Barack Obama
(Photo Credit: wikipedia)

The Obama campaign poured more than $1 million into Google in February compared with only $67,000 by Clinton during February. The $1 million paid to Google was more than six times the campaign’s entire online ad spend for January.

The Obama campaign also outspent the Clinton campaign on Web portals and social networking sites. The Obama campaign spent $4,900 on Facebook, $99,341 on Yahoo and an additional $58,000 on Yahoo Search Marketing. By contrast, Clinton spent just $9,186 with Yahoo.

The Obama campaign also spent $93,162 on Internet political consultants Blue State Digital.

For the month of February the Clinton campaign raised $30 million online and $35 million overall. In January the campaign raised just $14 million forcing Clinton to lend her campaign $5 million.

In February the Obama campaign brought in $45 million in online donations and an overall total of $55 million.
 

This can show us a few things: what the Internet "climate," so to speak, is for the candidates; how they stand on issues affecting the Internet; and which ones are making the best use of the Internet for their campaigns.

And I’ll try to keep my opinions out of it. (Cub)Scout’s honor.

If you were just now tuning in to the race, and your TV’s busted, you might search Google Images to find out what the candidates look like.

Aside from the first image of Senator Barack Obama, which features "gangsta" Obama allegedly pandering to the African American audience, the rest, for the most part, look nice and Presidential. If you just search for "Obama," it’s a little more casual, featuring a more JFK, Jr.-esque shirtless beach shot, and of course his would-be Kennedy-esque mistress.

Hillary (don’t click that without safe search mode ON), on the other hand, doesn’t get quite the treatment Barack does. She’s featured as the Devil in both the informal "Hillary" return and the "Hillary Clinton" return (where she’s poking Bill in the rear with a pitchfork), as well as Darth Vader, or is featured with various decidedly monstrous looks on her face. Google Images doesn’t appear to like Hillary much, but that baby pic is priceless.

John McCain, according to Google Images, is a pirate. And a GI Joe. And is most often draped in the Stars and Stripes. Sometimes Presidential, sometimes crazy guy at the bar angry because you looked at him funny. POW camp kind of does that to a guy.

Okay, so Google Images clearly favors either McCain or Obama, depending on your POV, which puts Hillary last in our forthcoming analysis (besides, "ladies first" is so sexist). We’ll start with Obama because, according to Google Suggest, nobody knows who he is.

What Google Tells Us About Obama

If you’re the type of person who listens to what President Bush says and thinks we should do the opposite, then Obama’s your man. In this Editor & Publisher report, Bush called McCain a "true conservative" (a statement Limbaugh, Hannity, Ingram and Coulter might all disagree with), and said Hillary was "well-prepared for the job." And Barack? Bush doesn’t like Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience. And if anybody knows about bad foreign policy, it’s Bush.

That’s the last time. Honestly.

Obama’s well-liked at the Googleplex, especially since he was the only candidate to answer correctly CEO Eric Schmidt’s Google employment question, which is about "the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers."

He answered "I think the bubble sort would be the wrong way to go." That’s apparently correct because the crowd applauded. Giving me a math problem is like putting a chimp at the helm of an atom-smasher. Still, I think this is the correct answer: "Give them to a Google employee."

During that interview, Obama voiced support for Network Neutrality (a topic you’re unlikely to hear about off the Internet), and unveiled his technological plan for the nation, which included the appointment of a Chief Technical Officer to help make the government more transparent online.

As far as utilizing the Internet in his campaign goes, he’s been early and aggressive online, making use of YouTube, MySpace, and Google AdWords, especially to ward off a smear campaign suggesting he was Muslim. That question, by the way,—whether he’s Muslim—is the top Google suggestion for "Obama is…."

Google also tells us that, according to Slate, Obama is the most Google-like candidate, if you were to compare him to a company. A young, exciting, inspiring, dreamy upstart…whose stock has fallen, says my boss, hardee-har-har.

But even still, after all that Silicon Valley love – Google led contributors to his campaign, choosing him over Clinton and McCain – Obama failed to carry the region. Silicon Valley went the way of Microsoft. And the Obama Girl? Well, maybe she caught a cold by not wearing enough at the Google-YouTube New Hampshire pre-primary party, because she sort of didn’t go cast her vote in the New Jersey primary. Et tu, Amber Lee?

McCain, Your General Motors Pirate Guy

Google Suggest suggests that McCain is an insane, liberal traitor, or at best an old conservative. But if you’re the type to go against anything MoveOn.org says, which has thrown it’s support via donated money and advertising to Obama, then McCain’s your man.

And he’s earned your support. For every dollar McCain’s campaign spent online he earned $4 in campaign donations. Not a bad return at all. His email campaign did better, pulling $189 average donations at a cost of $8 per donor. He’s savvy when it comes to Internet campaigning, utilizing AdWords, AdSense, and MySpace to bolster support. 

His ads don’t always hit the mark. Some of his AdSense flyovers ended up in enemy territory thanks to some faulty contextual targeting. And he had to diffuse a McCain googlebomb at some point, which seems to have been unsuccessful. His attack on Hillary worked pretty well though.
 

While visiting the Googleplex, Schmidt let McCain off the hook by not making him answer the efficient bit-sorting thing, and McCain struck a cord with Googlers with this nugget:

“If Google is going to be able to maintain its supremacy in the world, it is going to have to continue to get the best and the brightest from all over the world, and I accept with your gigantic egos, that you are the best…we need an H1B visa program that works.”

But he wasn’t pandering. Soon after, a Googler got the "McCain story" Rick Santorum was talking about as the two of them argued about the war in Iraq. And McCain wasn’t exactly gentle. And he’s still kind of mad at Google and Yahoo for their involvements with China.

He’s against Net Neutrality, believing the market will right itself without government intervention. That might be why he took in $0 from Yahoo, and just $1,550 from Google. Don’t feel bad for him though, McCain has mentioned making Cisco CEO John Chambers a cabinet member. Cisco doesn’t like Net Neutrality either, especially with all the network filtering equipment they make.

Luckily for him, the Navajo put their anti-McCain pitch on Google Base where nobody’d see it, and nobody remembers the Keating thing either. Probably. At least, nobody’s brought it up yet, anyway.

While Obama is compared to Google, that same Slate article compared McCain to General Motors, calling them both "old warhorses" and implying McCain’s brand wouldn’t keep pace with the new efficiency. But as half my family is employed in the steel industry, I have to say, never, ever count old GM out.

Clinton, Our Microsoft

Google Suggest isn’t kind to Sen. Clinton, either, suggesting she "is" a fake, a joke, even the devil. Slate compared her to General Electric, the "mega-cap blue-chip, a juggernaut of the 1990s," but I like the comparison to Microsoft better, especially if Obama is Google.

In fact, out of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, Clinton pulled in the most from Mr. Softy, the Beast of Redmond, and carried Silicon Valley, too. She also has visited the Googleplex, but unfortunately, it looks like Clinton specified "no math questions" before Schmidt was allowed to interview her.

Clinton is also pro-Net Neutrality and has backed legislation in Congress. Her larger broadband expansion plans have come under fire recently, as she has based them on Kentucky Connect, which wasn’t quite the darling it was made out to be.

Rest assured, just like Microsoft with Google, wherever Obama is, there you’ll find Clinton, too, especially online. In AdWords, on YouTube and MySpace.

Final Tally

Let’s take a few things into consideration here. From a PageRank standpoint, Obama’s website is beating McCain’s, PR 7 to PR 5 (as of last August), but McCain’s MySpace profile PR is ahead of Obama’s 7 to 6. Clinton’s website 6, her MySpace profile 5.

SEO advantage goes to Obama.

Obama has 271,000 MySpace friends, compared to Hillary’s 181,000, and McCain’s disappointing 44,000.

Therefore, the overall Internet winner for the US Presidential Election of 2008 is…

Ron Paul?
 

 Votingpresent.com and Votingpresent.org are domains hosted by the same IP address as official Clinton Web sites, like TheHillaryIKnow.com, which was launched this week.

The Clinton campaign is taking specific issue with Obama for having at times voted "present" as an Illinois state legislator when it came to controversial legislation.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton said," "Among the thousands of votes he cast in the Illinois Senate, he used the present vote on occasions when he believed bills were drafted in an unconstitutional manner."

"On other occasions, he voted present as part of legislative strategies, such as ones crafted by pro-choice forces in Illinois to thwart maneuvering by the opponents of a woman’s right to choose."

Clinton has used these present votes to portray Obama as a talker and not someone who takes action. "I don’t think people want a lot of talk about change," she told Iowans early this month according to abcnews.com. "I think they want someone with a real record-a doer, not a talker. After eight years of incompetence, they don’t want false hope, they want real results."

A Clinton campaign official defends the attack Web sites noting that Obama’s campaign has a Web site called HillaryAttacks.BarackObama.com, which tracks criticisms Clinton has made about the senator.

It’s not clear when the Clinton attack sites will go live.
 

The Blue Hampshire blog traced two usernames to the Clinton campaign, along with four usernames that had registered with the blog within minutes of one another that were recommending a pro- Clinton post, according to Dean Barker, managing editor of the blog.

"Paid campaign staff are welcome in this community, but are asked to disclose their affiliation to a campaign, either through their signature line, a disclosure statement on a diary, or even in the choosing of a username," Barker wrote on the blog.

"The fact that all the users mentioned above came from a Clinton campaign IP, but did not register with campaign email addresses, and avoided making comments or diaries, instead only recommending pro-Clinton diaries, strikes us as gaming the system and a form of "recommend astroturf."

The Clinton campaign told Blue Htampshire that the comments on the blog were not part of an orchestrated effort, but the "product of over-eager staffers and volunteers, done without her awareness, and will not be repeated."

"While initial acts like these are very small, when a community starts to sense there is no enforcement of the norms of the site, a slow slide into anarchy inevitably begins," Barker wrote.

"Team Clinton is the subject of this post, but it is meant to be a warning shot across the bow of all campaigns. And further, it is the fact that we do manage to have civilized discussions here among opponents that makes this line worth drawing." 
 

Anne Zelenka provided a graph that shows searches for “hillary clinton” with a clear lead over those for “barack obama” and “john edwards.”  The content of the graph was, by the way, originally suggested by Google’s own Marissa Mayer.

So what does this mean?  All other issues (representative sample, etc.) aside, there’s one major problem: whether or not all the searches for Clinton reflect positive interest (or at least less negative interest than whatever’s present in the searches for other candidates). 

Still, Zelenka noted, “Mayer showed how Google Trends accurately predicted George W. Bush’s dominance over John Kerry in 2004 and Nicolas Sarkozy’s win in May of this year over Segolene Royal in the French presidential election.”

And in semi-related news, Jonathan Richards began an article by stating, “Bill and Hillary Clinton are among the guests expected to descend on a tiny Caribbean island this weekend for the wedding of Larry Page, the billionaire co-founder of Google.”

This year, in addition to discounts between $10 and $50 and offers of free shipping, Checkout users will be racking up frequent flyer miles as well.

Google has secured participation from seven different airlines including Alaska, Continental, Delta, Midwest, Northwest, US, and United.

Noticeably lacking from the lineup is American Airlines, currently embroiled in a trademark violation lawsuit against Google.

In addition to promotional offers, Google has also set up Checkout so that users can donate to various charitable causes such as California wildfire relief via the Red Cross and The Salvation Army, March of Dimes, the William J. Clinton Global Initiative, and the One Laptop Per Child program.

At this early date, money remains the first, second, third, and probably twenty-fourth most significant concern for White House aspirants. The Thompson website, I’m With Fred, features links to donate and raise funds should the actor/Senator pursue a bid for the Presidency, just as the other candidates do.

His organization has opted for a slightly different approach to the Web. Thompson’s website doesn’t have the dizzying array of content blocks the other candidates we mentioned have posted. His main content section is a blog, kept up to date by an administrator at times when the candidate himself isn’t posting.

The important concept Thompson’s people seem to get is the need to have their supporters engage traditional media. His site features specific links to encourage people to write to newspaper editors or call talk radio.

Those two sections allow the visitor to pick a state followed by a media market. A results page shows the options available for contacting the media outlet of choice.

It’s easy to give the Internet too much credit for what it can do in building support for an issue, and to give mainstream media too little. Thompson’s people recognized this and built support for the old media into their new media.

Whether that’s an election breaker or not will be seen in 16 months.

“The Clinton Foundation and Microsoft Corp. today announced a long-term partnership to develop a suite of technology tools that will enable cities to accurately monitor, compare and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions,” stated an official press release.  “The technology,” it continued, “will include both software and services.”

The release doesn’t mention any dollar amounts – I suppose that sort of thing would be impolite – but it did say that the “online, Web-based software tools will be provided pro bono to cities and will be available by the end of the year.”  As far as what those tools will do, the press release was surprisingly vague; it sounds like they may help guide decisions based on the results’ environmental impact.

Another surprising turn came when neither Bill Clinton nor Bill Gates contributed any statements to commence the partnership’s beginning.  I know these are busy guys, but to have their speechwriters whip up a paragraph or two doesn’t sound hard.  Still, Microsoft’s Craig Muncie, a chief research and strategy officer, contributed his opinion.

“Technology has the power to make a positive, long-term contribution to solving the world’s environmental challenges,” he said.  “By partnering with the Clinton Foundation, we can increase environmental awareness and drive sustainable change that will help cut global carbon emissions.”

Well, there you go.  It’s fun to see Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft attempt to one-up each other, but it’s even better when their efforts go towards a good cause.

Schmidt was a gracious host, according to Scott Lindlaw of the Associated Press.  Due to an earlier visit from Hillary Clinton, Google’s CEO has some experience with this sort of thing, and it looks like he’ll get still more practice in the future.  “The company has extended invitations to all the major candidates and expects more campaign appearances in coming weeks,” wrote Lindlaw.

And no candidate should feel too out-of-place when visiting Mountain View; at this so-called “Google Interview,” Lindlaw reported that, while “[o]ne questioner expressed surprise that a Republican would venture into this liberal area,” another “said he had campaigned in 2000 for McCain.”  Still, Democrats may be more at home, judging from Barry Witt’s description of the forum.

“An audience of far younger, far more technologically adept and far more liberal Google employees on Friday sparred politely with Republican presidential candidate John McCain,” he wrote.  Witt works for the Mercury News, a San Jose newspaper, and so presumably found himself on familiar ground while covering this story.  He did seem less surprised at Google’s apparent influence in the political sphere.

Still, it’s always interesting to see how different people view the same event, particularly when it comes to politics.  If you’d like to see McCain’s Google Interview for yourself (and have 68 minutes of free time), a video of it is available on YouTube.

According to the Washington Post, the amount spent on online political advertising has grown at a phenomenal rate.

Online political advertising…has steadily increased in the past five years, according to the marketing firm PQ Media. It was $5 million in 2002. It totaled $29 million three years ago. Last year it was $40 million.

And, if your ad agency has any interest, it looks like the political campaigns have money to burn. Look at this crazy idea…

Scott Randall, president of BrandGames in New York, is trying to get campaigns interested in creating video games around candidates in the same way his company makes them for other products. “Candidates are brands and the power of video games, like a brand mascot, is to create an emotional connection with the brand,” he said, though he had not managed to persuade any campaigns at the conference.

Oh, cool! Maybe we could have political death-match game where Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton square-off in a ring. Fight! Fight! Fight!

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