Disclaimer:
This post is a personal comment from me. It does not represent any opinion from Crebbers LLC or anybody else from Crebbers. This post does indicate any political endorsement from Crebbers or anybody from Crebbers.
Many of you may notice the heated campaign war between Scott Brown and Martha Coakley for the senate seat previously held by Ed Kennedy. Part of my job is marketing, especially web/video marketing. So out of curiosity, I did some comparison on the two candidates websites. Below are three screenshots from their websites as of 2PM, Jan 17, 2010.
[Home/entry page side by side]
[Home page of Martha's website]
[News pages side by side]
Quite interesting, isn't it?
Here are a few quick comments.
1, The home page of Martha's is an entry page. You need to click something to go to the real home page. If you visit the site for the first time, the site will show you the entry page and then plants a cookie on your computer so that the sites you already visited the entry page.
From a marketing point of view, this is not a good move. Online audience are pretty impatient. That extra trip (click) might really annoy some audience. And you lose the golden 3 seconds to catch online audience's attention. Plus, all the three buttons could be found on the "formal" home page, why bother an extra page?
2, Secondly, both candidates use social media. That shows how important to use social media.
3, Thirdly, Scott uses lots of videos in his website. Picture three shows the news page of the two sites side by side. For Scott's website, the whole page is just full of YouTube embedded videos. On the contrary, Martha's page is full of texts. I guess I do not need to comment on which page is more appealing.
4, A side comment on the video within the headers on both websites. On Scott's page, the video shows a scene of people while on Martha's header, the video shows Ms. Kennedy. I do not know who chose that video and why they chose that video but I am sure voters can easily tell who carried the message out more loudly:"this is not a Kennedy seat, this is a people's seat."
I could comment on and on but I guess I would stop here. Hopefully, this would shed some lights on realtors and brokers on how to do web/video marketing. By the way, you might want to visit my another website at http://www.ZoriaMedia.com on the DSP3 marketing theory.
