Who will be the Obama of the Indian Internet?
Even though the success of the Obama campaign’s use of social media is well-documented, there is no end to in-depth studies of what exactly worked and what didn’t (see this recent write-up in Mother Jones). Yet, there is much less clarity and understanding about the role that social media could play in other countries. One ...
Even though the success of the Obama campaign's use of social media is well-documented, there is no end to in-depth studies of what exactly worked and what didn't (see this recent write-up in Mother Jones). Yet, there is much less clarity and understanding about the role that social media could play in other countries.
Even though the success of the Obama campaign’s use of social media is well-documented, there is no end to in-depth studies of what exactly worked and what didn’t (see this recent write-up in Mother Jones). Yet, there is much less clarity and understanding about the role that social media could play in other countries.
One good thing about the abundance of studies of the Obama campaign is that they encouraged more local experts to pay a closer look at how the Internet is being used in domestic campaigns. Gaurav Mishra, Yahoo! Fellow at the Georgetown University, has produced an excellent writeup on how social media is being used in the Indian election for their coverage at Global Voices Online. Here are some tidbits:
The Indian National Congress, on the other hand, seems to be stuck in the web 1.0 era. Both the official Congress website and the Congress Media websites are online brochures. The Vote for Congress portal, which was supposed to revolutionize its online campaign by providing the Congress candidates a platform to blog (Hindu/ TOI), is still not up. None of the senior Congress leaders – Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, and Manmohan Singh – have a website and, what’s worse, their URLs are owned by cyber-squatters (Indian Express). The party does want to set up 600 internet kiosks across the country (Hindu) but without engaging interactive content, their effectiveness might be limited.
Shashi Tharoor – author and former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations – is perhaps the only Congress candidate to seriously leverage the web in his campaign, with presence on Facebook and Orkut (CIOL/ Sify). Former Karnataka chief minister SM Krishna has a Twitter profile. Some of the younger Congress candidates like Priya Dutt, Milind Deora (Facebook) and Sachin Pilot also have well-designed websites, but aren’t really active on social media.
Several other regional parties have either set up, or revamped, their websites, in the run up to the general elections. The CPI-M (Live Mint/ Hindu/ Economic Times/Indian Express) and Samajvadi Party websites seem to be the most well-designed. However, none of these websites are using social media tools, beyond asking for donations and newsletter subscriptions.
Many observers have pointed out that the digital campaigns by BJP and other Indian political parties are amateurish in comparison to Barack Obama’s social media campaign (CIOL/ Networked World) and they are right. BJP’s digital campaign can hardly be compared to Obama’a campaign, in terms of ambition, execution or results. The campaign is hardly going to change the course of the election; the election will still be decided in India’s small towns and villages. But, even if it "fails", the campaign will set a precedent for all future elections in India, just like the ‘India Shining’ campaign did, five years ago.
You may also want to check a related post at Global Voices on how politicians in Colombia are using Twitter.
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