• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, December 4, 2008

MediaPost's Search Insider Summit kicked off in Park City Utah Thursday morning with a town hall meeting to discuss the online strategy of the Barack Obama campaign.

Gordon Hotchkiss, CEO and president of Enguiro, led three panelists and conference attendees in a lively discussion on how search helped Obama win the presidential campaign. Panelists included Emily Williams, Interactive account executive MSHC (who worked on the online campaign early on); Ben Sesllia, senior director of analytics at Clickable; and Corina Constantin director of decision services at Didit Labs.

Williams, who worked on the online campaign for Obama early on, said "We were lucky and in a position to be more calculated [in the keywords bought]. Clearly the strategy was not to bid on the opposition keywords. When a story broke we would try to get certain terms but it wasn't an online strategy to bid on McCain-related words."

Economic woes didn't shift the strategy of the online advertising team, Williams said, but they did add "issue" terms. There was no notable shift in the overall strategy and everything the team did reflected other parts of the campaign.

Constantin said Obama's online advertising campaign was more traditional than many realized. He managed to create a brand. Unlike John McCain, he didn't build as much on issue until the end of the campaign, but rather built enthusiasm for change. He created online buzz, offline. This spurred electronic word of mouth, It was better than any strategy. The buzz he created online built an amazing campaign. But Constantin questioned whether it was because the audience was online or did the strategy bring the audience online.