Our home city - Lancaster, PA - has seen visits from both major party presidential candidates in the last week. Since the 2008 election is fast approaching, and the candidates have been playing the politics game in our backyard so frequently, I wanted to take a second and analyze each president’s internet marketing campaigns.

For starters, each candidate is using the essential social media and networking sites - Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, Digg. Obama has the appearance of being more “tech savvy,” thanks to his Twitter profile with over 78,000 followers.

Obama’s use of the web as a driver for donations has been well executed. In a random selection of ways to get to Obama’s online home - Google organic search results, Google PPC links, direct website visits, and mobile searches by Blackberry - our team found four custom lead generation forms to fill out before hitting the main page. Two were e-mail capture forms, two were for donations.

Only one pay-per-click ad led to a donation form on the McCain site, but the Arizona Senator isn’t neglecting the internet. The Wall Street Journal noticed McCain’s camp is using an ambush pay-per-click campaign. Search “Joe Biden” and check out the top sponsored listings - “Joe Biden on Obama” links to McCain’s site. Very sneaky, sir.

McCain’s campaign is placing a heavy focus on this year’s election issues with its PPC. Search “housing crisis” and “U.S. economy” in Google… McCain will have a PPC ad there - Obama won’t.

The internet is definitely playing a huge role in this year’s election. Its cool to see how each candidate has found a completely different way to use the power of the mighty internet and search engines to their advantage.

Any other cool internet marketing tools the candidates are using that we missed? Drop us a line below.

We have put together a comic in celebration of Google Chrome. Hopefully Sergey and Larry have good senses of humor… because we love the product!

I was driving into work today, listening to 96.1 (yes, I’m in my mid-20s and I LOVE oldies), and Dave & Dog had an interesting little factoid to share. Apparently, emails beginning with the letters Q, Y and Z get only about 20% spam, while those beginning with A, M, S, R and P get about 40% or more. This information comes courtesy of Dr. Richard Clayton, a computer scientist from the University of Cambridge, as reported on BBC News.

I thought that was pretty darn interesting - here I thought spammers were keeping up with the times and constantly finding new ways to spam people as much as frickin’ possible. As it turns out, they’re missing out on tons of spamming opportunity.

Sort of in line with this - I’ve noticed my gmail has been missing more spam - for months, I saw not one spam mail in my inbox - they all went right to junk. For the past month or so, I’d say I average at least 1 spam email in my inbox per week - sometimes more. Of course, lucky me, my email begins with an A.

Anyone else notice gmail seems to be slippin’ with spam control? Or is it just my spam-magnet email address?

So, I thought it was kind of fun and cool that Jon Fisher and Jon Volk are having a competition to see who’s blog can rank higher for the other person’s name. This kind of goes back to the good old miserable failure google bomb that happened a while back. Volk is a friend of ours, so we thought we’d support him in his quest.

As I’m sure everyone’s blogging about today, the big news is that once again, Twitter was the first media platform to report breaking news: the NASA probe Phoenix found water on Mars AND brought it back for extensive scientific testing.

While I’m personally not a huge Twitter fan (for the longest time, I just didn’t get it), if it keeps up with breaking news stories open before even mainstream media, I’m down with that.

No, I don’t want to read about the fact that you just threw a load of laundry in and are now watching TV. Really, nobody wants to read that…

I DO however, want to read about the NASA findings, about earthquakes hitting the LA area, even that you spotted a famous celeb out getting trashed at a bar (gotta love celeb news, can’t help it!). If that’s what Twitter has to offer, than I suppose I just may have to start paying more attention.

On a side note, as reported by The Press Association, Dr. William Boynton was quoted as saying “…this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted.”

Um…I don’t know if I’d be so hot to be tasting Martian water so soon…sheesh.

OK… I know… I know! Google PR doesn’t mean anything anymore. Well, I don’t really care. I still found it neat today when a page that was created on June 12, 2008 now has a page rank of 4.

Yeah… that’s right.

So what’s the deal? Does google update PR on new pages only? According to some sources, PR hasn’t been updated for 155 days.

Anybody else see an update on any of their pages recently?

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Update:

I’m a goof… here, I thought I was breaking some incredible news!

Guess not.

“Ooh, look the bar is like ummmm, 75% green…that’s good, right? That’s like…a lot of searches, isn’t it?”

That was my usual thought when using the Google keyword tool. But no longer!

I logged on to their keyword tool today to do a search and what did I see in my results? THE SEARCH VOLUME IN NUMBERS!! Google finally got it through their head that those little bar graphs showing the average search volume just wasn’t cutting it anymore, especially not with other tools such as Wordtracker providing actual numerical data. (I would mention Yahoo’s Overture tool, but they finally put that tool out of its misery - you can read more about the Overture shutdown over at Search Engine Roundtable.

It is SO much more powerful to be able to find the actual number of searches for a given keyword on Google, even if it’s an average. We spend a TON of money on Google every month, the least they can do is give us as in-depth data as possible in return!

It’s not really surprising that they finally made this change, since they’ve already released Google Ad Planner and Google Trends with numbers with the purpose of hiding nothing from users.

Anybody read TV Guide? They always had a Cheers & Jeers section.

Well ‘Cheers!’ Google, for finally giving an actual number for approximate search volume.

‘Jeers!’ for taking so dang long to do it!

OK… first off, I have to say this… GREAT JOB THOR! In a previous post, I explained my frustration with where Top Affiliate Challenge was headed. I hated the fact that there was no real “content” within the episodes and was getting sick of listening to the contestants whining like my kids.

Episode 5, although not available on their site presumably because of a “trick” shared by John Chow on how to cheat Adwords, was incredible! THIS is what I am looking for. Props to you guys!

They got into tips and tricks with drupal and wordpress and talked about delegation and much more. I highly recommend checking out episode 5 here.

So, I have been excited for months for the internet reality/game show Top Affiliate Challenge to come online. I love affiliate marketing and am learning all the time new ways to create income streams with it. Affiliate marketing has truly turned into a large portion of what our team does each and every day.

I watched the first episode and was totally disappointed. Everything seems so scripted from their host and it just feels completely amateur. Which… don’t get me wrong… there’s NOTHING wrong with amateur. I would be game if they were just casually filming this thing and editing it together to post… but I think what gets me is that they are TRYING SO HARD to make the show look like an “Apprentice” style thing and they are being lazy with their editing (probably because they are over committing their time frames of being online).

So far… I HAVE SEEN NOTHING of what the contestants are actually doing to win or lose money. All they do is talk about relationships they have and the whining from the contestants is ridiculous. The producers are trying to put twists into the game… but they are so non-relevant and don’t even make sense. In all honesty I am just having a hard time following it all.

I have to give props to Joel Comm, who’s show, “The Next Internet Millionaire” looked great… especially compared to this one. But I had the same complaint about that show that I do about this one. There is very little video of the contestants doing the actual tasks… it’s just a series of interviewing. At least Joel made his show one where you could actually start to root for certain contestants.

Look, when I watch a show like this I want to do it on the edge of my seat going, “No way! That’s a freaking incredible idea! There’s no way he’s going to lose this one!”

Instead… I have nothing to root for… and the only judgments I can cast about the contestants is relating to personality traits and public speaking abilities (which very few of them have).

Will I continue to watch? Yeah… I will… so they’ll still get their impressions from me (well, maybe not because they clearly didn’t look into how much bandwidth they were going to need, so the site can’t even play the videos right… so I just go right to google video). But I’d also watch a train wreck it I knew where and when it was going to happen.

Come on Thor! Give me something to root for man… I was prepared to be your biggest fan!

Hello All! It’s been so crazy around here… we have a lot happening that we will be telling you about very soon!

In the meantime… be sure to tune your ears into Webmaster Radio tomorrow at 1pm. I will be making a guest appearance on the SEO 101 Show with David Brown, Brian Mark, & Carolyn Shelby where we will be talking about link building for beginners.

I was honored to be asked to be on this program in part because of the many internet marketing experts that have appeared including Todd Malicoat (stuntdubl), Jeremy Schoemaker (shoemoney), Joel Comm, Michael Gray (graywolf) and many others.

The show will re-air in re-run and be available on demand for a few months after the live broadcast tomorrow at 1pm.

See you then!

UPDATE: Here is the link to listen to the show!