Five Creative Internet Campaign Tactics

YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, blogs, we've been there, done that. Now, let's take a look at some of the more unique techie tactics to which candidates have taken.

First, There's text messaging updates. Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama all have little fields on their websites that either allow you to enter your cellphone number or tell you where to send a message. Complete the step and you'll start getting SMS text message campaign updates. Regardless of how useful the updates are, it's always fun to go to Hillary Clinton's page and enter a co-worker's cell phone number as a practical joke.

Next, let's talk about the Ron Paul. There's a link on his homepage to Digg. Why? Cuz his supporters are the craziest Diggers ever. They'll click on anything if you tell them it'll help get Ron Paul some network media attention. 7000 Diggs to support Ron Paul getting on the Daily Show? It sounds a little like spam to me. But the Digg guys know better than to take it down cuz Ron Paul rEVOLutionaries would burn the Digg headquarters to the ground.

Next up is Barack Obama's very own Social Network built right into his website. It's an ambitious effort, but when you have the type of support that he has on MySpace, Youtube and Facebook, it's just redundant and excessive.

Now, Rudy Giuliani's got a weird one. As a fundraising tactic, Rudy wants you to start a baseball team. Go online, register a team of nine players. Each player donates $25 to Rudy. Do that, and you'll get you're very own Rudy Giuliani pennant! If your team raises $2008 you get your very own SIGNED Rudy trading card! And $5000? Get read for this one. You get your very own Rudy Giuliani signed Baseball! Yeah!

Last up is EONS. Eons is a social network for OLD people like babyboomers. So far I've found Hillary Clinton and John Edwards on there. Hillary Clinton even links to her Eons profile from her site. But it doesn't seem all that effective. Neither candidate has more than a handful of "Eons friends." It just goes to show how effective the web is with young people. So I hope the candidates keep up the creative web marketing and look forward to getting messages from Ron Paul on Pownce.