With the open letter to Ron Paul supporters issued by Allen Wastler, managing editor of CNBC.com and the slurry of posts about it throughout the SEO blog community it seems perfectly clear that the future of political campaigns is changing - or at least adding to it’s armory.
This letter and the following blog storm it has caused will be noticed by the savvy campaign managers that are going to be looking towards online reputation management along with SEO to get their messages to the top of the search engines.
With an already huge and growing number of people getting their news from social media and online newspapers it would be silly to ignore what a little SEO (and perhaps PPC?) could potentially do for a political campaign. Think about it, a political party could bring the search engines to their Team’s side and make sure the people only see what they want them to see… I’m not sure how this will play out… will it be pure reputation management - making sure only good things about your party show up on the magical first three pages of search results - or will it be a twisted reputation mud-slinging battle that will make sure every bad thing about the opposing side pops up to the top.
Either way it should be a pretty bright (and possibly fun) future for current and up-and-coming SEO’s and pretty interesting for the SEO world in general. It may change the face of SEO (at least somewhat) from a competition against the numbers and faceless webmasters - to a downright brawl, king of the hill style, between SEO managers from each party.
I, for one, am excited.