Webs@Work

The heartbeat of electoral politics in the US has moved online, and Barak Obama is leading the charge. In bringing about new levels of civic engagement, the participatory culture of the Web is changing not just the face of politics, but the way presidential candidates are marketed.

DREAM TEAM?

Obama campaign managers say their focus online is to drive supporters to the Web site so that people can participate in the process by hosting house parties, writing their own campaign blogs and starting grass-roots groups in their communities.

Techpresident.com, a nonpartisan “group blog,” tracks the effect presidential candidates are having online. For example, in terms of MySpace friends, Obama is leading Democratic rival Clinton, with more than 268,400 friends linked to his MySpace page while Clinton has more than 179,300 friends.

Not since the fireside chats of Franklin Roosevelt has a communication medium played such a pivotal role in electoral politics. With the presidential election shaping up to be truly the first of the digital age, hearts and minds are being shaped online.

Can Web 2.0 technologies bring about a sea change in politics, much like TV swayed political behavior in the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960?. They were the first major presidential debates on television, a venue in which a youthful John Kennedy outshone Richard Nixon, who was less telegenic on camera.

PEW Research Center found that the Web is living up to its potential as a major source for news about the 2008 presidential campaign. Online is the key place to get news about the elections, with almost a quarter of Americans now learning about the campaigns online on a regular basis.

Partnering between old and new media adds even more legitimacy to emerging technologies. Like MTV and MySpace, teaming up to feature real time, dialogues between candidates and voters.

Certainly the rules of the game have changed and the politics much more distributed. There are many aspects of Web social marketing in this race. Campaigns are happening on people’s screens and no longer run from headquarters or driven by centralized purchases of TV advertising time.

What YouTube and other Internet sites seem to have done is they enable people to talk to one another. Allow voters to talk to one another without necessarily going to the campaigns. And so you see people making their own ads for candidates and that might be part of what is getting people so excited and what’s leading to this record turnout as well.

Much has changed since Democrat Howard Dean tapped into an online community for support and money in his 2004 campaign. Today top Web experts are hired to outfit candidates’ sites with fundraising tools, blogs and videos and post profiles on social networking sites.

Republican candidates are using the web to grab donations and build communities. McCainSpace allows users to build their own sites hosted on the John McCain site. Other Web features used by campaigns mimic those of YouTube, Google and Amazon.com. But instead of generating a sale or linking to an advertisement, candidates pitch supporters, pick up fundraising leads and potentially land votes.

Well the Internet has certainly been a big target of campaigns for two reasons. One, fundraising. It has made fundraising a lot easier. You can go out and find people to make donations. I think Internet has played a strong role in this record amount of campaign contributions that are flowing to the campaigns. The Internet also enables you to target voters and to target advertising. So it’s brought a lot of change to how campaigns operate in terms of fundraising and in terms of targeting

As people turn to the Web for shopping, banking and news, will getting and being influenced by political information be any different? Certainly, the ‘pull’ type of media on the Web may not get to the masses who are still unwired, and who need political information pushed to them by TV or newspapers.

What remains to be seen is how web-marketing techniques change as the electoral field is narrowed to two primary candidates. While the Web will matter in this election, will it also determine outcomes? Will these tools make or break a candidate?

Here’s a chance to be a YouTube millionaire, but only if you’re a top content creator. In the US, users of video-sharing site are already making money from the videos they post on the site. The project is being extended to other countries, starting in the UK.

Those signing up to the YouTube Partner Programme will be offered a share of the revenue generated from advertisements that run next to their video. Partners are independent video creators and media companies who are looking for online distribution. New YouTube partners include LisaNova, renetto, HappySlip, smosh, and valsartdiary.

The amount earned will depend on the number and popularity of the videos. YouTube says those making “several thousand dollars a month” are regularly producing videos with over one million views

The first wave of US partners - including singer/songwriter Tay Zonday, wordsmith hotforwords and comedians apauledtv and peteandbrian - have already become responsible for a significant percentage of YouTube’s total traffic, according to YouTube.

As people spend more time on social networking sites, they are increasingly thinking about how to monetise it. YouTube is part of the trend of social networks and user-generated content sites offering people a chance to make money for the content they create.

TOP 100 NEWSPAPER WEBSITES

Find out how newspapers can put your message in a whole new light. Here’s a site that gives you solid support as you evaluate your media strategies.

Thanks to higher bandwidths, many Web sites now contain video of one kind or another. Stuttering footage is a thing of the past, and video-sharing Web sites are hot properties.

The viral meme is a new phenomenon. If you’re trying to break into the business of becoming a viral Web star, the most important thing is to understand the dynamics of the medium and the nature of Web audiences:

1. Be funny and get to the point. People are clicking all the time and you need to hook them in the first 15 seconds, or they’ll move on. Gary Brolsma managed to do so when he created his Numa Numa Dance flash video in November 2004. It’s now on over 80 websites, with over 13 million views on Newgrounds.com

Numa Numa - Views: 6,899,308

1. Push every demographic button. Judson Laipply, whose gyrations have long reigned as the most-viewed on YouTube, says his video crosses almost every generation - there’s no language barrier and lots of nostalgia going for it:

Evolution of Dance - Views: 64,907,725

2. Tenacity and self confidence. Fritz Grobe the guy on the right of the Diet Coke and Mentos video says many of the biggest Web videos were made by real people showing what they are passionate about. The experiments in his video took six months to develop:

Diet Coke + Mentos - Views: 3,945,642

3. The right genes. Adam “Chocolate Rain” Bahner, known as Tay Zonday took off not just because his video had a catchy hook, but what he says are his looks and deep voice. Judge for yourself:

Chocolate Rain - Views: 11,179,018

4. Keep viewers wondering. Matt Harding leaves something for people to figure out at the end of his videos, like: Who is that? How did they learn to do that? Is this for real? What the hell is going on:

Where the Hell is Matt? - Views: 8,358,33

Being the latest, greatest Web meme has its drawbacks. You’re human kitsch and never sure if people are laughing with you or at you. Brolsma’s videos are on his newnuma.com Web site, his celebrity status taking him on talk shows like Oprah.

Bahner is hoping his viral will turbo charge a career in show business. Grobe and his partner are paid to travel the globe setting up Diet Coke fountains. Harding is filming a new dancing/traveling video for release in June. Just enjoy the ride and laugh.

Related reads:
Saving a Favorite Web Video
Viral Videos for Small Businesses
The Secret Strategies Behind Viral Videos

Brave new things are happening on the Web frontier, but the doom and gloom around old world journalism make people fresh out of J school just want to get a rope, a ladder, and a lonely place.

Journalists as we know them, are going out of business, so says Forbes. The magazine concludes that journalism is one of the worst jobs there is and journalists are an endangered species.

Despite the proliferation of media outlets, newspapers, where the bulk of US reporters work, will cut costs and jobs as the Internet replaces print. While current events will always need to be covered (we hope), the number of reporting positions is expected to grow by just 5% in the coming decade, the Labor Department says. Most jobs will be in small (read: low-paying) markets.

FORBES

Not so fast. The Web proliferates information and the people making sense of the information are not about to go out of business online. The Web offers broadcasters a chance to test new forms of storytelling and news reporting to make content more attractive to the audiences who are deserting TV news.

Take ABC. The network is using the staff of its evening newscast to produce a distinct daily program for a Web audience. Unlike networks like CBS and NBC which are still using the Web to repackage regular nightly news shows, ABC is unique among the broadcasters’ experiments online.

ABC regards its “World News” Webcast as a first step toward a future that looks increasingly digital and multimedia. They create a 15-minute daily newscast separate from the TV bulletin using the same set and anchor, Charles Gibson. But similarities end there.

The Webcast covers many of the same stories as its TV bulletin, but segments purposely look raw and personal, as if they were made for MTV rather than ABC. Reports break the broadcast news formula with longer stand-ups, sound bites and interviews. There are often quick Q & As with correspondents.

The Webcast has evolved since it started 20 months ago as a distillation of the day’s news. Now it has video blogs, first-person essays and interviews plus a good dose of pop culture and techie stuff. A partnership with Google provides top searches and keywords in a one minute segment.

Pieces have a decidedly new-media feel. For example, a correspondent shot a piece walking on the streets of Baghdad to explain what it was like to wait in line for gasoline and pay more than Iraqis are accustomed to paying. It was closer to a video blog entry than a traditional report.

Looking like a younger, more tech savvy version of its evening TV newscast, ABC Webcast is aimed at people who view Web pages on iPods and cellphones - the 25- to 54-year-olds every news organization covets.

“World News” reaches a fraction of the 4.5 million views and downloads a month, most coming from podcasts downloaded automatically by iTunes users. There’s no ad breaks as ABC focuses on editorial experimentation than on garnering advertising dollars.

Related post:
A TV Website is a Product, Duh.

TV folks still don’t get it! When I’m consulted by broadcasters planning to launch an accompanying Website for a TV series, I am often floored by the silo-thinking that an online presence is merely something nice to have to reinforce the brand and generate awareness.

Little wonder that so many micro-sites purporting to be the online arm of a TV show are, well, so small and mono-dimensional. Sure, the bean counters on the board ask for the business case. It’s about time they drop the blinkers and TV-centric thinking and build the Website as a product.

The Website cannot be conceived as a brochure for reinforcing the TV brand, but rather as unique content sold as its own entity. It’s about leveraging the resources unique to broadcasters to implement a successful online strategy.

With Web content eating into the profit pies of print and TV, online financial success for broadcasters lies in creating true cross-platform integration with the TV side of their business. Traditional media are not getting the share of advertising because they have not got past the ways to monetize their Websites.

ESPN.com and CNN.com got it. And it’s simply that people will pay for content if it is valuable to them. What ESPN and CNN have done is increase cross-platform reach to their audiences by investing in and building their Websites. It’s about taking the information the networks have and knowing how to feature it.

ESPN.com developed cross-platform storytelling by streaming video and creating interactive games for their users. CNN.com emphasized the cable network’s strength in delivering breaking news by expanding on the I-Report feature which allows the portal to receive a large volume of breaking news without actively soliciting.

So instead of using third-party and costly software, broadcasters should create a local network of sites, organize the local Web and take advantage of what’s already available to create unique community. Some of the brightest minds in the industry know where the future lies and are steering their online products in that direction.

Amid talk about how Web video is cannibalizing eyeballs from the big screen, younger demographics are shifting focus from TV to Youtube. A survey by Frank Magid Associates shows that while a majority of consumers would rather watch video on TVs than on the Web, remarkably 13% of people feel otherwise.

Younger adults are the least committed to TV, with only 23% strongly agreeing that they prefer TV for video viewing. In contrast, more than 48% of the 55- to 64-year-olds strongly prefer TV.

Source: Frank N. Magid Associates

About 29% of the 12 to 64-year-old population report that the Web is competing with the TV for their entertainment time. For 18- to 24-year-olds, that number rises to 36%; for 55- to 64-year-olds the number falls to 27%. And almost a quarter of online users surveyed believe the Internet is the future of video viewing, with younger adults expressing more confidence in that prediction.

Young people are more likely to report watching less TV since they started using social-networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook. More than 22% of 18- to 24-year-olds say they are watching less TV since they started using social-networking sites.

Respondents also believe their use of online video has cannibalized TV. Overall, more than 15% of respondents say they watch TV less as a result of watching online videos. And 25% of 18- to 24-year-olds believe that online video is cannibalizing their TV viewing. In comparison, fewer than 11% of 45- to 54-year-olds report such cannibalization.

Source: Advertising Age.

So it’s no sale with paid content. The New York Times is joining the crescendo of falling walls at news sites including The Economist and CNN by ending its experiment with charging for select online content. The Times today restored free access to most of its columnists along with many articles, blogs, video, podcasts and archives.

It sure is good Maureen Dowd and the cast of Times columnists are firmly back into the public conversation. Columnists like her must be clicking their champagne glasses now their verbiage is accessible to a larger audience. But I’m raising my glass to a move that opens access to journalism’s most definitive moments on the Web.

The more important meaning for journalism here I say, is opening up the Times archives. With a perma-link on each article, Times’ stories will become the de facto primary sources for people around the Web, and around the world. So on topic after topic, the Times stories will move near or to the top of the search engine rankings. They will become more valuable for keyword and advertising once people click through to the actual stories.

Readers increasingly find news through search, as well as through social networks, blogs and other online sources. In light of this shift, we believe offering unfettered access to New York Times reporting and analysis best serves the interest of our readers, our brand and the long-term vitality of our journalism. We encourage everyone to read our news and opinion – as well as share it, link to it and comment on it.

New YorK Times

This was a money decision to be sure, and it could well be the start of the end for paid news on the Web. It is not so much that ads on the columnist pages will bring in that much new revenue but rather people looking at those pages will then go elsewhere on the site and the more eyeballs looking at more advertising, the better.

By lifting the gates on Times Select and returning its website to a completely ad-supported model, the larger significance is a resounding victory for the idea that information wants to be free. The Times site, nytimes.com, is the most popular newspaper site on the Web, with 13.1 million unique visitors. But its middling results with paid content, neither validation nor failure, strongly suggest that very few content publishers should even consider playing in the pay arena.

Lifting the ramparts on paid content shows the Times is taking seriously the prospect that Rupert Murdoch will drop access charges for most or all of The Wall Street Journal Online. The Journal is now the only major newspaper charging subscriptions for most of its online content.

Incidentally, Murdoch gave his strongest statements to date the WSJ.com will go free. He says the company doesn’t feel it would hurt subscriptions and any lost revenue would be more than made up from increased readership and search engine traffic.

There’s talk the UK’s Financial Times web site with around 100,000 subscribers will also open up. Which begs that question - if we can read newspapers for free on the Web, why should we pay to read it in print? How come one model works for the Web and another model is used for print. The print model needs revisiting.

The once hot online-newspaper ad revenue is slowing as a result of competition from Web portals and TV networks. Nielsen/NetRatings show Yahoo News and Time Warner CNN Web sites posting strong growth over newspaper sites. Although online ads still make up a small portion of total newspaper revenues, the downward spiral of print revenues, has pushed print media to grab as big a slice of the online-ad pie as they can.

The Times introduced Times Select in September 2005 to wring subscription revenue from its website and shore up sales in print, where ad rates remain much higher than they are online. It admitted that the power of search engines, which often drive traffic to the Times Online even when people looking for information don’t necessarily set out to find it, meant there was too much potential to pass up in free access underwritten by marketers.

2007 is emerging as a watershed for advertising, once seen as only part of a broader revenue play. Media owners are recognizing there is more money to be made reducing barriers to usage and selling advertising against that increased usage. So far in 2007, publishers have abandoned the paid ramparts at outlets including CNN, The Economist and The Financial Times.

Sure it’s nice for advertisers to know that a consumer loves a publisher’s site enough to pay for it. Opening the gates do let in riffraff who may not be so desirable. But from a marketer perspective, the more, the better. You potentially create greater scale for advertisers, and they want as much scale as possible.

Essentially, the Times is betting it can generate enough advertising revenue and/or goodwill to more than make up the loss of $10 million in subscription revenue. That’s a lot of ads, but the popular columns and archives that were behind the pay wall are popular material and should generate a lot of page views.

Of course, niche sites with unduplicated or especially compelling content will always be able to charge something for content. In addition to the free photos and articles Playboy posts online, it sells three tiers of paid access.

The Times is ending its premium service with 227,000 paying subscribers, 471,200 people who got access as part of their print subscriptions and 89,200 college students and employees who signed up for free access. It has sold sponsorship ads to American Express across The Content Formerly Known as Times Select.

The Web series that featured the character Lonelygirl15, known to millions of web surfers as Bree, is pushing on without her. The show’s creators believe video watchers and advertisers are hooked on other members of the series even though Bree is dead.

Lonelygirl’s popularity soared since the revelation that what seemed like a teen girl’s innocent online video log was actually a scripted show with young actors, one portraying 15-year-old Bree.

Statistics on websites such as YouTube show that some episodes attract more than 1 million views. The interactive episodes average between one and three minutes. The show has added to the online landscape by mixing elements used in online programming with social networking.

The show producers are looking into more sophisticated methods of advertising and have designed the series website to feature more than the typical banner ads and sponsorships from Google AdSense.

Because the show is based on an interactive experience between the characters and viewers, the website includes a forum that lets fans discuss all things Lonelygirl. Another possible ad model is to tap into ideas from viewers.

What’s unique here is the immersiveness of the program inside a social network, enabling you to do stuff that you can’t do on YouTube. People are for the first time realizing what it means to develop a show for the internet, and not just repackaging it for the internet.

ZIV NAVOTH, VP-marketing, Bebo.

Show creators have left room for marketeers with product placement and brand integration. Hershey’s IceBreakers Sour Gum was prominently featured in one episode where Bree refused to share the product with her friends. In a two-month deal with Johnson & Johnson, the Neutrogena line became part of the plot, with a new character, working as a scientist for the company.

Similar methods are in full swing for Lonelygirl spinoff, KateModern. There are deals with MSN, Walt Disney’s Buena Vista, Paramount, Procter & Gamble, and Orange Mobile, a British telephone company.

Article adapted from Advertising Age Online.

BBC News is now offering broadband video clips online internationally. The cost of the video service will be supported by advertising around the broadband news clips. BBC will also provide a regularly updated video summary of international news from the newsroom of BBC World television.

In March, the BBC partnered YouTube to bring its short-form content to online audiences. Clips on BBC News (available to users outside the UK only) and “BBC Worldwide” will benefit from Google and YouTube’s advertising platforms.

The original promise of the Web is “free.” Old distribution monopolies based on scarcity no longer holds. When you look at the fundamental economics of digital media content, it makes sense to dump paid walls. Who wants to pay when the Web is awash with content?

Talk is News Corp will end access by subscription for the Wall Street Journal online to lure visits and page views to attract more ad money. Soon-to-be owner Rupert Murdoch seems willing to sacrifice subs dollars in return for possibly earning millions more from online advertising.

Talk too is The New York Times will end TimesSelect, its experiment with paid content on the Web. Not surprising. For two years NYT online visitors could only access blogs of well-known Op-Ed columnists and other premium material. But these days many insightful commentators are publishing their thoughts on the Web for free.

NYT site figured there’s money to be made in blogs. About 200,000 signed up for TimesSelect at US$50 per year. But with ad money going into the biggest media brands NYT must weight the cost of a few million subscription bucks versus a potential few zillion online advertising bucks.

In 2006, Times Select generated $10 million. In the second quarter alone, NYT’s total Internet revenues grew 23%, to $80.9 million, a tally that includes ad sales from The Boston Globe’s online edition, About.com, and other sites.

According to BusinessWeek, if WSJ Online went free, it could see even greater online ad revenue than NYT. Already, the Journal makes some $75 million from ads. WSJ currently charges four times more than NYT for each ad shown on its Web pages.

WSJ commands this higher price despite a smaller online audience because its readers are seen as business-minded, college-educated professionals with significantly higher wealth—the sort of audience advertisers like makers of luxury goods, want to reach. If WSJ were to significantly expand its audience by moving to a free model, it won’t command the same premium because audiences would be more diverse.

For the WSJ and NYT, there’s also the opportunity to exploit information gathered from a larger stream of visitors. This information on surfing behavior can be shared with other Web sites those readers visit so they can be shown more relevant ads. Advertisers typically pay more for these targeted placements, and so the Web site is more than happy to share some of the revenue with the newspaper site that provided the information.

This behavioral targeted advertising, is growing in importance online. Over the next four years, US$9.6 billion is expected to be spent on ads targeted by a user’s past online surfing activity, according to research firm eMarketer.

Every year billions of animals are captured, imprisoned, neglected, abused and slaughtered for human ends. They are used for everything from entertainment and sports to consumer product testing and food.

This powerful film, containing graphic images, just begs to be seen. The video depicts the shocking truth about the meat and dairy trade. Find out more from www.animalaid.org.uk.

Animals don’t have a say in their treatment, but humans can give animals a voice, speak up on their behalf and end their abuse. Such advocacy has taken a giant leap with the Web through the use of video clips to reach the target audience of visually-savvy, environmentally conscious youth.

A softer but no less powerful approach is this video highlighting animals’ plight by Saatchi & Saatchi, along with Rushes Network, SongZu & BlackMagic Design. The Singapore-made clip fuses words, image, sound and movement to deliver a sting in 30 seconds.

The clip was produced to raise awareness of the work of Singapore-based wildlife activist group, Animal Concerns Research and Education Society (ACRES.) The non-profit seeks to tackle the illegal wildlife trade in Singapore, as well as promote awareness on the threats facing wild animals and their habitats in Southeast Asia.

It is early days for video advocacy. From the no-holds barred to the polished and subtle, the folksonomy must keep up with times. The grim messages of these videos are often couched behind labels like “Pets & Animals.”.

Here are notable clips on YouTube highlighting animal cruelty propagandized as “family entertainment.” They make you want to cry and teach our children well.

China’s Animal Abuse Makes for Family Fun
Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty
Dump AT&T for Sponsoring Animal Abuse
Asian Elephants Abused Under Big Top
Animal Abuse - a growing problem
Animal Cruelty - could you?

Related investigative news report on China’s use of animals for entertainment and medicine.

The first person to tell me that there should be no animal in the show will be the public when they don’t show up.
Circus owner

The business of web metrics continues to grow more complicated as accountability becomes the prime concern of marketers who are pouring billions of dollars into online advertising.

With US$70 billion in total TV spending at stake, American networks are busily trying to prove that their audience numbers haven’t dwindled - they’ve just splintered into other viewing venues such as DVRs, streaming video and video iPods.

Advertisers, on the other hand, argue the issue isn’t where audiences are watching but how. Networks want to add bigger numbers, but advertisers want more than just an eyeball count, according to Advertising Age. Mobile and online venues are different environments for consumer advertising, where audiences behave differently.

What’s important is not how many people watch, but how those audiences recall and interact with the ads. That hasn’t stopped NBC, CBS and others from counting the eyeballs wherever they are. It is, of course, in the networks’ best interest to follow the money. Until a neutral third party is able to come up with standardized methods, data from individual media outlets will have to suffice.

Nielsen/NetRatings’ introduction of yet another web audience measurement metric - total minutes -brings new complications. The total minutes measurement also upends rankings among the largest web portals - pushing AOL to No. 1 in a field where it is usually ranked third or lower by other major metric formats.

Watch Video: Web Audience Metrics Get Complicated

Where consumers watch:

On the boob tube
About 93% of audiences prefer the old-fashioned way, on a chair or couch in front of the ubiquitous appliance, according to Nielsen Media Research.

On iPods
Nielsen surveys reveal consumers spend an average of 45 minutes a day listening to music on the devices but only three or four minutes watching video. Most of it tends to be stuff passed along by friends, not professional-quality dramas and comedies.

On the web
Many viewers use the internet for “snacking,” or reviewing particular segments of a show. For many, the web is more of a backup that viewers use to fill in for what they missed or want to rewatch. Not necessarily the best environment for an important new campaign.

On the mobile phone
Gambling on this in the short term is dicey. A lot of marketers are spending money hoping to hit a jackpot, but nobody really knows if the jackpot is large enough to warrant the money they are spending.

Excuse me, are you a politician? Have you pimped your profile online? Forget kissing babies and door-to-door handshakes. That’s so 1.0. Get Googly instead.

Welcome to hustings 2.0! First, enlist YouTube for your campaign platform. Next, out-Google your opponents. How? Refine your search strategy to drive traffic to your campaign sites.

Psst! Did you know Al Gore is a senior adviser to top search engine Google? Mr Inconvenient Truth may be keeping mum on throwing his hat in the presidential ring, but brace for search terms around his pet peeves.

The Web is the channel flavor of the month to stump for votes. Don’t just stop at organic search results. You can buy search-term advertising to boost traffic from search engines. So if you’re passionate about your cause, issue, peeve etc etc fork out some $$ for those terms to stake your turf.

Take “global warming.” It’s so hot. Why not buy a sponsored listing for buzz phrase “climate change?” Here’s a search tip if you’re trying to get to Gore - go boolean, like “Al + Global Warming.” That’s because surprisingly so far, global warming and climate change are significantly absent from political search terms.

Why are people still cool to the scares trotted out about Gaia on heat? Apparently searches on these terms are sending Web users to news and educational sites. So either people are real interested in looking up the topic to learn, or warnings on global warming aren’t scaring folks anymore, or it’s just a political non-issue.

Incidentally, America’s top political-issue search term is “abortion.” That has been its most divisive political issue over the last several elections. So it behoofs the net-savvy candidate to purchase search terms like “pro-choice” and “pro-life.” Interesting to see the top politics-related search terms in prosperity-driven Asian societies like Singapore.

Search statistics offer glimpses into the candidates’ public image. What would you do if you were an online campaign strategist? If you drill down to search terms juxtaposed with a name, you may be confronted with an unsettling truth.

No prizes for Barack Obama. It’s “muslim.” But Hillary Clinton. The lady builds her profile to associate with political positions on health care. Guess what her searchers are focused on? Her theme song contest.

Republican candidates are more Googly then their Democratic counterparts. For the first week in June 2007, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani received over 41.4% of his official campaign site traffic from Google.

The current most-searched-for Republican, Senator Fred Thompson, received over 47.5% of his traffic. Hillary Clinton got 21.6% and Barack Obama 22.2%.

Clinton and Obama can take comfort in the fact that they have more MySpace friends than their Republican counterparts. Clinton has over 7.9% of her visits from the leading online social network while Obama trails at 3.9%

BILL TANCER
General Manager of Global Research at Hitwise.

Google’s press honeymoon is over as an Internet watchdog pans the online search leader for having the worst privacy practices among the Web’s top destinations. London-based Privacy International says other Internet companies have troubling policies, but none comes close to Google in handling users’ personal information.

Google ranked worst for “comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy.” Of the 22 companies surveyed, none received top grade. Five were rated “generally privacy-aware” - BBC, eBay, Last, LiveJournal, and Wikipedia.

The report is another strike at Google’s privacy practices. An independent European panel recently raised concerns about how Google uses and manages search data. And the US Federal Trade Commission is under pressure to investigate the potential threat posed by Google’s planned acquisition of DoubleClick, an online ad service which also tracks surfer behavior.

Google says it stockpiles data to help its search engine better understand users to deliver more relevant results and advertisements. In a move to placate critics, it has pledged to begin erasing information about users’ search requests within 18 to 24 months.

Privacy International is troubled by Google’s ability to match its search data with information collected from other services such as e-mail, instant messaging and maps. The watchdog reached its interim findings after a six-month review of Internet privacy practices mostly in the US and UK.

Taking the report to task, Google says it stands by its track record and slammed Privacy International for publishing the report before the company had a chance to discuss its practices. In a brewing mutual smear campaign, Privacy Internaional posted a statement accusing Google of embarking on a move to discredit the group and its report.

See my post on WEB TIPS for a way to search the Internet with more anonymity.

It’s all about conversation. Consumers reviewing stuff and writing about it on the Web. The wisdom of the crowds is forcing businesses and brands to come up with a transparency action plan.

Old economy fog is clearing: no longer can incompetence, below-par performance, ignored global standards, anti-social & anti-eco behavior, or opaque pricing be obscured. In its place has come a transparent, fully informed marketplace, where producers have no excuse left to underperform.

In a transparent world, for both brands and consumers, settling for anything that’s sub-par becomes a choice, not an accident. Trendwatching.com has a good read on consumerism and crowdsourcing.

The spending spree on Internet-advertising companies continues. Microsoft is snapping up Internet-marketing firm aQuantive for $6 billion in cash to increase its presence in the fast-growing online advertising market.

It is Microsoft’s largest acquisition ever, and the latest in a flurry of deals for online advertising firms by big Internet and media companies. The intensity and price tag of these acquisitions show that some very big media and agency firms are staking their bets online.

Microsoft’s all-cash acquisition represents an 85 percent premium, underscoring just how critical Microsoft believes the deal is to its troubled efforts to become a major force in the business.

Microsoft is the latest technology firm to pounce on the shrinking independent online advertising sector. Last month, search engine giant Google agreed to buy DoubleClick for $3.1bn, while Yahoo snatched the 80% of Right Media Exchange it did not already own for $680m.

The advertising industry is evolving and growing at an incredible pace, moving increasingly toward online and IP-served platforms, which dramatically increases the importance of software for this industry.

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft Chief Executive.

The aQuantive acquisition enables Microsoft to offer an Internet-wide advertising platform for advertisers, publishers, agencies and media owners. It gives Microsoft increased abilities in building advertising solutions such as cross-media planning, video-on-demand, and IPTV. Read the Microsoft media release here.

aQuantive, founded in 1997, has taken advantage of a major shift in advertising to the Internet from television. The firm helps companies plan and run Internet-ad campaigns. It counts Ford Motor, Verizon Communications, Capital One and Microsoft among its customers.

Based in Seattle, aQuantive has three major businesses. Its Atlas unit competes with DoubleClick and is used by advertisers and publishers to deliver ads online in real time when users visit a Web page. The company also owns AvenueA/Razorfish, a leading interactive ad agency, and DRIVEpm, an advertising network.

Until now, Microsoft has sold ads on its MSN portal and used a technology called AdCenter to sell ads linked to Internet search — a booming business, and the cornerstone of Google’s power. But Microsoft’s share of the search business has steadily declined, limiting the effectiveness of AdCenter.

With aQuantive, Microsoft will be able to help sell and broker ads on sites across the Web, a business seen as increasingly important as advertising continues to shift online. The acquisitions of DoubleClick and RightMedia by Google and Yahoo were also intended to bolster those companies’ efforts to sell and broker ads on Web sites.