WebProNews

Politics have penetrated pretty much every aspect of our lives, from water cooler conversations to car commercials.  A session at SMX East continued the trend, then, by exploring the ties between "Search & The US Presidential Campaign."

(Coverage of the SMX East conference will continue at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

There are, in short, a lot of them.  And there were a lot of speakers at this session, as well, with people from the John Edwards, McCain-Palin, Ron Paul, and Mitt Romney campaigns tossed in with Google and Yahoo representatives.

Members of the group very much liked the concepts of geotargeting and microtargeting.  Eric Frenchman, the McCain-Palin campaign's chief Internet strategist, confirmed, "Everything we do is geotargeted and microtargeted."  Other folks talked about trying to get campaign managers to accept the importance of search engine marketing.

This leads to another point on which everyone agreed: not enough money is being spent on online campaigns.  So even if the candidates seem to have made large strides this year, in 2012, we can probably expect to see a great deal more in the way of online advertising.

The speakers also believed that politicians might learn a lot about paid search advertising from corporations, so look for some similarities there.  Diane Rinaldo, the political advertising director at Yahoo, observed, "Retail is a lot like politics."

WebProNews Video anchor Abby Johnson contributed to this report.