Some of you may follow the American electoral race, some may not so I’ll give you a brief description of who I’m talking about first. Herman Cain is running for the Republican party presidential nomination. Meaning, if he wins he will become the Republican candidate for the 2012 presidential race. Herman Cain is a very different politician in many ways.
Firstly, where he started, which was the CEO of Godfather’s pizzas, this is not the typical route for most presidents, but times are changing and different is always welcome. It’s also fair to say that Herman Cain is very outspoken and likes to push the boundaries a little for example in one of his campaign videos his campaign leader was smoking whilst talking.
However the seemingly unstoppable popularity of Herman Cain has appeared to have slowed of late, with alleged charges of sexual harassment from four different women. Cain denies these charges and is still running his campaign but unless he does something soon, his surprise popularity in the preliminaries may dwindle. It will be interesting to see if these tactics used by Cain’s campaign party will pay off using an almost physiological factor with the PPC ads appearing first.
The reason this is interesting from an SEO point of view is the way in which PPC is being used by Herman Cain’s campaign team. If you are in the US and search the names of the four women that are alleging that they have been sexually harassed by Herman Cain, then the PPC bought by the Herman Cain campaign shows up. These results display ‘Herman Cain support a real president’ and ‘The truth about Herman Cain’ seen in the image below.
This interesting way of using new media has been done many times before by Brands and large corporations but I have never seen it used this blatantly in politics before. I’m not entirely sure if this is a clever campaign tactic or a bit of an underhand move. Whatever it is, it draws more attention to the Herman Cain campaign and tries to restore some of the damage done.
This clever way of using keyword searches is just another way in which SEO can benefit an individual or business. As the excerpt below from the popular technology podcast TWIT highlights keywords for things such as acai berries, which is a beauty product where companies have paid for the PPC keywords acai berry scam just to try and draw the attention away from people searching for acai berries.
Img src: Donkeyhotey
