These days politicians, of course Western politicians, are doing online micro-election campaigning.  They pick all the activities you have on your profile – the posts, the likes , etc- and based on that will develop a customized ad that will appeal to your emotion. The end goal is to make you LIKE them and possibly connect with their campaigns.

They begin by understanding what you like best and systematically they peel the wall and connect with you. When you post on  you dislike on tax, you will be sure to get a “customized” ad that will tell you how the politician shares your frustration with high taxes.

Facebook Washington DC office focuses on providing tools to politicians to help them connect with people in their networks. With the plugin, politicians can target people efficiently like has never happened. This is a new domain for social media consulting because most times people do not turn off these politicians because they come through a point they know you want. You like higher taxes, they pretend they offer a solution in that. You hate green house emission, they link to their statements supporting your view. It is about mining your data and using that to construct an ad that will appeal to you.

Online micro-electioneering is going to become a growth area in coming months as the U.S. 2012 election heats up. So the politicians can make thousands of ads which are constantly tuned to particular and specific Facebook users. Facebook provides them data that makes the ads intuitive and relevant. Ads in Facebook is relatively cheaper, about 40c per click, and they can launch many at a time and quickly know the particular ad that people are responding to best. The idea is to figure out the one that drives higher response.

In platforms like FarmVille, politicians are also promoting themselves which enable people to visit friend’s farms to campaign. Expect to see more in Zynga and other popular platforms in Facebook and possibly MySpace. Notice that it is not just the Like they want, they also like your purse and if you connect, be ready to open your wallet for the politicians.

Almost everybody is familiar with Google Inc. Computer science graduates Larry Page and Sergey Brin are responsible for the internet search engine that changed the way people web surf. The services of the company do not stop there though.

This is a cloud computing corporation, offering several technologies such as the Gmail personal email service, the Orkut social networking and web discussion site and their income generating Ad Words program which gives companies the benefit of advertising their links on numerous affiliated web pages on a per click basis.

A Look at the Logo

Anyone who has been using the company’s search engine is familiar with the number of temporary modifications it has undergone through the years. The pop logo design is used to celebrate holidays, major events such as the Olympics as well as birthdays or milestones.

Ruth Kedar is responsible for the design of the company’s brand identity. It is a word mark which is based on the font called “Catull”. When it was first introduced after the term “BackRub” was replaced, it sported an exclamation point which was placed in order to be associated to “Yahoo!”. The colors found in the logo are mostly primary colors except for the letter L. Being shaded in a secondary color signified how the company liked setting the trend or following their own rules.

The idea for the company name came from the mathematical term for number one. It is followed by a hundred zeroes which represents how infinite the information on the internet is.

Maintaining their Success

In order to keep up with rapidly developing technology, the Google Guys believe that the philosophies which apply to the development of the successful search engine can apply to all of their products.

One such philosophy states that there is an endless amount of information available. This is the kind of thinking that lead to the company’s phone number listings, book preview system as well as their organization of image files, videos and news clippings. This also applies to their Android operating system, which is why they opt to leave it as an open source platform. It is aimed to encourage developers and manufacturers to contribute to the information repository of the system.

The company believes that everything can still be improved and developed. For example, they were already successful in providing accurate results to properly spelled search queries but to help users find what they are looking for even if they commit typos, an intuitive spell checking system was implemented and is now used worldwide.

The Green Android

The Android OS was announced back in November 2007. It was initially developed by Android Inc. until Google purchased the system. Now it is a part of the Open Handset Alliance and has its code library available for developers under the Apache License.

The first mobile phone to use the Little Green Robot was the HTC Dream which was released on the 22nd of October 2008. Today, thousands of Android devices are being shipped every day.

by Simon Drew