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Google Offers Politicians a Campaign Toolkit

by Terrence O'Brien on June 4, 2010 at 08:20 AM

YouChoose
Google has launched a set campaign tools designed to make it simple for anyone to run a proper (read: Web-enabled) political operation in the 21st century. The main component is the YouTube You Choose 2010 toolkit, which offers a special politician channel, Google Moderator and YouTube Insight. The politician channel allows campaigns to more thoroughly brand their channel, control the thumbnails used for each video and upload longer clips.

More interestingly, though, are the paid campaign tools. Campaigns can now ad "call-to-action" overlays to videos and pay to add their spots, in-stream, to commercial programing on YouTube and Google's partner sites. As should be expected, candidates can also ad their clips to YouTube's Promoted Videos program. The rest of Google Campaign Tools are standard issue Google apps like Gmail and Google Docs, as well as Analytics (for tracking website traffic) and Ad Words (for promotion).

In the end, the Google Campaign Toolkit doesn't really offer much new or innovative. What it really does is simply make a set of existing tools more accessible. Now there is no excuse for any campaign, no matter how large or small, to lack at least some Web presence. [From: YouTube Blog, via: Mashable]

Tags: campaign, google campaign toolkit, google campaign tools, GoogleCampaignToolkit, GoogleCampaignTools, politics, top, you choose, YouChoose, youtube, youtube campaign toolkit, YoutubeCampaignToolkit

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