| Since I'm looking forward to spending more time covering Austin elections this spring and because I'm interested in technology in campaigns, I thought I'd start a series of posts that looks at candidates' use of technology.
In this post, we'll see what we can find when searching for candidates' names on the Google and offer up some relative grades. Things of importance will be where things rank such as campaign websites, city websites, facebook pages, youtube channels, and what kind of media or other stories show up as well as any search terms bought with search ads. All searches are done logged out of any google accounts as personalized results for me are not comparable to that of an average or non-logged in searcher.
I'm looking at Google only in this case simply because it is by far the dominant player in this field. In fact, 87% of traffic to BOR via search in the last year has been from Google, with 8% from yahoo, and less than 2% for anything else. I also realize that this post in and of itself could affect some of the rankings moving forward, and as a side benefit, by linking each candidate's name to their official campaign website, I'm going to share some of Burnt Orange Report's Google Pagerank of 6 (the highest in the Texas blogosphere and equal to media sites like KXAN or KVUE).
Mayor's Race
Brewster McCracken: A-
Brewster's Mayor Pro-Tem site comes up first, followed by his official city website, and then his Mayoral website. That's a pretty top notch top listing and other than having the Mayoral site eventually float to the top listing, he's well set here. His personal facebook profile is 5th which is a nice touch. The only negative story in the top 10 appears to be one related to Toll Roads thanks to the infamous Sal Costello, though it's not apparent it is a negative piece from the search result. Brewster is also running google ads on his name which is a plus, though they are pointing to his Mayor Pro-Tem site.
Lee Leffingwell: B
Lee suffers from the fact that he hasn't launched his campaign yet and thus has a bit of split focus on his website rankings. While the Draft Lee site is the place holder site until he's in the race, it won't be the URL he uses. It's floating around the bottom at #9 which is good in that it will be easy to dislodge when he announces but until then, isn't really offering much help. His City Council re-election site is the top result (useful if he converts that into his campaign site) followed by his city site. Some interviews, a TV spot, and the Draft Lee facebook page round out the other results with nothing really negative other than this post which is more awkward thank anything else. I'll remove it if anyone from the campaign would like me to. NOTE: The Draft Lee campaign has me listed as a supporter which I never gave permission for so that's kind of irritating. I thought I made it clear that I'm unaligned in the Mayor's race for the purposes of BOR. Seeing that, I'm even more unaligned now personally. The Draft Campaign removed my name earlier very quickly at the request. They were very responsive and it was a mix up in terminology and how I had joined on the website.
Josiah Ingalls: C
Yes, I bet you forgot this 28 year old living on Riverside was running for Mayor. Well, he is, and his top listing is a PDF of his treasurer filing with the City, followed by his MySpace page, and his LinkedIn profile. The 4th result is his MySpace video channel which has a variety of his vlogcasts, the most recent of which are about his campaign.
Carole Strayhorn: D+
While it's hard to choose which name to search for, I assume that Carole Strayhorn is the one that we can most agree on. Even though she had a splashy launch Monday, she's ill-prepared in her google listings. Not a single site that could be viewed as particularly positive or useful for Carole is in the top 10. Her wikipedia page is first and the second is a story on Free Republic with the former GOP state chair Tina Benkiser attacking her for no longer being a Republican. While distancing herself from any GOP label can't hurt her in the Austin electorate, most voters are more likely to be reminded that she's a party flopper of epic proportion.
3 of the top 10 slots are taken up by various versions of the Laughing Ad I created Monday mocking Carole. Round that out with posts from Rick Perry and Off the Kuff attacking her, and you have a pretty awful listing. She'd benefit with some google ads (which would have to compete with mine) to try to direct people to her website. Still, none of the top results are really damaging policy attacks and the plethora of posts about our BOR ad will probably be easy enough to displace which keeps her from getting a failing grade. NOTE: Carole's email sign-up form was broken when I used it and her header title tag is "Return to front page". Hmm, I'll do a website review as a separate series.
Mike Levy: F
Mike Levy isn't a candidate yet, so we can't really rank him. Nothing in the Top 10 for his name is even related to him. More defined searches for "Mike Levy Austin" or "Mike Levy for Mayor" don't yield much more than blogs asking whether he's running for Mayor as well as some old news articles on his tendency to send mass emails and generally be a little crazy in attacking other media entities (the Statesman). |
