East Meath Candidate A.J. Cahill understands online campaigns
Read more about: Independents, Meath East, Media, Video, irishelection.tv 
Repost from Mulley.net
A.J. Cahill seems to be the one candidate so far that has a better grasp of the online turf that any other candidate, anywhere in Ireland. AJ is blogging and not afraid to pull some punches with this post about Dominic Hannigan and he is making some quite fresh and original videos and putting them up on YouTube:
(I think they’re the best videos so far since he now talks to locals about local issues in them)
A first for an Irish Election candidate, A.J. Cahill, I think is the only candidate to use Google Ads to get the message across. When you search for Fianna Fail or Fine Gael on Google, you may notice this ad on the right from AJ:
And also if you do searches for candidate names like Dominic Hannigan and Thomas Byrne, you will also see the above ad or a slight variation:
The online arena is still new and possibly too new to have an impact at this election but getting it right now and getting respect now is probably not going to harm your chances and if any media are talking about the campaigns online, it’ll be people like A.J. that people will probably talk about.
Blogging, YouTube and Google Ads, nicely done sir.
Few tips for A.J. though:
- Integrate the blog into your website. No need to have it on blogspot. (Possibly too near the election to move now.)
- No need either to have ads return when someone puts in your name, your blog comes up at the top anyway.
- Your blog is not on the front page of results for “Meath East” or “East Meath”, you should change that and modidy your blog keywords to fix that. Only Thomas Byrne shows up on the first set of results. There is an IrishElection post about Dominic Hannigan alright.
A few people asked me what does A.J. actually stand for. This doesn’t seem to be apparent to them upon reading the blog and looking at the videos.
Just noticed that I’m scoring well on both East Meath, and Meath East on the google searches. Better do something to advertise Regina Doherty and Shane McEntee
He is making good use of the youtube, but the blog quite recent and he started off on a very negative tone with regard to one candidate in particular. The problem with the net unlike letting off steam on the radio say is that it will be there when the election is called and is more likely to lose votes than win them.
And while he is quite detailed about facilities that he feels Meath East needs, he says nothing about how he would get any of them if he were elected.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see anything so special here. His blog is a little more frank that is typical, but I’m not sure this is necessarily going to do him any favours. In particular, I think it’s a complete waste of time for him to be responding to every negative comment that’s posted. In politics you have to learn not to waste time on people who are never going to vote for you anyway.
The YouTube clips are okay, the extreme local focus is interesting. But how many of the affected constituents are going to see the video? Of the 200 or so who have viewed the first video, I would be that most are not East Meath constituents.
Sorry to be cynical, but I’m just not seeing it.
I agree with Damien, as a leading member of the Shell 2 Sea Campaign Cahill he is not a political greenhorn, he seems to well versed in garnering publicity.