Newsjacking the Republican Presidential Campaign HubSpot Style

Today, HubSpot launched the brand new Marketing Grader – a free tool to grade your online marketing. You can read about it on the HubSpot blog.

Newsjacking the Republicans

What I found interesting about the launch was the example they chose to highlight. The info graphic they made shows the Marketing Grader scores for the leading Republican US Presidential candidates.

As we are less than a month away from the Iowa Caucus, the media is focused on who is ahead. There are polls galore looking at who’s up and who’s down. Into that mix comes an analysis of the candidates online marketing.

The infographic is a long shaped image so I have included it as a small size. Click it to expand or download.

It will be fun to see if any journalists pick this up and run with it in a story.

Comments

[Kevin Aires]

David,

Nice catch on this one! I get a number of the HubSpot emails and am a major proponent of their inbound marketing techniques. I just had an interesting conversation with my Aunt last night about the Republican parties 'missteps'. Timely and cool analysis. Thanks

[Ben Johnson]

Go to www.rickperry.com and see who is newsjacking whom.

Boosh.

[Lindsay Southwick]

Just posted about this on my own blog. There's a significant amount of evidence that Gingrich's following is astroturfed.

http://wp.me/p1ToMC-b6

I agree that an analysis of online presence & its benefits w/r/t politics wold be interesting, but let's make sure that online presence actually exists & is genuine before we get too excited.

[David Meerman Scott]

Kevin, Ben, Lindsay - thanks for jumping in.

Ben -- AMAZING. I didn't know that. Holy cow. Anyone reading this who hasn't gone to www.rickperry.com yet, do it now.

Lindsay - You're right. If you dig deeper into the numbers, there may be a different story being told.

[Mike Bernard]

David - I'm confused. While on the surface the subject matter does align enough for this to be an excellent opportunity to Newsjack, I don't see any SEO built into the Hubspot blog article (announcing the Grader) that would tie Hubspot into search results on the primary story (The Republican Primaries). Can you explain further how they've executed the newsjack? Thanks!

[Tim Dempsey]

Another fun topic! Wordstream really did a great job newsjacking the Scott Brown / Martha Coakley race a couple of years ago: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2010/01/14/ma-senate-race-poll-scott-brown-trounces-martha-coakley

And while I think there are areas where newsjacking is a questionable practice (like the Chilean Miners, for example) I think politicians are FAIR GAME!!!

Jack on!!!

/t

[David Meerman Scott]

Mike - I have no clue. I didn't look at it that carefully. I thought the info graphic was awesome but did not research how they got it into the market.

Tim - Yes, politicians are fair game. Blago anyone?

[Mike Volpe - CMO @ HubSpot]

@Lindsay - Actually, the initial reports and allegations made against Newt Gingrich turned out to be false if you folow the story all the way through. This is why the mainstream media never really ran completely with the story. This would have been a headline on CNN for weeks if it had been true. This Mashable article was the final and true analysis of the whole thing: http://mashable.com/2011/08/24/twitter-analysis-vindicates-gingrich/ Quote: "So there is no smoking gun to suggest that Gingrich, or any of these politicians, bought any of their followers."

[Mike Volpe - CMO @ HubSpot]

@Mike - We took the data from Marketing Grader and used that to create the infographic about the republican candidates. Time will tell if other people run with the infographic and the newsjacking is successful.

[David Meerman Scott]

@MVolpe -- thanks so much for jumping in. Keep up the great work.

[Lindsay Southwick]

@Mike: OK, interesting. Thanks for the response. I wasn't aware of that. Looks like I need to be more careful, not you.

[Lindsay Southwick]

Also changed my blog post to reflect accuracy of situation. Sorry, HubSpot!