Can social media win elections New delhi:Five days after rahul gandhi and
narendra modi slugged it out online, the representatives of some of india's best
known pr and social media http://www.austherm.com.au/
marketing agencies like mahesh murthy of pinstorm, dileep cherian of perfect
relations and s swaminathan of iris biz services, found themselves making
pitches to political strategists of the congress and the bjp. Calling in the
professionals is a step up for political parties, for whom a social media
strategy has largely meant a mix of volunteers and old Louis
Vuitton Top Handles timers updating websites and sending emailers
from a dingy backroom. So what's changed for politicians to take facebook and
twitter seriously?The numbers:At the time of the 2009 election, there were only
1.6 million social media users.But today, the number has jumped to 65 million,
roughly 5% of the population.And by the time of the projected next election, in
late 2013, or early 14, that figure could be 80 million. Politicians are also
apparently impressed with social media's role in the recent street protests like
the ones after mumbai's 26/11 strike, the anna hazare agitation and the protests
sparked by the delhi gangrape. Groups like the iris business services, have now
sliced the data further to demonstrate it is relevance in an indian election.
Iris mapped facebook Louis Vuitton Australia users by
lok sabha constituencies to find that in 160 constituencies, the number of
facebook users was higher than the margin of victory. For instance, in thane,
the margin of victory was 49000 votes.The number of facebook users in thane is
4, 19, 000. Swaminathan points out that these are not limited to big cities, but
cities as far afield as jaipur, indore, madurai and patiala, all have
significant social media clusters, mainly due to the spread of smartphones.
India only has about 13 million internet connections.But a majority almost 60%
connect to social media via smartphones. At the same time, the study is a highly
simplistic exercise.There is no deeper study of how many facebook users are
voters, or whether they are politically engaged.Nor is their evidence to suggest
that social media can influence election outcomes. Swaminthan says,"It is no
one's contention that fb users will vote as a block.But for example, the place
where i live in thane, the thane facebook user community is considerably more
homogeneous than the thane electorate.It's also likely given again the bulk of
these voters are probably firsttime voters.Most of them are below the age of
25.It can have an impact in terms of voter turnout as well.When you combine all
these things together, the contention is not that they will vote as a community
and that they will determine who will win or lose.It's just basically saving
that they have the critical mass to influence the election. " So social media
might have reached critical mass in india but how can it be leveraged to help
political parties? At his mumbai office, mahesh murthy says the same social
media strategies he used to promote his corporate clients could also work for
political parties. For example, pinstorm runs the twitter account of cadbury
dairy milk, where they aim to generate what he calls 'remark worthy' tweets.He
says he can provide the same service to political parties. Pinstorm also runs
cadbury's facebook page, which it peoples with interactive content. When we
visited, pinstorm was running a real time promo on the cadbury page, which keeps
pace with ipl results.He says the can do the same for political parties, running
fb pages for each of their candidates for instance. Pinstorm says they can go
one step further with software that maps online chatter which they used to solve
customer complaints for clients like airtel and icici bank. Mahesh says the same
software can map chatter about political buzz, letting parties know their weak
and strong areas. But as dileep cherian says, these services won't come cheap.He
says investing in social media is a long term strategy that should be done not
just for simplistic political gains, but because it's a listening post to tap
into the aspirations of the young. Members of the congress and bjp that we spoke
to Louis Vuitton Handbags
Australia said they were interested, but refused to commit as to
whether they were signing these agencies. Perhaps this figure might make them
sit up:According to pinstorm, only the newly formed aam admi party has
engagement levels on social media four to five times more than the bjp and the
congress.
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