Damien Mulley

A.J. Cahill seems to be the one candidate so far that has a better grasp of the online turf that any other candidate, anywhere in Ireland. AJ is blogging and not afraid to pull some punches with this post about Dominic Hannigan and he is making some quite fresh and original videos and putting them up on YouTube:

(I think they’re the best videos so far since he now talks to locals about local issues in them)

A first for an Irish Election candidate, A.J. Cahill, I think is the only candidate to use Google Ads to get the message across. When you search for Fianna Fail or Fine Gael on Google, you may notice this ad on the right from AJ:

And also if you do searches for candidate names like Dominic Hannigan and Thomas Byrne, you will also see the above ad or a slight variation:

The online arena is still new and possibly too new to have an impact at this election but getting it right now and getting respect now is probably not going to harm your chances and if any media are talking about the campaigns online, it’ll be people like A.J. that people will probably talk about.

Blogging, YouTube and Google Ads, nicely done sir.

Few tips for A.J. though:

• Integrate the blog into your website. No need to have it on blogspot. (Possibly too near the election to move now.)
• No need either to have ads return when someone puts in your name, your blog comes up at the top anyway.
• Your blog is not on the front page of results for “Meath East” or “East Meath”, you should change that and modidy your blog keywords to fix that. Only Thomas Byrne shows up on the first set of results. There is an IrishElection post about Dominic Hannigan alright.

Edit: It was pointed out that people were unable to ascertain what solutions A.J. has or were wondering is he marketing himself as a protest vote.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 5th, 2007 at 5:05 pm and is filed under blogs, irishblogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.