UK Government turns to Social Media and Inbound Marketing
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Thu, Mar 25, 2010
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o how is the UK Government turning to Social Media and Inbound Marketing? Actually they are planning to harness the "wisdom of crowds" by inviting the general public to offer online critiques to their recent budget. The British Prime Minister recently accounted plans to "crowd-source" public reactions by putting their content online and look for people to examine the small print.
For the UK Government turning to social media and inbound marketing has democratised the analysis of their recent budget to an extent never seen in the days of traditional media when it consisted of only newspapers and televisions. Social Media and Inbound Marketing has enabled rapid reaction, analysis and comments from all sides. Twitter has further accentuated the democratisation trend with thousands of people emitting their reactions to the recent budget both during the speech and afterwards. According to reports there were 11,132 tweets during the budget speech which was an average of 2.29 tweets per second. Inserting the most commented part of the speech was about cider with 249 tweets per minute. Due to these tweets cider even appeared in Twitter's global list of most commonly tweeted terms for a while after the speech. So is this the UK Government using social media and inbound marketing?
Is there any backlash of the UK Government in social media or inbound marketing? Well sticking to the cider issue soon after the speech on Facebook a group called "Leave our Cider Alone" was established in minutes and soon after had more than 2,500 members. And 90 minutes later Facebook carried a poll of 10,000 people on their view of the budget with over half declaring the budget a failure. So what can the UK Government learn from Social Media and Inbound Marketing?
The UK Government is more than aware that Social Media and Inbound Marketing can be about people finding you but it is also about expressing their views. So with such a large participating in the Facebook poll could this be seen as evidence of the first social media election.... which the budget losing?