Boeing vs. Northrop Grumman: YouTube battle examined

I am watching the conflict between Boeing and Northrop Grumman over the Air Force Refueling Tanker contract with great interest.  Not only are there serious policy issues at work here for how procurement works in the future, but there's so much money at stake that you expect to see some interesting tactics employed.

Generally people in public affairs don't ask me if they're doing enough online for their client. Either because of a lack of knowledge or a lack of money, they know they're ignoring some important elements.  While a full analysis of the conflict in every channel online is too much to do now, let's just take a look at YouTube and it's 62 million visitors (Mar 2008).

My general rule when someone says, "Should I be on Twitter/YouTube/Facebook/mobile ?" is to ask them two questions:

1. Are people talking about you or your topic/business/brand there?
2. Are your competitors/opponents there?

If either answer is 'yes', you need to adopt a combination of organic and paid online tactics to help get your message out in that channel.

Today I went to YouTube to examine it for presence of the fight over the tanker contract.  With a combination of videos by their proxies (some sympathetic and some possibly paid), Boeing owns the message in this channel.  To see what I mean, go to YouTube and search on "tanker contract" and sort by relevance.  Of the first ten videos, eight of them are pro-Boeing, one is neutral, and one is pro-Northrop Grumman.  The pro-Northrop Grumman video is actually a video put up by a TV station in the area, WALA, talking about the economic benefit to the region. The neutral video is also put up by a news website.

However the 8 pro-Boeing videos have been put up by a combination of Boeing employees (1 video), Boeing-friendly legislators (4 videos), and what appear to be Internet operatives working on Boeing's behalf.  The most prolific, a user named "demorra", has only five videos uploaded to YouTube, all of them pro-Boeing, and demorra's title on their profile page is "Internet Strategist".* 

If you'd like to follow this conflict more, you can check out the online presence from both Boeing and Northrop Grumman.

* I called and e-mailed Boeing to ask whether this person was compensated for uploading videos to YouTube, but they didn't respond in time for this article.

[Disclosure: Neither I nor my firm, Virilion, is currently working on behalf of Boeing, Northrop Grumman, or any entity with a stake in the outcome of this conflict.]