A Twitter hijack at yesterday's conference for the welfare-to-work sector reminded Vibeka Mair that there are two sides to social media.

Tom Daley’s self-outing on YouTube has been hailed by many as a triumph of social media. Simon Blake, chief executive of Brook, has written an excellent blog on the issue here.

Blake explains how social media has given Tom the power to talk about his sexuality in his own words, enabling his truth to be told in a direct, forthright and human way.

Blake was also recently a judge on the inaugural top 30 Social CEOs list, a great list of the best 30 charity leaders on social media led by Zoe Amar and Matt Collins, two people who are champions for its take-up in the sector.

I, too, have always been a big proponent of social media. It’s unsurpassed for building surprising contacts, learning new and random things, and venting. But, for all the positives of social media, yesterday I was reminded of the more negative aspects.

I was at the Employment Related Services Association (Ersa) conference which, like most conferences nowadays, has a Twitter hashtag.

But instead of a timeline of conference delegates discussing what they were hearing from speakers, the hashtag was hijacked by protestors opposed to some of the more controversial aspects of the welfare-to-work industry, such as workfare.

It was so bad that an audience member mentioned it during the first round of questions. He complained that the #ersa2013 feed was full of negative phrases such as ‘scumbags’ or ‘profiteers’, and said the social media profile of the industry badly needed raising.

I don’t know what the answer to this is. On the one hand, it is now expected that every conference will have a hashtag on Twitter, and on an open platform you have to take the bad with the good. Civil Society Media once fell foul when conference participants at one of our events took to Twitter to complain about a less-than-popular speaker.

But, on the other hand, the experience can become hard to manage. Ersa was very open that protestors from Boycott Workfare were going to be at the event, albeit physically, not virtually too. But, their dominance on its conference Twitter hashtag clearly upset some attendees.

Commenting on the unfortunate negative online reaction to Tom Daley’s relationship with a man, Blake suggests people should not collude: “For every harm people tell you social media potentially causes I can show you multiple of goods,” he says.

And Ersa seems to be aware of this too, announcing yesterday the launch of a YouTube channel which will showcase the good work that the welfare-to-work industry does.

But, even if the YouTube idea was launched a month ago, it would not have helped its Twitter crisis yesterday. I think the following could have:

1)    Ersa’s Twitter hashtag was not visible at all times. This is a bugbear of mine and a mistake which I see organisations often make. Even at the Social CEOs launch they made this mistake. At the Ersa conference yesterday I forgot the hashtag very quickly, and wrote it down incorrectly once. Perhaps if more conference delegates saw the hashtag and became familiar with it they would have been motivated to use it, and countered some of the negative tweets.

2)    Ersa itself should have been tweeting throughout the conference. I didn’t see any from them. They did not necessarily have to engage with the protestors, but tweets from them would have diluted the opposing presence.