Election 2008 and optimizing video in search engines

See new posting of March 23 for an update.

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The 2008 presidential campaign is upon us. A news report says the candidates have to raise $250K per day in order to be "competitive." Another element of competitiveness though is having strong grass roots support.

The March 19 Seattle PI has a very interesting story about a video on Youtube attacking Hillary Clinton. The author, Carla Marinucci rom the San Francisco Chronicle, compares it to the infamous Daisy ad from the 1964 election. The video is based in part on the notable Apple commercial from 1984 launching the Macintosh.

The article is here: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/308085_campaign19.html

What's interesting is to look at the search engine considerations of this video.

The first search engine that counts is Youtube.

If you go to the video and play it, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h3G-lMZxjo

you will then see the Youtube window load with some other choices that include both the original Apple 1984 commercial on which the anti-Hillary video is based, and other videos also attacking Hillary. Some of these are based on the video I just watched.

This raises an interesting issue: should someone from Hillary's campaign be trying to optimize a video that would appear instead of more attack videos? They could do this by posting a video then sending out an email asking people to click on the appropriate one. However, word of this would probably leak out.

Or should they ask Apple to sue Youtube for copyright infringement unless they remove the video? This could take care of the specific video, but not attack videos in general. Again word of any request the campaign makes will probably leak out.

Or should they ignore it and hope it goes away? Sorry, but attack videos are here to stay.

There are no easy answers.

I checked Google. The first listings are all positive. At number 24, there's a Youtube video of Hillary singing the national anthem.

http://www.google.com/search?q=hillary+clinton&hl=en&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2006-05,GGLG:en&start=20&sa=N

It will be interesting to see whether the new video moves ahead of this one. The national anthem one has a Title tag of "YouTube - Hillary Clinton Sings National Anthem". The attack video has a Title of "Vote Different." The person posting the video would probably get a higher position in the video if the Title was "Youtube - vote different than Hillary Clinton."

I then looked at Google video search results for "Hillary Clinton".

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=hillary+clinton&num=10&so=0&hl=en&start=0

Nearly all of the first 50 results have the words "Hillary Clinton" in the title.

I checked the stats for the attack video:

Views: 438,795 Comments: 1873 Favorited: 841 times

I then looked at the first video, her announcement of deciding to run, to compare the stats:

Views: 13,338 |Comments: 54 |Favorited: 14 times

There is no comparison in number of views, comments or favorited.

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It will be interesting to see if Google modifies its algorithm to place less weight on the TItle and more on the tags used by the poster of the video.

It will also be interesting to see if the poster modifies the Title in Youtube.

I hope to do some follow up checking and see if this video rises in position.