This morning, while catching up on reading everything I missed over the 4th of July weekend, I happened upon an interesting story about gas prices across the country.  A site (certainly appearing to be a MFA (’made for Adsense’) appeared on Digg because it had mapped gas prices by US county, and put up a cool heatmap illustrating the range of prices:

This got me to thinking.  It did strike me that this map seemed remarkably similar (swapping red with blue) to another color map we have all seen (over and over again) this election season.  You know the one, red states and blue states:

On first glance, this looks like grounds for a conspiracy theory.  Blue states, on average, have higher gas prices.  But, there is sure to be a lot more to it.  Blue states are: typically higher in population density, have more of the country’s larger cities, might impose larger taxes on gas stations, and are generally located on the coasts and not in the center of the country.  These are all factors that could account for the prevalence of red and orange on the gas-prices heatmap in so many of the “blue” states.  There are certainly a few things that don’t make any sense at all— Illinois (blue) is Orange on the heatmap, while neighboring states like Indiana (red) is Yellow, and Missouri (red) is Green. 

Take that for what you will.  I’m going to leave it to the political blogs (for either party) to argue if there’s an issue there or not.  That’s not what we’re here for, we’re here to discuss internet marketing.

So, I decided to see if there were any noticeable similarities in the price of clicks for keywords associated with “gas prices”.  I loaded Google’s Traffic Estimator with the same geoqualified keywords (gas prices, gas stations, etc) for each of the 50 states and District of Columbia.  I analyzed the results in Excel, and found some interesting things. 

I assigned estimated CPCs of $0.00-$0.25 a score of 1 (for low), CPCs of $0.25-$0.50 a score of 2, CPCs of $0.50-$1.00 a score of 3, and CPCs over $1.00 a score of 4.  That gave me the opportunity to make my very own fancy map (thanks to tamu.edu for the utility), a heatmap of Gas Prices CPCs in Google.  There were some surprises, like the high competition in Georgia and Texas:

 
Then, I gave Gas Prices from the heatmap similar scores: Green got a 1, Yellow got a 2, Orange a 3, and Red got a score of 4.

Lastly, I averaged the scores for Blue states and Red states to see if there were any noticeable trends:

In conclusion, it appears that there isn’t much ground for a conspiracy theory, afterall.  Both the average CPC scores and average Gas Price scores that I calculated seem pretty consistent when viewed in aggregate.  There are aberrations, but they don’t favor either the red states or blue states, and virtually cancel each other out when viewed in total.

So, I guess in the end we are all in it together.  We’ve got high gas prices, and internet marketers in both red states and blue states are paying for the increased competition they create. 

Friday, the Personal Democracy Forum announced that it will be hosting a presidential candidate debate to be entirely conducted over Twitter:

“We’re pleased to announce a first for the Internet Election of 2008: Starting tonight, a designated representative of both of the major presidential campaigns are going to participate in a free-wheeling debate on technology and government, moderated by Time magazine blogger Ana Marie Cox and channeled via Twitter.”

While the actual presidential candidates will not be submitting their own “tweets“, some pretty respectable figures from each of their campaigns will.  According to the post:

“The McCain campaign will be represented by Liz Mair, the online communications director of the Republican National Committee. The Obama campaign will be represented by Mike Nelson, a professor at Georgetown University who served in the Clinton White House under Vice President Gore on tech policy issues.”

For a lot of us in the industry, this marks a pivotal moment.  Not because the candidates look to be a tiny bit closer to embracing the internet as an effective (and cheap) means of communicating their messages to potential voters, but because it may be the first truly meaningful use for Twitter. 

For anyone who lives under a rock, Twitter is a website service that provides one single function: users submit >140 character messages (by web interface, text-message from their cell phone, or third-party application), and they are pushed to all of their “followers” (and for most users settings also posted on the public timeline for anyone to see, even if only available for a brief moment in time).  In this time of text-messaging mania, Twitter provides a useful (if not meaningful or profitable) function.  But, short of using it to quickly organize an audience rebellion at a conference (a great story worthy of reading), most tweets consist of one of the following: a) what is for lunch, b) where to get that lunch, c) how the weather is today, or d) where to eat lunch because of the weather today.  Nonetheless, Twitter has racked up impressive usership (an estimated 1.3 million users in March). 

As a free service, with no on-page advertising visible, many people wonder what the real business model is.  Where is the opportunity for revenue?  That hasn’t stopped investors from pumping Twitter full of money to keep going.  Recent estimates have them as having already collected over $20 million.  Many heads are being scratched as to what they are thinking— I for one am wondering, have I missed something here?

So, while the online presidential debate does not represent a way to make Twitter any money— it does give the site a further boost for its popularity and/or notoriety.  And, as long as the 1990’s don’t repeat themselves for this industry, maybe that will prove to be enough.

Here’s something you don’t see every day:

A San Francisco photographer posted pictures on Flickr (yes, Flickr and not Picasa) of the Google Maps “Street View” camera vehicle pulled over by the police in the Presidio.  It seems that a SF motorcycle cop found the enormous apparatus mounted to the roof of this lady’s Prius to be a little suspicious.  Either that, or she was speeding. 

I have always wondered what Google’s camera apparatus for Streetview looked like, and thanks to Damian Spain, now I know.  Some bloggers are speculating what the hardware included– with some convinced Google is working on collecting 3D data for some new functionality to add to Street View.

So, now we know what it looks like.  And, the next time you see a hybrid vehicle with a 5-foot camera array following you down the street, don’t miss your chance.  Do something visible and memorable for the camera, write down where you were when you saw it, and watch for it on Google Maps.  When else will you get a chance for such fame? 

For anyone that doesn’t live under a rock, buildup to November’s presidential election has reached a fever pitch in all media.  Television commercials, whole-page ads in newspapers and magazines, as well as incessant news coverage (yes, I’m lumping that in with other commercial media) are impossible to avoid or ignore.  

This year, the most successful candidates are finally near fully embracing (although, perhaps still not fully understanding) the internet as a truly leveragable media outlet.  Of course, the internet has played a growing role in the past few presidential elections.  Here are some internet memories of elections past:

• 2000 - Ralph Nader gets good viral buzz
• 2000 - Bloggers and the other “free” media make election irregularities more widely known than previously possible
• 2004 - Support rallies for Al Gore organized through meetup.com
• 2004 - Blogs rule
• 2000 & 2004 - Anyone heard of a little political action committee called MoveOn.org?

So, what are the candidates doing online to promote themselves so far this time around?  Here are a few of the biggest candidate internet marketing pushes of 2008 (so far):

• 24% of people report regularly learning something about the election from the internet, up from 13% in 2004 (and compared to 40% for TV news)
• Perhaps this is why the average age of voters continues to decline (arguably creditable to a more informed, more motivated voting-age populace).  In Illinois (where I live), Barack Obama wins the 18-24 age group nearly 2:1 in the democratic primary versus Hillary Clinton
• “Yes We Can” is released as a musical remix of Obama’s motivating speech, tops Youtube ratings and inspires some humorous parodies (including one called “No You Can’t“)
• A ClickZ column points some of the blame for Hillary Clinton’s loss in the primaries to lower Google Adwords spending (the same article suggests that candidates relied much more heavily on search distribution than content network placement)

So, now the primary season is finally over and we have our major-party candidates.  What will the internet change this time through?  Hopefully, a lot.  I expect to see much more as the national election season gets underway. 

Don’t think that the internet will be a big factor in this year’s contest?  Barack Obama sure does, his campaign is hiring internet marketing professionals.

On May 27th, I wrote a post about content targeting of PPC advertising on Google Gmail.  Specifically, it was about an ad I saw for Spam Primavera.  It seemed to me that this ad was demonstrative of a few things going wrong at the same time:

• Content match on Gmail was reading the page navigation (the word ’spam’ only appeared on the folder name) instead of only reading my unique content
• The advertiser was opted into content match, but was not controlling it (using negative keywords or advanced match types to limit what the keyword ’spam’ might match to).  Having the negative keyword ‘email’ might have been a smart move
• The idea that anyone would make a pasta dish with Spam luncheon meat is pretty repulsive, even though I understand it is a useful source of preserved protein in some other parts of the world

A long time ago, I followed a thread by Matt Cutts of Google where he talked about that day’s Googleplex cafeteria option, bacon polenta.  The SEO community responded by trying to trump Matt’s top ranking for the niche phrase.  DarkSeoLabs “Google Washed” him from the SERPs.  It got kind of nasty, but very interesting.  So, just for fun, I got in the game too.  I wrote a post entitled “I just want to rank for Bacon Polenta, too” (note, this was before I launched paperclipmarketing 2.0 and decided to wipe out all my historical archives).  I think in it’s hayday, the post reached the second page of search results.

I was thinking about this today, and out of curiousity did a search for Spam Primavera.  Funny, I should find a few posts where other SEM bloggers talked about seeing this same ad, and what it meant for advertising on Gmail. 

So, since I’ve long given up trying to rank for Bacon Polenta, I’ve decided instead to try ranking for Spam Primavera. 

Maybe not as tasty, certainly not as competitive, but still probably a lot of fun.