from the audience.

Facebook, what works? Buying admin rights for a group, Dan Steele, from Comedy Central.

Interestingly, the question of what kind of participation exists on November 5th, after the election, came up. It seems to me a new “channel” is being created via online media, Paid Search, FaceBook, Twitter, and targeted Blogs, along.

Justine Lam, worked for Ron Paul, and talked about all if that, and how it took a life of it’s own.

What tools used for monitoring Online Buzz?

Google Trends, Google Alerts, but many of the online tools are not useful, yet, to campaign strategists, yet.

Yahoo, Diane Rinalado, says Yahoo Buzz was sited as being better than Google Trends, and HotTrends, but not as highly used.

I brought up a few observations that I voiced including:

1. Increase links shown for embedded videos in Yahoo to include the long tail.

2. Data collected for Buzz Tools need to be refreshed hourly, not days or months later, as Goigle Trends and Yahoo Buzz often are.

Media Buys, as Eric Frenchman said, need to be decided in a few hours. You can see the gap.

Which campaign is doing better online?

Don Steele, Comedy Central, says he’s surprised media companies aren’t better at this yet.

Excellent Panel.

An interesting post from Jeff Jarvis today about The rise of the third estate and the need for Social Media participation and, by extension, Social Media Measurment- though what we have now, is still poor and ill suited for what’s required, moving forward.  According to Jeff Jarvis:

“…. No one’s in charge. I didn’t think that’d be worse than having the bozos we had in charge. But it is.

You’d think the one thing our politicians would be competent at is politics. But they couldn’t even count votes.

We knew the White House was a vacuum. Congress is a vacuum. Wall Street is lie. Detroit and the era it represents is dust. Journalism is sinking like a wet witch.

Who’s in charge? It’s falling to us, the people. We’re in charge. Problem is, we’re not ready. We’ve used the internet so far to organize some knowledge and yell at each other. We are just beginning to create the tools to organize ourselves. If only the meltdown of every authority structure could have waited a few years. Then again, necessity is the mother of organization. New structures don’t replace old structures while they’re still in place. New structures fill voids. And, boy, do we have some voids to fill.

We’re not ready, but then again, sometimes circumstances makes the person – maybe it’s time.   Now, I’m not really for or against the $700 Billion Dollar Bailout (see Bush Urges Congress to Pass Bailout in today’s New York Times) but I noticed how many people on Facebook mobalized to send the Congress representatives mesages against the bailout.

And Paul Krugman, more than anyone else, has been able to explain the $700 Billion Dollar Bailout like Where will the money come from and interestingly, in an analysis very similar to what Web Analysts produce for Traffic and Attribution, Krugman published this chart yesterday in a post on Politics of crisis

Just saw a video about a bunch on Economists at Princeton earlier this week – and it’s amazing how much Economic Analytics reminds me of Web Analytics.

Too bad what’s being analyzed is such a mess – The Economy