A Few Surprising Winners from the 2012 Campaign

2012 will be the first Presidential campaign in which social media is a proven force. And, simply because the search market has expanded so much, search will be a bigger factor, too. That’s a trend that will produce a few surprising winners in 2012, including:

1. Facebook’s selling stockholders: Facebook is very likely to IPO in early 2012, and their lock-up will expire by the end of the year. Facebook recently enabledtargeting by zip code, which is a very smart move—political direct-mail consultants have been targeting by zip code for a long time, so this will make them comfortable with the platform. (Getting nearly double the click-throughs won’t hurt. Media companies rarely break out their political versus non-political ad revenue, except qualitatively. So Facebook might end up with a growth rate a few percentage points higher than its trend in 2012, and a few percentage points below trend in 2013. And Facebook co-founder and Obama 2008 online organizer Chris Hughes is on the loose now that he’s folded his nonprofit startup.
2. Online reputation management companies and agencies: Companies like Reputation.com will see a flood of business from local politicians. More prominent politicians will retain agencies to run online reputation management campaigns. Search engines control what is literally synonymous with a candidate’s name—even making bad headlines disappear faster is going to make a positive impact on their campaigns. Google may step in to mitigate this. They already present data differently for structured queries like “movies 10016″ or “weather 94043″—why not “obama capital gains” or “perry global warming”? Google already donates overwhelmingly to Democrats, which could lead users to assume that Google will slant results in their favor (which is probably why Google hasn’t already produced a tool like this).
3. Aol and Patch will be partially vindicated: Aol already charges ridiculously high CPMs for some Patch ads, and Patch already makes it into a surprising number of Google News results. Patch isn’t just going to earn revenue; they’ll also work as a platform for direct outreach. Aol’s audience skews older, and thus more likely to vote. 2012 could be an amazing year for them.

New platforms won’t benefit as much. Twitter is fun, but it’s not going to capture most of the gains from on-Twitter behavior. Quora also won’t: it’s too geared towards deep discussions of policy, which haven’t won anyone the Presidency since the days of powdered wigs. Both Quora and Twitter will probably help campaigns raise non-trivial amounts of money from supporters, though.