The Politics of Paid Search Marketing - Combatting the Obama and Palin Rumors

I almost put my head through a window the other day when I was forwarded an email from someone who had received an email titled "Where did the money come from?" asking whether I thought it was true. The message asserts a variety of fallacies about Obama, insinuating ties with all sorts of unsavory characters and extremists and the like.

Firstly, I was once again appalled that this type of stuff spreads in a day and age where people can check the factual accuracy of these items in a matter of seconds by going to snopes.com (which the above link points to) or countless other fact check and urban legend sites. Honestly, it only takes a second to find out that Sarah Palin was never a separatist and that Obama did not have roommates that were terrorists. The fact that people so willfully pass this misinformation along, and worse yet, people believe it, frustrates me to an extent that I cannot express. For a democracy to function, it requires a little leg work by its citizens to inform themselves, so c'mon people, let's pull it together. End non-partisan political rant.

This brought me to a salient point on paid search marketing, however. My first thought was, what about those people who don't know about snopes.com? If they were to search for "Obama muslim", would they find more innuendo, or was the candidate proactively fighting back? I was a bit surprised to find two paid advertisements run by the Obama camp. The first as more of a catch-all, titled "Researching Barack Obama?" and a second targeted add proclaiming simply, "Barack Obama: Not Muslim" leading to his brilliantly assembled Fight the Smears site, which provides information countering all of the misinformation. Much credit should go to whomever in Obama's campaign came up with this approach. Well thought out and well executed.

Taking this across the aisle, Sarah Palin has been a target of similar rumors and attacks. However, any combination of terms such as "Palin secession", "Palin Trig", and "Palin abuse of power" returned no results in the paid arena. Interestingly, one paid add for Obama offered, "Is Palin a maverick? Nope." Certainly an interesting strategy, as my father might call it "piling on". Regardless, it appears the Obama side is definitely taking a more proactive approach with search and the web overall to try to stem the tide of this phenomenon, and I can only wonder why the Republicans haven't at least attempted to mimic this approach.

Regardless, I would imagine that defensive paid search marketing is likely here to stay as far as politics go. With the hyper-condensed nature of politics combined with the relative ease of generating new misinformation, defensive SEO would simply be too time consuming to be effective. While it sickens me that this even needs to happen, it certainly provides an interesting business opportunity for those of us in the pay per click marketing business.

Adam Henige is Managing Partner of Netvantage Marketing, a Michigan SEO solutions, paid search and web analytics consulting company based in Lansing.