Not All Change Is Good

By Aaron Goldman, VP, Marketing & Strategic Partnerships

In his post-election speech, Barack Obama declared, “ What began 21 months ago in the depths of winter cannot end on this autumn night.”

I’d like to echo that sentiment and ask President-Elect Obama to practice what he’s preaching as it relates to his search marketing efforts.

It’s no secret that search played a crucial role in Obama’s marketing arsenal. In fact, over $3.5 million was spent on Google alone in October for strategies including reputation management. And link-building was a crucial byproduct of his social marketing push.

Last week I looked at Google Insights to try and get a read on how the election would turn out. Sure enough, US query volume turned out to be a pretty good indicator of voter preference as Obama pulled away in both searches and votes.

A quick glance at Google Trends today shows a huge spike in Obama queries on election today and search volume holding steady at pre-election levels…

Click to view larger image.


However, one conspicuous change in the search landscape is the absence of Obama paid search media. And the new Change.gov site couldn’t be less optimized.

This is not change I believe in!

Yesterday, Kris pointed out how some marketers are capitalizing on the Obama wave.

Hopefully, the new administration can prove that its actions during the campaign were not just rhetoric and get back to leveraging the power of search marketing to connect with its constituency.