How many clicks does it take to soil a candidate’s online reputation? A prominent liberal activist would like to find out.
Chris Bowers, campaign director for the Daily Kos, is launching a behind-the-scenes campaign against 98 House Republican candidates that attempts to capitalize on voters' Google search habits in the hopes of influencing midterm races.
Bowers wants the Daily Kos’ thousands of participants to dig up little-noted or controversial news stories about the candidates that could hurt their chances with undecided voters. Users would click on the links and blog about the stories with the goal of boosting their rankings on search engines, so that undecided voters will discover them more easily.
He sees the campaign as a 21st century version of pamphleteering: Daily Kos readers are simply providing informational materials that are already out there in the same way that volunteers would hand out information to voters on the street.
The use of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is standard practice for companies and campaigns managing their reputations online – or news organizations attempting to drive Internet traffic – but Bowers’ focus on promoting strategically damaging stories is unique.
Bowers says that he’s already received hundreds of e-mails with suggestions and maintains an online spreadsheet with key words like “Social Security,” “hypocrisy” and “Palin.” But so far, he’s only posted links to five stories related to five of the targeted candidates.
They include a Boston Globe story about a teenage strip search scandal involving former policeman Jeff Perry, a candidate in Massachusetts’ 10th District. Another item is a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed about abolishing public schools by Bay Area House nominee David Harmer.
Bowers also linked to a September POLITICO story about the flip-flopping stance of former Marine Sgt. Jesse Kelly, a conservative party tea party favorite running in Arizona. The story notes that Kelly said that he wanted to eliminate Social Security and Medicare in the run-up to the Republican primary, but subsequently said he would protect the two programs.
“We’re just educating people about how to get the message out without doing something more transgressive, for the lack of a better term,” Bowers said in an interview. “This is a more general education project on SEO, with the 2010 elections as a teaching moment.”
For his part, Bowers maintains this isn’t a repeat of his 2006 “Google Bomb” campaign because he’s not asking anyone to link candidates’ names to specific keywords such as “miserable failure.”
And he said that he has no plans to ask activists to flood Twitter and other social networks with links to the damaging stories during the final stretch before election day, unlike a January attack against Massachusetts Democrat Martha Coakley, who was the subject of an automated “Twitter Bomb” in the closing days of her failed Senate campaign.
Nine anonymous Twitter accounts sent out almost 1,000 negative messages about Coakley during the days up to the special election that Republican Scott Brown won. Wellesley University Professors Panagiotis Takis Metaxas and Eni Mustafaraj linked the accounts to a conservative Iowa group called The American Future Fund.
Naturally, Bowers’ effort is causing controversy among conservatives, search engine marketers and even Daily Kos readers about whether this kind of campaign constitutes an unfair manipulation of search engine results. It also could lead to reciprocal attacks.
One blogger on RedState.com called the campaign a character assassination and urged the blog’s readers to take countermeasures by engaging in their own guerrilla marketing campaigns.
Another RedState.com poster called on Google to remove the Daily Kos domain from its search index entirely for engaging in unethical SEO practices. Other discussions on Twitter are focusing on how self-identified Tea Party members can emulate the campaign to fight back.
Mindy Finn, a co-founder of EngageDC, a conservative digital campaign consulting firm that is working on about a dozen congressional races, said she tells concerned callers either to ignore Bowers or get even if they like.
“I think the tactic stinks of desperation,” Finn said. “However, I think that all’s fair in love, war, and political campaigns, and as long as there is an equal and fair playing field, there are no boundaries.
Google will not publicly disclose its algorithm and how it addresses attempts to manipulate the system.
“We try very hard to protect the integrity of our results,” Adam Kovacevich, Google’s senior manager of global communications and public affairs, said via e-mail. “In the past, similar efforts haven’t really been effective.”
SEO experts disagree on the likely success of Bowers’ campaign.
“It’s probably going to be an effective Google Bomb,” said Michael Fertik, CEO of the Silicon Valley start-up Reputation Defender. “The Daily Kos has thousands of readers, and I think they’ll respond to [Bowers]. If you can get thousands of people to link and drive traffic to content of a certain kind, if you can crowd-source linking, then you can have an impact.”
Metaxas doesn’t think Google can tweak its algorithm in a way that could foil thousands of links.
“What this will do will probably get Daily Kos participants more excited about the races themselves rather than changing the Google results,” he told POLITICO.
Google has worked on its algorithm to ensure that the candidates’ original pages and sources such as Wikipedia entries show up top, he said.
Regardless of the success rate this fall, search engine politics will continue to play a role in campaigns. In their report, Metaxas and Mustafaraj found that voters use search engines to find out more about political candidates in the last days of a campaign.
“When you look at Google Analytics, you can see where the traffic is coming from, and usually more than a third of the traffic is coming from search engines to these congressional campaign websites,” Finn said. “That is the reason why search results are critically important.”
If leftists can punish companies they don't agree with then so should we.
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