Do Political Parties Understand Intellectual Property?

By now you've heard of the new "Tea Party". This is probably in spite of the terrible job they're doing on social media. Ron Callari at InvestorSpot.com wrote an incredible blog entry on the Tea Party -- he really digs into the details of the Twitter, Facebook, domain presence, etc. To sum up the big tea party convention:

"For such a large event that draws on people who like to hear the sound of their own voice, one would think they would have a significant presence on Twitter and Facebook."

At Avantla, we've seen the same thing with the major political parties. We did an analysis of all recent California candidates for local offices for both major parties. The result? Over 100 did not own the domain name for the politician: "FirstLast.com". And we found quite a few "Last.com" type domains available.

What does this mean for candidates? Two things, and both are bad:

First, California candidates aren't taking advantage of the search engines, since Google will give better search ranking to domains that exactly match the search -- the candidates name in this case.

Second, this is an opportunity for the candidates' opponents to grab up this valuable online real-estate. The first ammendment usually protects domains that are used for political purposes, so it's not cybersquatting.

If these candidates aren't getting their domains, what about their other intellectual property? Twitter? Facebook? We'll be publishing a full analysis for California soon.

In the "Internet Age", intellectual property is a key differentiator between the winners and losers. The parties that excel at acquiring and managing IP will have huge competitive advantages.