In a recent development(or is it?), LinkedIn and The New York Times have joined hands for a tie up. I stumbled upon this while surfing NYT and a few clicks revealed how it works. Here’s the deal for you.
Linkedin members will have an option to be served customized headline feature on Business and Technology article pages of NYTimes.com that’ll comprise five latest stories from NYT. For ex: someone working in biotechnology sector will be served latest news from that sector.
One early use of Twitter had El Fattah and a dozen or so of his collegues coordinating movements to surround a car in which their friend Malek was being held by the police, to prevent it and him from being towed away. Knowing they were being monitored, they then sent messages suggesting that many more of them were coming. The police sent reinforcements, surrounding and thus immobilizing the car themselves. This kept Malek in place until the press and the members of parliament arrived. The threat of bad publicity led to Malek’s release, an outcome that would have been hard to coordinate without Twitter – Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky
James Karl Buck, a graduate journalism student from the University of California-Berkeley was in Mahalla, Egypt, covering an anti-government protest when he and his translator, Mohammed Maree, were arrested. On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a single word message, “Arrested”, to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter. This alerted them and helped secure his release(details not known)
– cnn.com
Mortin Pain Reliever in an effort to pitch to mom who wear their babies released a print and video ad campaign.The campaign didn’t go down well with moms and they started fighting back on their blogs and Twitter. As the campaign picked momentum, the company officials realised their mistake and in order to pacify irrate customers, removed the ad from their website and apologised on their site.
– parentinghelpme.com
A few weeks back amazon users realized that many books about gays, lesbians, bisexual and transsexual issues stopped appearing in relevant searches. Enraged users and authors swung into action and started posting updates on Twitter about this with adding a hashtag #amazonfail. It wasn’t long enough that Twitterverse was abuzz with #amazonfail, this led to a public communication by the company that this incident was inadvertant and soon things were fixed and back to normal.
– bbc.com
Twitter is increasingly being used for activism of sorts. Be it customers protesting against a product/company, or citizens campaigning against their government officials/policies, Twitter is the platform of choice when it comes to raising your voice against an issue or coordinating a protest(online and offline both).
Social media activism has graduated from protests in blogosphere, groups in social networking sites to #hashmobs on Twitter. The reasons for Twitter’s success as a platform for activism are
1) Critical Mass: Twitter has gained enormous mass since last year and is now a force to reckon with. Millions of users from all parts of the world use it to stay connected with their friends and family. It’s not just people like you and me, there are some really big brands that have presence on Twitter.
2) Dense Connectivity: Twitter is one of the most densely connected networks of all. It won’t be wrong to say “On Twitter, everyone is connected to everyone”, which means getting the word out is a lot easier. Chances of people noticing something and sharing it with others is quite high. The ease of sharing content(RT ) is another reason for word to be spread easily.
3) Search: Awesome search functionality, made further useful by trending topics make the discoverability of memes a lot easier. With the latest changes, everyone can see the trending topics on their Twitter page. This without any effort discoverability is really helpful in getting more eyeballs.
4) High visibility outside the platform: What makes a protest on Twitter better from say one of Facebook is that Twitter updates are more shareable(via blog widgets, feeds) than Facebook messages. Also, thanks to dozens of really popular tools, Twitter updates are just not limited to the website, you can get updates on your desktop app, mobile phone and email.
5) Hooked Traditional Media: There’s enough traditional media presence on Twitter which is eager to pick the next big story. So anything of significance in Twitterverse is quite likely to be noticed by them and spread further.
It would be interesting to see how activism on Twitter evolves from this point on. I’d like to end this post by sharing a list of Twitter Activism related protests/campaigns.
People love connecting with others who share the same tastes, goals, beliefs, lifestyle, social status, locality and even dislikes. Essentially (most) people are on a lookout for new groups to join and satiate their innate desire of belonging, of being a part of something along with others for all sorts of reasons.
Brands are one of the many possible threads that connect people in many ways and it’s not limited to just those who like the same brand of alcohol or the same brand of cigarette but even to kids who like the same brand of candy.
Brands, because of the way they are intertwined in our daily lives offer tremendous ways(even unconsciously) for their customers to connect and luckily for them, people want to connect with the brands they love. They connect to find like minded people, to know more about the brand and their latest offerings, in hope of availing some offers/discounts or just to broadcast their choices to the world. Since the advent of social software , the grouping of people into communities/tribes has peaked a new high.
Ridiculously easy group-forming matters because the desire to be part of a group that shares, cooperates, or acts in concert is a basic human instinct that has always been constrained by transaction costs. Now that group-forming has gone from hard to ridiculously easy, we are seeing an explosion of experiments with new groups and new kinds of groups – Clay Shirky, author of “Here Comes Everybody”
What does all this mean for brands ? Yes, if you are a brand that people love/like and you’d like to take your relationship to the next level then you should also think of having your community.
Here are the top 5 reasons why your brand should have a community.
1) Feedback:
According to me, the most important thing a brand can get from a community is honest feedback. Be it a new product or a new ad campaign, it’s extremely important to know what your customers feel about what you are doing. Forget market research, a community gives you a direct channel to know more about your customers, what are they like and what they like. This can be immensely helpful in improving the existing products and services and building better ones. This group can also be used to beta test a new product/idea.
2) Audience:
Community, means audience that likes your brand and wants to stay connected. A small but focused audience is a lot better than large but unfocused audience. The difference here is that this audience wants to know more about your brand/products/services as much(if not more) as you want to tell them. This means the conversion rates for any campaign here would be higher than that of a campaign aimed at a randomly chosen lot.
3) Brand Image:
Everyone loves a social brand, a brand that’s closely connected with it’s customers scores better over one that isn’t. Having a community around a brand will better the brand image in general and lend more trust and loyalty to it . If a brand is spending resources to build and foster a community it shows that it cares. Cares for its customers and is willing to give them back some love.
4) Buzz: Will you feel nice if you get a birthday greeting from your favorite brand ?
Will you feel nice if you get a discount offer on the latest product from your favorite brand ?
Will you feel nice if you get a sneak preview about the upcoming range of products from your favorite brand ?
If the answer to any of the above is yes, you are highly likely to talk to your friends(online and offline) about it and that’s how buzz starts to build and spread. The way communities work naturally supports word of mouth. In a group even small things aren’t small. Also, there are other factors associated with a brand’s community that add more credibility and virality to the buzz ,which in turn helps it to spread faster and wider.
5) Crisis Aversion/Management:
Think about it, would things have been a bit better had dominos already been on Twitter or Youtube ? I am sure things would be been better(even though slightly). By having an account on any of these services would have helped them in connecting with a small fraction of their customers who spend considerable time online and if there online interactions with the brand had been good, they would have definitely(on their own) taken on the task of dozing the fire and maybe prevented it from snowballing and this is just a small community on a third party tool.
I am by no means suggesting that every brand should have a community, these points are just to share why I feel it’s important for brands to have communities. What do you think ?
It’s been a few days since that appalling video of Domino’s employees tampering with food at their outlet got attention of social media users and started spreading in a viral manner. A crisis like this can easily get worse if things are not handled correctly and in a timely manner but luckily(mostly) for Domino’s that’s not the case. Despite the huge wave of disgust that the video generated, it feels like things are under control now and the negative buzz which was generated will subside in the next few days.
While we tried to discuss what could be done to handle a social media disaster let’s see what Domino’s actually did and is still doing for damage control post this Social Media fiasco.
1) Initiate action against the culprits:
The folks at Domino’s were quick to realize that “actions speak louder than words” and thus their first step was to initiate an inquiry into the matter and punish the guilty. Not only were the employee involved terminated from their jobs, they are now in custody and face felony charges.
2) Stop the negative content from spreading:
Stopping new people to talk about negative content and trying to control the spread of negative content should be next on the agenda. Domino’s got this right(though it took some time) and got the video off YouTube.
3) Participate in social media conversations:
Domino’s guys were decently quick to realize that they were getting a lot of bad PR in Twitter and thus they jumped into the scene by creating an account on Wednesday afternoon and started engaging with disgusted people. This works well for various reasons including pumping out positive things which otherwise don’t spread that virally as the negative one’s.
There is nothing more important or sacred to us than our customer’s trust
While the firefighting efforts had started on Twitter, Domino’s guys opened another front on YouTube by posting a nicely drafted public apology by Patrick Doyle, President of Domino’s U.S.A. The apology helped in re-affirming brands commitment towards it’s customer’s trust. Patrick also mentioned the steps they plan to take to avoid future happening of any untoward incident like this( sanitizing stores, tighter recruitment process, daily audits etc)
While Domino’s did open communication channels on a few Social Media Tools they didn’t announce anything on their official web resources and didn’t do a press release as they feared this will lead more people to know about this debacle and invite more embarrassment for the brand said Tim McIntyre, Dominos spokesman. So domino’swebsites remain the way they were, as if nothing happened. While I see the point, I would have still preferred an official “what we are doing about the incident” channel.
Update: Domino’s site has an official update for their customers
While these efforts will definitely help in dozing the fire, it will still take a lot of continued effort on Domino’s part to keep the fire from spreading.
For example: It will take them a while to realize that while they have removed the video from YouTube, goodasyou still has that video and a few even gross one’s and some explaining for this(assuming it’s not fake)
and ensuring that people don’t start talking about other things which can further take down their brand value
The next few days would be interesting, let’s see how the situation stands then.
When I wrote “Social Media: Handle with Care” it skipped me that Handle with Care applies to everyone who uses Social Media whether they realize it or not and this hold true even more strictly with employees/representatives of a brand.
The interwebs are abuzz with links to this video
These workers at Domino’s didn’t realize that just by uploading a 2.5 minutes video on YouTube about what apparently is just a prank they have brought the company they work for in face to face to what could be called a “Social Media Disaster”.
Negative buzz spreads a lot faster than positive confirms Emanuel Rosen, author of highly popular book “Anatomy of Buzz” and that’s what we are seeing as I write this. It’s a given that had this video been about something great Domino’s folks are doing, not even 10% of those who are spreading the word would have bothered to share it with their friends and followers.
While a lot is being said and will be said about how gross the video is, the employees are jerks and should be fired(or even jailed) and how we shouldn’t eat out etc what people tend to miss is “what next”, we have a situation at our hand and we know that it’s just an unfortunate incident which doesn’t really signify or imply anything about the way pizza’s are made at Domino’s or at any other pizza joint but what is it that they can do to reduce the side/after effects ?
Goodasyou posted a few videos and communicated with Domino’s officials about the same. The company reps replied diplomatically which is a fair way to go about it. Other than replying to all the written and telephonic communication in this regard they also need to find a way out to remove/block those videos(fake ?) and there has to be opened an official channel(social media off course) to interact with upset customers and update them regularly about the incident and what they are dealing with it.
What do you think should the people behind dominos do to reduce the impact on their brand ?
It’s nice to know that there are people who keep searching the blogosphere for brand mentions and it feels even better if the concerned person/product is not a big name(yet). This comment on the post on SMM Case Study for the film “The President is Coming” that I wrote a while back and a brief conversation that followed made me feel good about the whole thing. Going back to the film and it’s social media strategy here are some of the things that I could think of that can be done for the film, feel free to add/remove points from this list.
Film Website: Contrary to my belief there’s an official site for the film (http://thepresidentiscoming.in.com/ ). Even if you miss to make a note of the unusual url, thanks to the two conspicuous headers by the host website a visit to the site will make it clear that the film’s website is one of the sub-domains at Network 18’s portal in.com . I feel these headers are a great distraction and would surely eat some clicks from film site’s traffic.
a) Discoverability: Making the website searchable and discoverable is almost as important if not more than building a good site. The way to go about this could be
1) SEO: A quick SEO exercise for the site will be helpful.
2) Link other resources to the site: Web properties like facebook group, myspace page etc should also have a link to the main site.
3) Online Ads: Google adwords, Facebook ads are also a way to spread the word.
b) Cross Linking: The traffic flow should be bi-directional, for this to happen it’s important for the website to have links of other web properties like facebook group, myspage page etc. This will help users connect to the film group/community on their platform of choice.
c) Updated Content: The content on the website should be updated regularly. Be it text or multi media items, the film’s website and at any given time should have the biggest and latest pool of content. For ex: the site here has just two videos while about a dozen videos float on YouTube.
d) Updates/News: There could be a section on the site where the guys behind the film share the latest happenings for the film and related things. These updates can also further be broadcasted to groups/communities etc across various social platforms.
e) Games: Bush Games is a nice idea but I am not sure about how usable/enjoyable the games really are. However a few things that can be done are
1) Have a link for games on the main header, unlike just on the main/home page of the site.
2) A simple game based on the shoe throwing incident will also be a fun thing, if done nicely it can spread well.
f) Contest: A contest is a good way to involve potential audience but a look at the contest page doesn’t quite make things clear. I couldn’t make out if the contest is running or closed. Contest closing date and other details would be nice. This contest can also be taken out from the site and sold outside. This could be part of the ads doing round on facebook or other online and offline ads.
g) Feel and Engagement: Ideally a glance at the site should give a feel of the energy and number of people active on it. This feel is quite communicable and helps to get new users and retain the existing ones. This could be reflected by the comment count, count of feed readers or something else. In this case there should be a segment where people can talk. A small review wall, where users can post their reviews or rate other’s reviews could be a nice and impressive testimonial.
h) Blog: A blog could also be a nice place to connect with audience but it requires some effort on the owner’s part or on the part of people who are maintaining it. There are far too many blogs with a few and irregular posts. There could be lots of interesting topics to talk about from this film.
i) Celebrity Bytes: I don’t remember reading, watching or hearing anything about the film from the cast. A couple of interviews, videos, or even blog posts from Konkona and other cast members could be a nice way to catch some eyeballs.
j) Behind the Scenes: Some behind the scenes content could also be used for promotional use, be it videos or stills. Interesting anecdotes during the making of the film etc could also be shared with the online community of the film.
The above mentioned things can be helpful in spreading the word across borders but in order to cater to Non-Indians a bit more some efforts need to be put to provide more context, increase identifiability and generate interest. Facts from Bush’s India visit, people involved in it and their experiences could help generate some buzz. It might sound far fetched but a short video from the man himself reminiscing about his visit could be a great thing. Since the characters from the film might not be that easy for a foreigner to identify some more interesting details about them could help. A few catch phrases from the film could also be de-constructed on the site. A quiz based contest about the trip could be interesting. Targeted Online and Offline ads can also help.
I would love to know if there’s anything else that you think can work. The guys behind the film are listening so lets share our views with them, you never know if one of our suggestion actually gets implemented 🙂
In the age of wii, iphone and social media even Gods can’t afford to stay the same. As people start doing more activities online(the ones they used to do offline) they are spending more and more time online.
Lets imagine Gods themselves felt the need to engage with their audience and started using various social media tools to market themselves. Lets see how it plays and what can we learn from this.
It’s much easier for people to stay in touch with each other online as compared to offline. Not only this, it’s also easier for people to stay close to their favorite Gods online. Plus the internet offers some possibilities that were unthinkable before like say “making friends with God”.
With God himself on your friend list, the possibilities are immense. So don’t be surprised if your Facebook feeds reads : “Matt Jacob and Simon Taylor are now friends with Jesus Christ” or “Vivek Sharma and Sai Baba are now friends via the People You May Know tool”
Lesson 1: Fish where the fish are. Social networking sites like Facebook, Orkut, Myspace etc in this case are better options to connect with their audience than say LinkedIn or Friendfeed.
In case you think, making friends with God might be a bit too much(or you fear you’ll loose your online privacy) , you can simply become a fan of your favorite God.
Lesson 2 : Give your audience various ways to connect with you, depending on the degree to which they would like to get involved/connected.
With about 9200 fans, fan page of Jesus is brewing with activity. While most people show their gratitude and express their love towards the God, some people actually want to chat with the God himself and guess what ? Jesus does not disappoint his followers.
Lesson 3: Interact with your audience and small is big.
Lesson 4: Regularly update your web properties and add relevant content. This gives a reason for your audience to come back.
Lesson 5: Don’t oversell. The ultimate goal of Social Media usage is not to sell but to establish lasting relationships with your audience.
These are some of the simple lessons in social media marketing that I could think of from the above mentioned cases, if there’s something else that you’d like to suggest, just drop a comment 🙂
PS: This post is just meant to be used to learn some lessons in social media usage in a fun way and should not be taken in any other context
January and February of this year are particularly important months for Bollywood. With lots of big budget films like “Chandni Chowk to China”, “Delhi 6”, “Dev D” and “Billu Barber” hitting the screen, there’s going to be a lot of competition to seek people’s attention and get noticed. The marketing teams behind each film would try everything they can to spread the buzz and build a sense of urgency to watch the film. Lets see how folks behind “Dev D” are going about marketing.
Lustline:
Before you go any further, pick up your phone and dial 022-61424800. Just dial it for yourself and see what it is, trust me, it will be worth the call charges(if you are dialing from India)
Welcome. To proceed, please certify that you are above 18 by pressing one.
On pressing one, you are greeted by a husky voice that says
“If you want me in English today, press one. Agar hindi mein chahiye toh do dabaiye.”
Though what happens on pressing the next digit maybe disappointing for most callers as instead of talking(or hearing) anything naughty, all they get to hear is “to get an autographed cd of the film visit the website devdthefilm.com” or “to get a movie poster visit the website devdthefilm.com” , it’s a brilliant example of something that has never been tried before. If the lustline ever worked the way it was said to work it’s great but even if it never really worked that way it opens a whole new world of interactive marketing. The possibilities of using phone and sms lines for involving masses are immense and hopefully, we would soon be seeing more being done on these lines.
Website:
You have to certify that you are above 18 to view the site, interesting.
The lustline is also available on film’s website, where again you need to certify that you are above 18 by and select a language to get going. Though I couldn’t really get past this stage all thanks to the awfully slow site. I still don’t get why all the film websites are made in flash, other than poor SEO they all take ages to load, spoiling the whole experience but alas no one really takes note of what people are saying about these things online( see month old rants here).
Though only a few sections are working, the all red site looks intriguing just like its trailers. I liked the community links section and the fact that it has links to 10 external web properties but the site could have been a lot better and engaging(engagement is almost zero).
Videos:
I am not really a TV person, so I rely on the web for updates on what’s new on the idiot box but if you are not like me chances are that must have come across
This song was uploaded on YouTube under the official UTVMotionPictures channel three weeks back and has got about 25,000 views while the official trailer uploaded two months back has been seen more than 59,000 times and has got about 117 comments, not bad at all.Not only this, UTV folks have been regularly uploading a minute long videos of the film songs every 7-10 days with the last one uploaded yesterday. Since the movie contains 18 songs, they can easily upload 10 songs without worrying too much. These videos have got almost 1,00,000 hits in total.
Audio:
The films music is also available via streaming at BollywoodHungama. Anyone who listens to the songs of the film will definitely talk about it and thus spread the word. Some like me, may decide to buy the audio cd too. These songs have been listened more than 25,000 times already.
(M)TV:
After reading this nicely written piece on passionforcinema I tuned to MTV and as mentioned their tickr is full of “atyachar”. What happens if you are pretending to be working in office when you are actually playing games ? Professional atyachaar etc etc. It’s another nice way to spread the word(like I just did). There are film promos playing every 5 minutes across the news channels, even if you want you cannot miss them.
Facebook:
An active official group with 920 members as of now, 7 videos, 86 stills from the film. The good thing about the group is that it’s regularly updated and admins are also participating in it.
An active fan page which is also heavy on content. The film has 686 fans already.
There’s also an event about Dev D’s tattoo launch. This is an interesting way of involving online audience into offline activities. Translate the lyrics contest: There’s also a contest to translate emosanal atyachar into English & get an autographed CD
Things definitely seem to be in the right direction as far as facebook is concerned.
Other social networks(Fishing where the fish are):
Not on facebook but want to join the film group, no problem. The film has official groups/communities on orkut (176 members), perfspot (137 members), hi5 (30 members), fropper (26 members),
bigadda (16 members) and goyaar (10 members).
It’s worth mentioning that despite the size of the group/community the information and content is same across all these groups and apparently there are profiles of some of the cast and team members also on most of the platforms covered.
PFC:
passionforcinema is the biggest platform for Hindi film buffs and lots of experts in the field blog there. Anurag being an active blogger at PFC has written a lot of the film and engaged with his readers. There are lots of other posts written by other folks about the film.These posts must have easily got more than 10,000 views. There’s also a deleted scene video from the film exclusively for PFC which is certainly a great idea.
Controversy:
Nothing works better for making noise than a planned or accidental controversy. Dev D also has its share of controversy in the claims the film has reignited the infamous DPS mms scandal.
Merchandise:
Not sure if it’s the right category but if news sources are to be believed there are plans to launch “Dev D Condoms”. If they pull of this one, it will be an historic(not necessarily successful) tactic, which will create a lot of buzz and be a remarkable event in marketing of bollywood films.
The marketing strategy for the film includes both offline and online activities, while Ghajini’s online marketing was more focused on stand alone sites, it’s focused more on social networks in the case of Dev D and apparently it has got to do with the fact that the producer of the film is UTVSpotboy. Apparently, they have a platform and a methodology which is used to promote their films. Given the rate at which buzz is spreading for the film and the fact that its release is about three weeks away chances are it will see a grand opening. Lets see if they come up with something else till the release date and how the movie performs.
Update: You can also download the case study in pdf formathere
Social media marketing suits the needs for film makers pretty well, especially for low budget films. Social media marketing works for numerous reasons including wide reach(sans borders) and better ROI, owing to lower costs. While Ghajini saw a slew of online marketing activities, bollywood is yet to see an extensive online marketing campaign. Lets see how the guys behind “The President is Coming” have used social media tools for marketing.
Facebook It was an ad on Facebook that caught my attention. On being clicked the ad leads to the group “The President is Coming- The Movie”
Given the fact that this group is advertised(someone is paying for it) its safe to assume that its an official one. It has about 850 members, one discussion and 45 wall posts. There are a few pictures from the film and some videos(trailers, interviews etc) added by the group owners.
Facebook is slowly picking up as a platform for marketing Indian films but there seems to be a lack of clear strategy(or focus) on how to leverage the platform better. The film’s facebook campaign is top down, like in most cases and has been used just to push content, not to interact or anything else.
The least that could have been done was talking to interested people instead of just broadcasting the content. The content and the information that’s shared could have been a bit more interesting and a fan page would have been nice too.
Website: Apparently there isn’t a website built for the film, or if there is one, its not at all discoverable, which is equivalent to it not being there.
A website though simple, is a must have to share content, build a community and involve/engage the audience.
Blog: No blog either.
MySpace: Myspace has also been used to spread the word. In place of a website, the main placeholder is the films myspace page
Few things worth noticing about the myspace part of the campaign.
1) “Friend us and write a comment about why you should be a part of the film. If we like it, we’ll contact you directly. Good Luck” reads the profile. This means for one that they started this profile a decent while before the film was expected to hit the screens and secondly it shows an attempt to involve audience.
2) Since the profile’s main page still shows November 28th as the release date, its easy to make out that nobody is really looking after the profile.
3) Content wise the profile is decent, it has a few stills, an audio clip and a video trailer of the film.
4) The profile has been befriended by 175 people so far(though there’s nothing more to it) and the public wall has managed some 14 comments. Once again no involvement from any team member or cast.
Just like it was with Facebook, the attempts at Myspace are either half-baked or poorly executed.
The least that could have been done was to keep the profile regularly updated, interact with audience and share some more information about the film. If this page is used as the main web property for the site, it should have links to other web properties like facebook etc
YouTube:
There are around a dozen different videos on YouTube for the film, ranging from “film trailers” to “behind the scenes” to “press launch” to even “post production problems”. Once again some work has been done in creating and uploading these videos but not much thinking seems to have been done to get the most out of it. Chances of you bumping into these videos are as rare as chances of you bumping into their myspace page, which are to be honest, quite bleak.
The least that could have been done was to make a channel,upload all videos from that account and cross link the channels URL to other web properties.
Imdb: Un-official page without much information and the default poster picture.
The least that could have been done was to create an official page,upload the movie poster and fill in more details.
All in all it seems like a volunteer(and informal) effort by the team members involved with the project, especially the more net savvy ones and thus you can find their imprints across various platforms discussed.
Only if there was a sound strategy in place, things could have been better and effective.
Here’s a nice trailer, apparently made by a fan(as claimed)
Blogosphere and Twitterville are abuzz with the news of recently launched blog of prime ministerial candidate Mr L.K Advani of the India’s opposition party, BJP. Be it the Obama effect or something else, it’s good to see Indian politicians starting to use Internet actively. Clearly, BJP is coming out stronger and smarter when it comes to making their presence felt on the web as compared to the Congress. Also, there seem to be an aggressive effort in marketing Mr Advani on the internet too. Lets see how Mr Advani and team are using various social media tools and services to spread the word.
1) Personal Web Site: The website http://www.lkadvani.in/ as Gaurav Mishra notes, was launched on November 8, 2008. The site is much better than the kind of sites we’ve seen in the past . Not only does it look better, it is also well conceptualized(though there’s nothing out of the box yet).
Things worth noting about the site are
a) Comprehensive about and background page(s): This is very important for those who want to know more about the leader and/or the party. That said, the site offers a lot of relevant information.
b) Forum: The site also has an active in house forum, with a couple of threads having more than 100 posts. Having a forum is very important to organize a loyal community around the social media object in question. If handled properly a forum like this could grow really big and attract lots of politics enthusiasts engaged in various sorts of discussions. What remains to be seen is if Mr Advani, himself takes part in this forum.
c) Blog: A blog in another way to share your views/opinions and engage the community. A few questions that comes to one’s mind immediately are, who writes the content ? how open are they to feedback/criticism ? and who replies to the comments i.e engages in conversations ?
Since the blog is just a few days old, its difficult to answer these questions now.
d) Recent activities: It’s good to see, details about his standing and statements on currently relevant issues on the home page of the site.
e) Open to suggestions/feedback: There’s good enough and visible focus on asking for user feedback and suggestions. How they are dealt with it however is a separate issue.
f) Alerts: Email and SMS alerts about breaking news. Sharing things first with the community is a great thing to do and it gives people enough incentive to subscribe for these alerts.
g) Share with friends: The site also lets you invite your address book contacts and contacts from various social networks like Facebook, Orkut and LinkedIn.
2) Google Adwords Campaign: Though this doesn’t come under social media per se but there is also an active Google adwords campaign, not just for keyword search but also contextual advertising. Smartly enough they’ve even bought ads for keyword “congress”. So if someone searches Google for “congress” they’ll be seeing an ad like this
Some other keywords and phrases bought are “l k advani”, “lk advani” and bjp. Incidentally SBI folks are even smarter for they too bought ads for the keyword “l k advani”. Here’s what their contextual ad looks like
Apart from the above mentioned there also some properties on the web some of which might be official, like the Facebook fan page.
These are some of the aspects of Mr Advani’s internet campaign that I could discover. The campaign is focussed more on depth than on width for now and that’s the reason there’s a lot of focus on the website and almost zero focus on other social media tools. A couple of interesting and simple things they can do are
1) have videos of his speeches uploaded under an official youtube channel, so that more people can see them and know more about him and his viewss.
2) Have an option to vote for or against his stands on various issues. This could help them understand what’s the popular opinion for netizens about his stands.
Even if they decide to focus on just the site without doing anything fancy, they can get a lot of attention and earn goodwill by just spending more time conversing with the users/visitors.
Mr Advani’s experiments with the internet should serve as an example for other politicians from India, especially the younger ones and hopefully 2009 will see more politicos finding their way to the internet.
