He clearly had lost sense of direction as to what the purpose of his website was.

Surely his website is there to spread his message, not to make money by spreading someone else’s message.

Note: the presentation is focused on the actual race – from a social media and search marketig perspective – between Mike Bloomberg and Bill Thompson (which was made possible by the decision to overturn term-limits in New York City).

Laurens – great question regarding Bloomberg running ads on Thompson’s own campaign site via Google’s content network. The answer illustrates the power of using social media to monitor your brand…

Here’s what happened: I published my research, analysis and recommendations for both Bloomberg and Thompson on October 19th. Within the first week, the presentation started getting a lot of traffic from Twitter, so Slideshare included it as a featured presentation on its homepage. The presentation was also outranking articles from several New York City newspapers including the New York Times on the first page of Google for keyword “Bloomberg vs Thompson” in the days leading up to the election. Somewhere around 900 – 1,000 people viewed the presentation in the first week, and as you can see many more have viewed it since – closer to 1,600 – and now even more with your help!

What’s interesting about this is that after I published the presentation in October, and before the election, Thompson’s digital agency (Blue State Digital) began following me on Twitter, so I assume that Blue State was monitoring mentions of Thompson online and saw my analysis and them followed me as a result; but that wasn’t all…

About a week later, Thompson’s site no longer was running Adsense ads within their site, effectively eliminating Bloomberg’s ads from appearing there.

So that’s a very long way to answer your question! But I think it illustrates that while Thompson and Blue State Digital may not have initially foreseen all of the implications of a part of their search and website strategy; they appear to have effectively leveraged social media monitor mentions of Thompson’s campaign online, which ultimately led to them optimizing their approach.

Best – Ian Orekondy

Where’s the office of Thompson’s campaign team, in a cave?