As Barack Obama campaigns at his final rally today in the vital swing state of Ohio with his pals Jay-Z (who sang, "I've got 99 problems, but Mitt ain't one) and Bruce Springsteen, apparently some voters may be confused. And not because they're undecided.

The hard-fought, long-awaited presidential election will finally take place on Tuesday and America will decide which leader it wants to follow: President Barack Obama or Governor Mitt Romney. This pair has done pretty much everything it can on the marketing front, short of skywriting and Potter-style notes delivered by owl, to get their respective messages out to voters. Combined, their campaigns have spent more than a billion dollars on television ads alone this election, an almost embarrassing sum of money given the state of the U.S. economy.

And online was no different. The two candidates have dedicated digital teams that have been trying to push their message through every online channel imaginable. One of those, though, is getting some negative attention: brand hijacking. That's when a brand buys search-engine ad space for when a consumer searches for a competing brand. In some parts of the US, when someone searches for “Barack Obama” in Google or Facebook, ads for Romney appear. And when some Americans search for “Mitt Romney,” ads for Barack Obama appear.Continue reading...

On Twitter, the brand currently defining conventions of digital conversation, the source remains the strongest factor in value and quality and trust trumps emotion. New research shows the key factor in predicting a tweet's popularity is the source of the link being tweeted. And just as in search engine optimization, recognizable (brand) names help.

A just-released study from UCLA and Hewlett-Packard's HP Labs researched four factors and their influence on optimizing tweeted headlines and news links with accuracy 84% of the time:

• The credibility of the news source that generates and posts an article

• The category of news the article falls under (sports, technology, health)

• The subjectivity of the language in the article

• Famous people, brands or other notable entities mentioned.

The data was collected from Feedzilla’s API over nine days and 40,000 news articles, and popularity of articles was measured as the number of times a news URL was posted on Twitter. Using Stanford's Named Entity Recognizer to identify a famous person or company and measure prominence relative to others resulted in a score for each of those 40,000 articles based on the four factors.Continue reading...

When Matt Cutts speaks, people listen. So when Google’s software engineer and webspam guru recently posted (on his Google+ page, of course) that ICANN's looming dotbrands — the generic (vanity, customized, branded) top level domains or TLDs that are fast approaching — won't boost search engine results, the SEO and domain name worlds sat upright.

Cutts was responding to ARI Registry Services CEO Adrian Kinderis, who penned an op-ed column that argued: “Will a new TLD web address automatically be favoured by Google over a .com equivalent? Quite simply, yes it will,” wrote Kinderis, basing his argument on Google’s ranking algorithms that search for domain name keywords thus enabling business and brands to create commanding "clean name spaces."Continue reading...

Building up a brand has always been crucial to a business but the value has gone up even higher in the Internet age. The New York Times reports “brand experts and trademark lawyers say the value of simple, easily understood brand names has escalated in the Internet era because consumers are more likely to find such products while doing searches on the Web.”

Because of that, trademark fights have escalated, the Times notes, pointing to the trademark spat over the phrase "app store" by Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon.

But it is the smaller companies that have more stake in grabbing hold of those trademarks, the NYT points out, since the larger ones can attempt to crush the smaller — a legal tactic that some call "trademark bullying."Continue reading...

Here is a collection of links to pieces that are using Huffington Post's 2011 "What time does the Super Bowl start" search engine optimization (SEO) pageview trick.Continue reading...

Does your brand rely on Google? Does your brand utilize Google at all in its overall strategy? We thought so.

Then this latest development will be of interest. We'll let Search Engine Land lay it out:

"First, Google rolled out recommendations for 'pages similar to' earlier this week, now they also appear to be testing brand recommendations in response to certain queries... some users are seeing 'brands for' recommendations for searches such as ''digital cameras.' 'cheap laptops].' 'label printers,' 'fishing rod' and others."

Oh yes, they have screenshots (like ours above).Continue reading...