Social Media Analysis: Rep. Duncan Hunter (R)
Duncan Hunter has the following:
Website: The campaign website for Hunter is interesting in that it took me a good bit of time to find the email sign up! They’ve got the right hand “action” area to contribute, volunteer, tell a friend and become a member of the eLeader Team and the email sign up blends in the top right hand corner. Or…it could just be me! The eLeader Team is about joining the campaign…not just getting email updates. There doesn’t seem to be a blog anywhere, but the campaign is doing a nice daily audio update from the candidate himself – today’s was on work he was doing on the house floor. They have virtual HQ set up for Iowa, South Carolina, Nevada and New Hampshire (early primary/caucus states) and links to several social media. The campaign is clearly using a lot of YouTube and is porting in video all over the site. They are also using a cute email a yard sign application that takes you out of the site, but allows you to send of a post card via email to a friend about the campaign. Down sides to this site include poor updating. First thing that I was greeted with was a poll about whether or not Columbia University should allow the Iranian President to speak. That is over and should be pulled from the site. Also, in the virtual HQ areas, upcoming events were from AUGUST! Not good at all. Overall the site provides basic information. The layout of the home page is clean, but unstructured with no clear organization. It seems quite haphazard.
YouTube: Clean and neat layout. Nothing out of place. Video that is running is not a personal message from the candidate – it’s a segment from CNN Lou Dobbs on a boarder issue the candidate was working on. Without context or a date, it is confusing and certainly not worth watching. Most of the videos here are segments from debates and news shows. Only a few personal messages from several months ago, and most videos were added more than 2 months ago, hard to tell how recent the CNN piece is – sorry, I’m not up on that particular type of current event. So, overall, nothing outstanding here. 686 subscribers.
MySpace: Not much going on here – the one good thing is that the campaign has ported in a lot of the YouTube videos through MySpace TV so they are actually taking advantage of the social media in a way that complements each other. There are links to the Facebook, the campaign site, YouTube and the meetup sites (although MeetUp was NOT listed on the official site). Overall, nothing impressive. 6973 friends.
Facebook: Initial tries to get into the Hunter Facebook site failed. The direct link from the website doesn’t seem to work – taking me first to the login screen of death and then once I login, taking me to my network home page – nothing having to do with Hunter. The link from the MySpace page, however, does work but takes you directly to the official group for Duncan Hunter. What’s nice about this is the campaign is leveraging the group option in Facebook, which I think candidates in general are under utilizing. The group has 709 members. The Facebook profile page, however is set to private, so I have added him to my friends (the first candidate I’ve had to do that with in order to access the Facebook profile) so will have to do an update on that part of Facebook – and we will see how long it takes for them to accept me as a friend. I’m not sure what the rationale is for having a public group, but a private profile – seems to miss the whole point of a social network! 330 friends.
MeetUp: The link to the MeetUp site from Facebook brings you to the Florida group supporting the Candidate. Interesting choice of linking! At the main MeetUp page for Hunter, there’s a list of upcoming events and who will attend. Not a lot of activity here. Great idea though…they should link from their main website and I’m surprised that they aren’t doing that.
Search Results: With a name like “Hunter” organic search is going to be tough. I would expect the campaign to realize this and go for the CPC/sponsorship ads on the major sites in order to augment the organic challenge. A first pass through Google shows, however, that this is not the case. Using “Hunter”, the official campaign website is “below the fold” at #8. It’s actually a better showing than I expected. At the same time there are NO sponsored ads or AdWords at all. Over at Yahoo! the results are worse – nothing at all and no ads either. At Live, the site comes in at #7, and again, no ads. So, ok…Hunter is very common so it would be fair to put in his first name too. Results for “Duncan Hunter” revealed: Google: Bang! Pop! We have a WINNER! All candidate…all the time! Campaign site, WikiPedia.com, congressional site, MySpace, congressional campaign site (oops!—DIFFERENT Duncan Hunter – actually it is Hunter Jr.! my bad), several other relevant sites and the YouTube site as well. Yahoo! search provides similar results with Hunter Jr. showing up in the mix as well. Over at Live similar results, although no Hunter Jr. The issue, of course, is that people may not know the candidate’s first name, so as with misspellings, the team should be prepared. I am very surprised that there are no keyword buys on “Hunter”. If the ad was written carefully the CPC would probably be fairly low, since people who are looking for Hunting, or Hunter College, etc. probably would not click on a campaign website.
Recommendations: Here’s another underdog who is missing an opportunity. While they haven’t spread themselves so thin on social media that they can’t possibly keep up, the campaign isn’t even keeping the main website up to date! There are linking issues and some confusion over how to sign up for emails. At the same time, the use of social media tools is small enough – YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and MeetUp – that they should be able to keep them up to date. If the campaign can go to the trouble of posting daily audio on the main site, they should run a video of the same thing and post it on YouTube and MySpace. They need to manage their links better and should have engaged in some CPC on the name in the search engines. Overall, nothing too impressive here – and lack of funds doesn’t really explain it either, it really is a lack of attention to the small details. I’m surprised that there is no blog. There is also no RSS feed either. This Campaign is clearly not fully committed to the use of social media.
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