WASHINGTON — As the 2008 presidential campaign gets rolling, Google Inc. wants to be every candidate's running mate.
That was clear early one morning this month, when about 80 bleary-eyed political and advocacy group consultants crowded into a college lecture hall here and listened intently to campaign tips from an unlikely source: three guys from Google.
The trio, including the head of the company's newly formed political sales team, conducted an hourlong seminar about maximizing Google's products for political purposes, including what videos resonate on YouTube and how to propel websites up the search engine rankings.
"They're more keen to the desires and the needs of the political campaigns," Eric Anderson, online marketing director for the Republican National Committee, said after attending the company's seminar.
Google's acquisition of YouTube last fall thrust the famously "content neutral" Web giant headlong into the partisan world. And its competitors, including Yahoo Inc. and NewsCorp.'s MySpace, are hot after the same market.
YouTube had already shown its effectiveness last summer, after it helped torpedo the reelection campaign of Sen. George Allen (R-Va.), who was videotaped using a word perceived as a racial slur to refer to a man of Indian descent who worked for his opponent.
And last week YouTube demonstrated its power again when it set the political world buzzing with a spoof of a famous Apple Inc. ad featuring a Barack Obama supporter heaving a sledgehammer into a video image of Hillary Clinton.
YouTube isn't the only reason Google is reaching out to campaigns, but it helped accelerate the process, said Elliot Schrage, the company's vice president of global communications and public affairs.
"I think the difference is we are now recognizing that this is a segment that we have to pay attention to in a way that we hadn't," he said.
Google isn't the only major Web company to reach that conclusion as the Internet continues to evolve as a political platform. MySpace last week launched a channel featuring pages created by 10 presidential campaigns. And Yahoo recently tied all its election content and services together at election.yahoo.com, and is even planning to give its instant-message users the ability to dress their online images in presidential campaign T-shirts.
"There's so much activity taking place on Yahoo, why shouldn't we be making it easier for voters to engage?" said Cyrus Krohn, Yahoo's director of election strategy.
