If Online Marketing Were to Pick The Next Republican Presidential Candidate…

One of the reasons why President Obama won the 2008 election was because of his campaigns mastery of social media and online marketing. The Obama campaign embraced these two forms of marketing, creating a winning online strategy that appealed to Millennials especially. Four years later, have Republicans caught up in terms of marketing their campaigns effectively online? The top two candidates on the Republican side right now are former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum. Which campaign has the best online marketing strategy? Let’s put the two campaigns head to head and find out.

Let’s analyze Romney and Santorum’s brands in terms of their online marketing efforts. We’ll focus on three categories: social media impact, website engagement, and website SEO and inbound links.

Social Media Impact
Facebook: Romney’s Facebook page has a whopping 1,509,746 “likes,” versus Santorum’s meager 164,906. This is a HUGE difference!  Also, Romney has almost 80,000 people talking about him on Facebook whereas Santorum has just over 41,000 people talking about him. Also, Romney’s page, powered by digital media company Thismoment, just looks a lot better than Santorum’s

Twitter: Again Romney has more followers, with 360,155 versus Santorum’s 153,375. Surprisingly, though, Santorum has actually tweeted about twice as much as Romney in total. Santorum has been tweeting an average of 5.4 times a day for the past week, which is impressive compared to Romney’s 1.4 average tweets per pay during the same period. Tweeting more often allows Santorum to be more engaged with his audience as well as more informative. He often retweets posts by his followers and keeps them up to date on the latest happenings with his campaign. Romney does the same thing, just much less frequently, which loses him points. Over the past eight weeks, however, Romney has been gaining both Facebook “likes” and Twitter followers at a much faster pace than Santorum

YouTube: Again, Romney has more subscribers than Santorum with 5,008 versus 2,914. Romney also has more channel views and more total upload views.

Overall, it’s possible that Santorum might have slightly more social media engagement with his followers, but there’s no denying that Romney has more followers in every category and is therefore the clear winner in terms of social media impact. Romney also has a higher Klout score (77) than Santorum (66).

Winner: Mitt Romney

Website Engagement
Website engagement measures how users interact with a website. Website owners want users to be able to easily navigate a site and find information they are looking for. In terms of our two contestants, I would assume they would also want users to stay on their site for as long as possible, researching the candidate’s platform, clicking multiple pages, and donating to the campaign. They also need a site that effectively communicates their political message to visitors.

When visiting Romney’s website, visitors are asked to provide their email address and zip code before even entering the actual website. Obviously this is to grow Romney’s database, but it doesn’t fall in line with the permission marketing concept that businesses are beginning to follow. Upon entering both the sites, they look very similar. Both sites make it easy for visitors to find each candidate’s bio and the issues they stand for, as well as donate money.

From a design standpoint, Romney’s website definitely looks better than Santorum’s, though. Santorum’s site does the job, but it doesn’t look like he’s put as much money into it as Romney has.

Winner: Mitt Romney

Website SEO & Inbound Links
SEO and inbound links are very important to a website because they determine how high up on a Google search the site will appear. It will be hard for a website to be on the first page of a Google search without many inbound links to the site. It also tells us how popular the website is in the vast sea of the World Wide Web. While SEO is probably not a major concern for these presidential candidates, whoever runs their website is probably very concerned with SEO.

A Google search for “Santorum,” for example, provides links to many anti-Santorum sites on the first page of Google. Santorum’s actual website isn’t even the first website on the page, it’s third! The fourth website is called “Spreading Santorum,” and has the quote, “The frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex” visible right underneath the link to the website. I’m sure Team Santorum is not very pleased about this; they obviously need to work on their SEO.

According to HubSpot’s Marketing Grader tool, Romney beats Santorum 91 to 66. Marketing Grader is an assessment tool that analyzes a site’s entire marketing funnel and compares it to another site. When looking at inbound links to their websites, Romney wins with 3,828 inbound links versus Santorum’s 1,566. Romney also has 10,800 pages indexed by search engines while Santorum only has 1,460.

Romney’s site has a blog that publishes new posts every three hours on average. These blog posts are being shared an average of 75 times on Facebook and 38 times on Twitter. Santorum also has a blog but new posts are created much less frequently.

Winner: Mitt Romney

If the next Republican presidential candidate were to be picked strictly on the basis of online marketing, Romney would be the clear winner. He beats Santorum in all three categories; Team Santorum needs to step up their efforts if they want to pull ahead on Super Tuesday.

Mormon Missions: Path to Success?

In high school, there seemed to be somewhat of a negative stereotype associated with kids who were Mormon. I’ve grown up since then of course and I respect all religions, but I really didn’t realize how many successful and influential Mormons there are in America, especially in business. Mormons represent only 2% of the US population, but there are dozens of Mormons that dominate American business and civic life.

In the Businessweek article, God’s MBAs: Why Mormon Missions Produce Leaders, I learned one of the reasons the Mormon faith creates so many influential leaders: the Provo Missionary Training Center and the worldwide mission trips that around 20,000 Mormons are required to go on each year.

The Provo Missionary Training Center is a huge complex in Provo, Utah that nearly all US Mormon missionaries are required to pass through before going on their missions. These men and women are straight out of high school usually, and they spend one to three months at the training center preparing to spread the Mormon religion. At the training center, young missionaries begin their days at 6:30 am and don’t end until 10 pm. Most of their time is spent in class or studying. They have one day off per week, and not allowed to leave the training center grounds without permission.

The training center not only prepares them for their missions, which begin the day after they complete their training, but it also prepares them for real life. Mormons can be assigned to missions anywhere in the world, and around half of the 20,000 missionaries travel abroad. Where in the world each missionary goes is up to the “Twelve Apostles,” who pray to find out where each individual is needed, which could be anywhere from Ghana to Los Angeles.

The mission trips are usually two years long and are not glamorous. “The wonderful thing is that you don’t experience Korea from the 25th floor of the Hyatt,” says Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, who did his mission in Korea from 1971 to 1973, “they don’t have air conditioning, you don’t have air conditioning; they don’t have plumbing, you don’t have plumbing.”

Young Mormons do their missions in pairs, and they spend 24 hours a day, 7 days a week together. Over the course of their mission, each individual rotates through two or three companions. This forces the development of interpersonal skills, because you never get to choose who you get partnered with. On the two year missions, they spend 10 hours a day, six days a week spreading The Book of Mormon by knocking on doors and attempting to convert strangers, who often speak another language, to learn about Mormonism. They are met with almost constant rejection, making the missions almost unbearably depressing and demanding. To make it even worse, missionaries have to follow a pocket book guide full of strict rules, they are not allowed access to news and are only allowed two phone calls home EACH YEAR.

Now even though this might seem insane, the missionaries are forced to grow up REAL fast, and they learn many valuable lessons that help them later in life. “You leave your family, your friends, your car, you don’t date for two years, and you’re 19 years old,” says Dave Checketts “I missed my freedom, I missed going out to eat—I was suddenly working hard, knocking on doors, trying to find people who would listen, dressing every day in a shirt and tie…” Soon after his mission, Checketts became president of the NBA’s Utah Jazz at the age of 28, and then went on to become CEO of Madison Square Garden.

He’s not the only Mormon to see success. Did you know that the founder of Marriott Hotels, CEO of Nationwide Insurance, and the CMO of priceline.com are all Mormon? That’s not to mention millionaire Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney (mission: France), former Utah governor and Republican Presidential candidate Jon Huntsman Jr. (Taiwan), JetBlue founder David Neeleman (Brazil), Credit Suisse CEO Eric Varvel, The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People author Stephen Covey (England), and former dean of the Harvard Business School Kim Clark (Germany) just to name a few.

I had no idea about Mormon missions until now. I think it would be a brutal experience that would transform anyone from kid to an adult very quickly, which may be the reason so many Mormons are so successful.

Feel free to leave any comments or suggestions below!

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