It might seem that professional political campaigners would use more sophisticated tools than Google Alerts, but they often need to make points about opponents without leaving their own “fingerprints” on the story. That is where Google Alerts can be useful. You may not be able to say negative things about your opponent, but you can forward a blog post or news story to a reporter without getting quoted yourself. This game is played by both sides, so political campaigns had better be prepared to respond to any negative mentions about their candidate.
This public Google Alerts account gives you an idea of how this can be done for the US Senate race for Connecticut, between Chris Dodd and Merrick Alpert. This account is not meant to be exhaustive, but it does demonstrate the type of alerts you should be creating if you manage the communications activities of a political campaign. If you aren’t familiar with the search syntax used in these alerts, you can review our Google Alerts Tutorial.
Chris Dodd
“chris dodd”
site:chrisdodd.com
link:chrisdodd.com -site:chrisdodd.com
site:dodd.senate.gov
link:dodd.senate.gov -site:dodd.senate.gov
“chris dodd” site:flickr.com
“chris dodd” site:gov
“chris dodd” site:youtube.com
dodd site:drudgereport.com
dodd source:hartford_courant
Merrick Alpert
“merrick alpert”
site:merrickforachange.com
link:merrickforachange.com site:merrickforachange.com
“merrick alpert” site:flickr.com
“merrick alpert” site:gov
“merrick alpert” site:youtube.com
alpert source:hartford_courant
alpert site:drudge.com
Here is the account now in AlertRank. It was started 24 hours ago, when Merrick Alpert announced his candidacy. I’m sure there will be a lot more results over the next few months.
You can see that this can be expanded to hundreds of different searches, but Google lets you create 1,000 search terms in a single account, and AlertRank makes it easy to manage them.
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