The long tail concept is receiving a lot
of attention these days, even in the political arena. What exactly is
the long tail concept? You have probably seen or read discussions of
the problems the entertainment industry is having. Broadcast
viewership is down, CD sales are down and there is lots of talk about
what will happen next. Viewers and music buyers are finding other ways
to get their information and entertainment. The same process is
starting with politics.
In brief, the long tail idea is that search on the internet allows
people with very narrow interests to find kindred spirits with which
to interact. In the political sense this would imply those who do not
find the traditional Democrat or Republican parties to be relevant to
their position(s) now have a way to find each other and organize.
Websites are easy to set up and cost almost nothing to run. The
smaller the niche your website covers the less competition and the
easier it will be to rank well in the search engines for the words
specific to your special interest.
It will be interesting to see how this develops.
It is clearly to early to know for sure how this might effect the elections process, but the speculation is entertaining. What are some tactics which could be used to send online political in a new direction?
Do a Google search for “Bingaman” (US Senator from New Mexico). The first site returned is his page on the senate website. But, notice there are no sponsored ads over to the right!! It seems strange to me some interest group or rival candidate has not opened an adwords account and arranged for an ad to be shown whenever this term is searched. It should be a really cheap way to get almost equal billing with the senator.
Hos this site came to be:
I registered NMGOP.com after Howard Dean’s success with raising money from the Internet. I thought political activists would be quick to use the Internet for fund-raising and other political activities. However, I was wrong.
I registered many domain names with the state abbreviation followed by the letters GOP and put websites up on those domains during the 2004 political campaign. None of these sites, including VTGOP, TNGOP, and TXGOP, generated any significant traffic although I was offering to do a free website review for any political website that was sent to me.
After reviewing the results and the e-mails that I received as part of this experiment, I find there are several aspects of the existing political process which are opposite of what is required for effective activity on the Internet.
Political activity in the USA is very much timed with the actual elections. Candidates are interested in running, Filing their their registration papers, and gather the required signatures a year or more in advance of the election. However, these are not ongoing full-time activities except for the incumbents. The Internet on the other hand, does best with continuous activity, the website is always there. It does not handle interruptions very well.
Politicians are used to raising funds developing an advertising campaign and flooding the media via TV, radio or the newspapers with their advertising up to and until the actual day of the election. This kind of approach does not work with the website where traffic must be built gradually and there are no are no shortcuts to generate significant traffic. It takes time and effort to develop significant page rank with Google so that natural search engine results provide a significant amount of traffic to the web site
I also found that when the campaign experiences difficulties the first action is to hire a political consultant. This consultant will be somebody experience with previous elections whose immediate action is to make the candidate so busy with conventional door knocking, interviews, etc., that they have no time to devote to continuing action on the web site.
As a result, that web site quickly becomes dated, viewers that may have found it discover it is no longer helpful for following the campaign and as a result the web site languishes.
There is also a significant amount of warfare between the political campaigns. Putting up all information about your positions thoughts and ideas provides the opposition with everything and easy form that they can use to attack your position. As a result candidates may be are locked in to share and distribute their real thoughts on many subjects because of it makes them so vulnerable to this kind of attack.
Unfortunately the result is that I think the political process is going to be extremely slow and updating the approach to using web sites effectively. At the present time candidates. They obviously don’t understand the long-term benefits of a web site that stays up year after year while they run for a variety of offices. The fact is many candidates are having a political career that may spend years so having a web site related to their name and where they talk about the particular campaign they’re running at the moment may be extremely valuable for a long period of time
Another aspect which candidates have not taken advantage of the is the ad words program from Google I looked out the web sites of many incumbent senators and found there are no ad words running on their names so it would be cheap and easy for a challenger to my ad words space to advertise the existence of their campaign and asked people to visit their web site and contribute or enter into discussions or sign-up to help I don’t believe this has been exploited by any of the Candidates.