JG etc.

I have been signed up at Barack Obama for some time but today was the first time I really looked into the site of the person I am hoping will win the presidency. I came away very impressed by the layout of the site, the ability to connect with others, and the overall level of community integration on the My Obama platform. The amount of media on this site is incredible. Main blog, State Blogs, personal blogs, etc. To the tune of over 1.5 million pages indexed within Google.

Here are some of my notes and thoughts as I clicked around.

The clean layout and big text easily allows you to take the necessary steps to action:

Living in New York it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for me to campaign in a state that will swing to the Democrats. The site knows this and immediately suggests that I campaign in Pennsylvania. It goes so far to set up my phone bank and arrange a car pool to PA on a weekend of my choice.

Obama V. McCain

- McCain’s site is impressive as well but it lacks the clean look and sense of engaged community that Barack’s site has. In talking about Barack’s domain pages of over 1.5 million; in comparison, McCain only has a little over 40,000

- Part of that domain page gap can explain the huge traffic lead Obama has over McCain.

- Search is a closer race, but Obama is still winning in the database of intentions. Given the buzz, it makes sense that Barack would win this race as well.

- Google Insight shows us that Obama has international appeal. In the McCain view he hardly has the international appeal that Obama does. (Side note: so cool to see the search traffic from numerous countries within Africa.)

- Rising searches for McCain show the interest in Palin.

- Notice no mention of Biden in Obama related searches. Clinton is there, pointing to the strong need for her in the home stretch.

It would be so cool if the Obama or McCain campaign published their site analytics. I would really like to see how they are optimizing their site for social media and where they are seeing most of their referral traffic coming from. With Obama, they have a Share button on all their posts that include Digg, Delicious, Facebook, Newsvine and StumbleUpon. With Digg, for example, JohnMcCain.com has two homepage Digg Stories. Barack has 32.

There is so much buzz online over these two candidates it will be interesting to watch and see if winning the web strategy will also translate into winning the general election.