Next UK Government turning to Social Media and Inbound Marketing
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Thu, Apr 08, 2010
It appears that the next UK election could be won with Social Media and Inbound Marketing. As Google search results could become the political battleground to decide the next UK government. The general voting population of the UK is turning to the internet as away to research the party politics and track the ongoing election campaign. It appears that the Conservatives have been bidding on thousands of Google's "Adwords" in an attempt to draw the electorate voters in. And apparently the oppositions responds is to ask party followers to click on the conservatives ads in an attempt to run down their advertising budget. This does not appear to be very social, but maybe they are just scared of the power of social media and inbound marketing.
Does social media and inbound marketing work for Governments as well as business? Well according to Google search traffic on political terms increase around their party conferences, elections or budgets. For example after the last UK budget searches for "tax" increased by 36% and "cider" by 112% after the government announced a higher tax rate on cider, which was later abandoned possibly due to the facebook fan page against the increase. It appears that there is the appetite and need for social media and inbound marketing for any potential government party.
However Labour has decided to focus purely on social media and inbound marketing away from Google's adwords. Labour are emphasising the work their party has done to push up their websites further in the search rankings. They have also included their site in Google news, so that searches for recent stories deliver their version alongside the newspapers. And only recently John Prescott asked his twitter followers to click on the competitions ads as an attempt to run down advertising funds. So it does show that social media and inbound marketing is defining the next UK government.
At SiliconCloud we understand the challenges business fact before they think about Social media, so yesterday we ran a free webinar on Social Media for Business. You can watch the webinar by registering here: Social Media for Business