Social media marketing 'must endure negative publicity'

15:00 25th March 2010

Digital marketing professionals who are running social media marketing campaigns must ensure that they can endure negative publicity.

That is the opinion of PR consultancy Diffusion, which stated that social media campaigns must survive the inevitable detractors.

According to Ivan Ristic, director and co-founder of Diffusion, the way the general public use the media has changed radically in the last decade.

He said: "Social media needs to be an important part of any multi-channel political marketing campaign."

Mr Ristic was speaking after a social media marketing campaign by the Conservative Party backfired this week.

The Conservatives were forced to take down a new anti-union website after visitors were redirected to the Labour Party's website and to pornographic images.

Social media users spoiled the campaign after they realised that all messages posted from Twitter with the hashtag #cashgordon would immediately appear on the front page of the website.

This meant that social media website users could post code that would divert visitors away from the Cash Gordon site.

Recent research from Diffusion found that the Conservative Party's social media marketing approach has thus far been more successful than those of its political rivals.

More than 23,000 people are connected to the Conservative Party's fan page on Facebook, compared to just 7,000 each for Labour and the Liberal Democrats.