Online Marketing is not only essential for businesses to win new business, but has also been embraced as crucial in winning elections both here in Australia and abroad.

The United States Presidential candidates have all incorporated various online marketing strategies with varying degrees of success.  Just as we saw in Australia the Kevin 07 campaign do a fairly good job of incorporating online marketing in Kevin Rudd's successful bid for Prime Minister, we even experienced the normally out of touch John Howard throw his hat in the ring for a go at attracting a savvy political audience.

 Here is a link ( http://www.searchmarketinggurus.com/search_marketing_gurus/2007/12/democrat-joe-bi.html) to an article that critiques one of the US candidates, Joe Biden, and the effectiveness of his integration of online marketing including the following:

1. Search Engine Optimisation: discusses the pervasive and ineffective use of Splash pages without any proper title tags

2. Social Media Strategies:  the effective integration of using sites such as Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace. 

3.  Pay Per Click Strategies:  no visible integration of this strategy which seems to be the trend amoung the Democratic Candidates

4.  Blogging strategy:  Well incorporated, maintained with access for interaction and subscription-but unfortunately no Social Bookmarking capability.

If the Australian and US politicians that tend to be behind the times of integrating technology have now recognized online marketing as a key component to their future electoral success, shouldn't businesses that are relying on old methods such as full page yellow page ads investigate diversifying their Integrated Marketing Strategies? 

Just a question to ponder as businesses start the New Year and recognize it is now 2008 and not 1988.  More to come...