ChasNote

The Obama crew is using social media tools for much more than winning an election. Check out Obama CTO.

Dan Farber’s Tweets from Web 2.0 Summit’s politics panel.

Some pundits viewed as extravagant Obama’s $5MM spend to buy 30-minute slots across 7 networks last Wednesday. Heck, you could blow that for two Superbowl spots — 60 seconds — in front of a very large but mainly intoxicated audience. Meanwhile nearly 34 million of us watched the long-form Obama commercial, 70% more than those who tuned in to the final game of the World Series. I agree with my colleague James Gross, that this is yet more evidence that Obama knows his marketing.

Great viral concept by MoveOn.org. Remember to vote tomorrow, Tuesday, November 4.

From Ad Age:

“Just weeks before he demonstrates whether his campaign’s blend of grass-roots appeal and big media-budget know-how has converted the American electorate, Sen. Barack Obama has shown he’s already won over the nation’s brand builders. He’s been named Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008.”

Ulysses dvdrip

From Seth’s Blog:

“Sure, 1% of your customers blog or post or just plain talk. They’re louder than ever before. But the other 99% represent a real opportunity for you. Figure out how to get them out there. Cajole them to go to a caucus.”

(The 1% Rule explained here.)

I know it worked for Obama yesterday — get of them to caucus — but that might be the harder path, getting your quiet fans to alter their personalities so they become talkative fans. An alternative suggestion: Find talkative folks, and see if you can deliver a noteworthy experience with your brand.

According to Nielsen (see NY Times), banner ads for Mitt Romney’s presidential candidate ran 515,000 times on Gay.com. AOL’s Advertising.com, the ad network that accidentally put ads for the anti-gay candidate on the pro-gay (and anti-Romney) site, says the number of impressions was only 32,000.

Romney’s ads also ran alongside pornographic scenes of Harry Potter and Hermione Granger on fiction site FanFiction.net. McCain ads ran on liberal-leaning Huffington Post, Guliani ads ran on progressive DailyKos, Obama ads ran on Amazon alongside a book deemed by Jewish groups to be anti-Semitic.

“Part of the issue seems to be that political strategists came into the campaign season unschooled in the challenges of Internet advertising, and Web advertising sales outlets are not necessarily aware of the unique sensitivities of each presidential campaign.”

I believe the first part — political strategists may not know how online ad networks work. But the second? Oh come on. The problem isn’t that the people at “Web advertising sales outlets” like Advertising.com aren’t politically savvy enough to understand the “unique sensitives” of their advertisers. It’s that they don’t have those people on staff; the ads are targeted and served by computer algorithms that don’t know how to worry about sensitivities.