Social media campaign hammers the Daily Mail

This isn’t a real poll! It’s a Daily Mail branding exercise; product positioning in the minds of its audience. The people taking this poll are at the Daily Mail website because they have the website bookmarked. There’s no illusion about their political/social makeup. It’s like asking ‘should chicken farming be banned?’ on a vegetarian website. That’s why they don’t bother to report the ‘results’. And with regard to campaign effectiveness sure, if such polls are picked up by other publishers with different audience bias newsworthiness may grow under more heated opinion exchange. Social media can certainly facilitate a war of opinion very quickly, but only if the poll is fed into the right channels. It’s a matter of ‘know your audience’ and ‘know where they are’.

It made a Telegraph blog and got removed from the website:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/damian_thompson/blog/2009/06/19/daily_mail_readers_vote_to_allow_gipsies_to_jump_nhs_queue


But the Mail runs loads of these polls and rarely reports on the results.

I doubt they'll cover it at all, those pesky kids eh...

Looks like they've pulled because I can't see it on the site anymore. Terrible poll.

It will be interesting to see how it covers it..my bet is that it will simply ignore it.

But calling it a "social media campaign" or even a "Twitter campaign" is a little grand. Twas just a couple of hours of retweeting.

A small victory for a very small amount of effort.