ChasNote

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.