Social networking is nothing new to the presidential campaigns, but their strategies, tactics and degree of functionality have evolved over time. What has really caught people’s eye is Barrack Obama’s success with online fundraising. According to a Business Week article, Obama’s $51 million fundraising campaign was double that of McCain’s. Ontop of that, the Obama camp has stated that 88% of their donations have come from online resources.

What is he doing to make his online campaigning so successful?

Obama is the first candidate to start using widgets to make it incredibly easy for anyone to donate to the campaign through his social media channels. Obama is taking social media tools and networking sites seriously and is literally “everywhere”. Barrack Obama has a powerful presence on sites such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter as well as commenting on other sites such as BlackPlanet, MiGente and Glee (to name a few). With his presence on all these sites, it is no wonder that people are able to follow Obama more readily and easily. One source stated that McCain barely understands the Internet, let alone uses it in the right manner to captivate an audience.

Comparing Obama’s use of social media with that of McCain’s, it is clear that there are huge differences in their approaches, and it’s beginning to show.

If you visit any of Obama’s networking tools you will see how he engages with the specific audience. It won’t take you any time at all to find the donation widget, encouraging people to donate to the campaign. It’s no wonder his stats are higher than McCain’s. Obama engages his audience on their turf and then encourages them to donate.

This will definitely change presidential campaigning in the future, and it won’t be any surprise that social media marketing will play a major role.

We always tell clients that everything you need to know about search engine optimization (SEO) is already out there on the Internet. Some very good SEO’s make a nice living by providing all the information and resources you need to successfully run an Internet marketing program.

That being said, however, the best research you can bring to the table comes from practicing what they preach. Lisa Barone has a great take on the difference between reading about and practicing SEO.

In fact, most of the information put out there is general, as opposed to industry specific.  Once you start to do your competitive research, that will become apparent to you very quickly.  So, don’t get stuck trying to find out which SEO tactic lead to your competitor’s top 5 ranking, start practicing and let the results guide you to page 1.

Rand Fishkin outed an SEO company last week for suspect search engine optimization techniques.  Since then, there has been innumeral posts regarding the techniques in question and the fact that someone like Rand publicly outs another SEO firm for using tactics that he may be advising his own online community membership.

SEO Book‘s Aaron Wall has a lenghtly blog post regarding Rand’s behavior. The post also includes a a video from Shoemoney, who also questions Rands outing of a company for tactics that Rand has used at one time himself and includes his vue on paid advertising.

I follow Rand Fishkin’s at Seomoz blog and I pick up valuable information from Rand’s indepth analysis of search engine optimization and social media marketing. I admire Rand for what he has accomplished but still, I don’t get it. Why would someone of Rand’s stature take to outing an SEO company.  It just doesn’t make sense to me.

Google will eventually catch up with the company and justice will be served. The real point here is that by the time Google catches up to them, they will have made a samll or large fortune by then and they will take their profits and just start over with a backup they probably already have in the system.

We see this a lot in SEO, clients will show us a competitive website and want us to out their competitors who may or may not be using black hat tactics to rank well in Google.

Its not in our nature to out companies. That is just our way of doing things but that doesn’t mean we are right. That is just who we are.

I would like to hear your opinion on the matter. If your competitor was manipulating the system to take advantage of Google, would you report them?

Okay, we have picked victim #1, a cabinet maker/woodworker who has built a successful company that is celebrating 20 years in business.
Garren Dakessian (Owner) has built his business by giving great service, craftmanship and happy customers giving great referrals. When the chief editor of Style at Home magazine chose Malibu Woodwork to build new cabinets for the basement and lounge of her own home, it shows he is the best in his business.

Over the years he has expanded his skills and offerings from clients requests that he, finish their basement or renovate their lounge. But now he wants to go back to his true skill, cabinet making, and to get the word out that Malibu Woodwork will make custom cabinets for your Kitchen, home office, bathroom, or basement.

Malibugroup.ca has a simple site today, made up mainly of pictures showing the Style at Home spreads, home and contact page.

After doing keyword research we found traffic, and a lot of it, searching for his services as a cabinet maker. Add in his local town and the competing sites in natural search come down to either single digits or none!

After looking at competing websites in this space, we noticed of lot of them have a local amateur feel. We only found three that stood out with any style, content and ease of navigation.
What do we do with these you ask? Knowing that the average web surfer doesn’t just visit one site, we need to stand out and be remembered over the others, even if we aren’t in position #1. So we take the best of each and combine them into the ultimate site. Not only will the site rank well, it will also convert well.

Next steps: refine the final keywords and have content written. Build the new layout. Get video and pictures of happy customers.