If I Were Managing @PMOIndia

On 23rd January 2012, the Indian Internet community was abuzz with the news that the Prime Minister of India, Dr. Manmohan Singh, had set up an official Twitter account - @PMOIndia.

Initially the move was welcomed. Most of us thought it'd be a great opportunity for the PM tso connect with his people. We've all seen what Barack Obama and the White House are doing on Twitter, and we hoped that the good Doctor and his PR team would take a leaf out of their books.

Instead, what we got was a bunch of posts that looked like this:

A quick analysis tells you that:

1. The account is a bland mouthpiece for the PM.
2. There's nothing on the account that you can't get in traditional news coverage.
3. It's a purely one-way street. There's no conversation, no response to tweets or questions that might be coming in. Which goes against everything that Twitter is supposed to be.

Watching The West Wing has triggered a serious interest in me for political communication, and I've watched avidly how social media has changed the nature of the field. So here's my (admittedly idealistic) pitch presentation on handling the official social media account of the Prime Minister of India.

The Insight
Ordinary people don't know or understand the reasons behind decisions the government makes. All we get is the information that TV channels and newspapers put out. With scams and scandals at the centre of attention for the last couple of years, people have a very bleak and cynical perspective of the government. Evidence of this can be found in the consistently low voter turnout in urban areas. Belief in the government - and indeed Indian democracy - is at an all-time low.

The Strategy
Let's make governance more accessible to the people through content that is transparent, relevant and understandable. And carry on conversations that will help the government listen to and engage with people at a deeper level.

The Execution
Deconstruct decision-making.
Even the simplest-sounding decision has some logic (we hope) behind it. Just announcing that you're going to be amending the Factories Act to strengthen labour laws and ensure their compliance doesn't mean much to anybody.

What I'd do is this: post the 'in a nutshell' decision in 140 characters. And then follow up with a link to a Slideshare presentation for those who want to know more about the decision.

The presentation itself needs to be written in a different language than Governmentalese. Make it simple. Advertising-style. Problem/Opportunity --> Idea --> Decision --> Execution --> Responsibility --> Measurability. Write it simply, make it visual rather than verbose. Think of it as an Executive Summary of an Executive Summary. After all, who has the time to go through insanely lengthy government reports?

Listen.
The nature of Twitter is such that things that make news swiftly show up in that little pane in the bottom left of your Twitter screen. First, it's a great way for the PM to tell what his electorate is discussing, from defining who is poor to Kingfisher Airline's woes. It'd make sense for the PM to comment (online, if not offline as well) on some of these topics.

And why does the PM have to wait for a conversation to begin? What's stopping the PM's social media team from getting a hashtag trending, like we do for our clients day after day. Use hashtags as a tool to spark a conversation, and get an insight into what India feels about an issue.

This'd make governance far more democratic, because the PM would actually be listening to the voice of the people.

Have a point of view.
Twitter is an influencer medium. Sure, there are thousands of tweeple who just share stuff and yet have lots of followers. But it's the ones who share with a stance that are the true influencers. As I write this, @PMOIndia has 49,811 followers. Shameful for the leader of the world's largest democracy. I'm willing to bet that if the account changed its tonality from 'broadcast' to 'influence', they'd add plenty of new followers.

The thing is, I elect my MPs (and hence my PM) for the opinions they have. When they express their opinions in public, it's a reminder of what their government stands for, which is something all of us need to be reminded of from time to time.

It goes without saying that people use Twitter to crib, curse and make fun of people. @PMOIndia is already the butt of many jokes - as seen in the conversation below.

But I believe it's better to be roasted for expressing your opinion than just for being there. And we've seen how the twitterati can spring to a brand's (or a person's) defence when they think he or she is being criticised unfairly.

Have conversations.
I fundamentally believe that people like to talk to the brands they use or aspire to use. And they like it even more when those brands talk back. If Volkswagen were to have a conversation with me, I'd RT every post, and then talk about it offline as well. Apply the same thought here.

It's impossible (and not a good idea, because of all the trolls out there) for @PMOIndia to converse with every single person who mentions them. Instead, pick one person a day to have a conversation with. He or she could be a loyalist or an opposer or simply neutral. But an intelligent conversation is an opportunity to reinforce or sway beliefs, and turn somebody into an influencer for you, both online and offline.

Social media is a governance tool, not a political one.
Use it as such. If you're going to use Twitter to tell people how evil the Opposition is, or whom to vote for, it's going to backfire. Rise above the politics. @PMOIndia seems to have got this bit right, and I'd carry on this approach.

The Metrics
What could the ROI for @PMOIndia be? On a qualitative, non-political basis, I'd measure the success of the account as follows:

• Have I built loyalty among online Indians towards the PM? Loyalty in this case goes beyond the number of followers, and extends into overall sentiment and number and quality of positive mentions. Above all - have the tweeple of India shown their support of the PM online, maybe even outshouting the dissenters?
• Has listening online helped the government validate, improve or change a decision? If yes, then how often?
• The PM is the face of the government. How he or she is perceived affects how the government is perceived. Has there been a notable improvement in how people perceive the PM (online and offline) after he's taken to Twitter?
• Do people believe that the government is more accessible and more relevant to them?

I haven't included election-related metrics because I don't believe the @PMOIndia account should be used as a political tool. It is the account of the office of Prime Minster, not the person currently occupying the chair and the party he belongs to.

I'll end with a disclaimer: this post is not intended to reflect my political beliefs. Dr. Singh could resign tomorrow, the Opposition could win the election, and I'd still make the same sort of recommendations to our next PM.

I'd love to know what your take on this is. Weigh in with a comment and let's start talking.

Hashtag Wars

Call me a troll, but some things need to be trolled.

The Curious Case Of Dr. Pro And Mr. Troll

Four months into a company that's heavy on social media, and there's one thing I've discovered that I never expected:

All of us here have split personalities.

Without realising it, we've all been acting as two people with the accounts whose social media profiles we manage.

Personality 1: Dr. Pro. The nice guy is the one who handles the Facebook Page or Twitter profile. Who creates engaging, nice, rather paavam content. Puts it up dutifully. Carries on conversations. And just generally generates the numbers that keep clients happy.

Personality 2: Mr. Troll. Between posts, our social media man turns into the social media troll. Tweeting out to the brands his fellow content writers manage, joking with them, even criticising them to some extent.

It's interesting how quickly, easily and often I've seen this change in behaviour online. Not just in others, but in myself too.

It's rather natural, actually. One, all of us who dabble in social media are expected to be influencers. We all use our personal networks to promote our brands. And we all try to be funny on Twitter so that we get more followers - just to say we're this much closer to Lady Gaga.

Two, when we're not posting, or thinking about posting, we're just being ourselves. As people, we have every right to express ourselves, even if it means cracking a joke or two at our brands.

And three, we also tend to talk to brands hoping for a response. So that a few of the thousands of followers of the brand will also follow us after being drawn into the conversation. That's my conspiracy theory, anyway.

The catalyst to write this post was a Twitter conversation I had with one of our brands.

This is hardly a conversation that should bother me. It was a joke, meant without malice, just getting cheeky with a boy band signed on to the record label.

The question is: at what point do we draw a line?


Let's not consider defamation and vulgarity. Any digital professional who defames or gets vulgar with his brand deserves to lose the account.

But are we allowed to criticise when we believe we're justified? Are we allowed to laugh at our brands when they say something stupid (through the keyboards of our fellow creatives)? How far can those boundaries be pushed? Do those boundaries change from client to client?

Do we get to play audience or do we have to stick with being admin? Am I allowed to tell a brand on social media - in an individual capacity - that I do not like its product, even though I may be directly or indirectly managing that account in a professional capacity?

I suspect there isn't a right answer to this question. And I'd love to discuss this. Do leave a comment, and let's carry on this conversation.

The Dark Side of Viral Marketing

On 16th November, Jack In The Box kicked off what became India's (and possibly the world's) biggest viral campaign of 2011. By the time we took our foot off the gas, #kolaveri had covered most of the globe. The original video had gotten (at the time of writing this) over 25 million hits and spawned a whole bunch of cover versions. Dhanush was on billboards and news channels, and organising flash mobs at Churchgate Station. Amitabh Bachchan was tweeting about it. And Jack In The Box was getting a whole lot of phone calls and news coverage.

Kolaveri was a case study in viral marketing. It showed the world how great seeding and promotion could get a great piece of content to the right people, in the least time and the least cost. It showed the faith our client had in us - and the power of social recommendation.

Then, two weeks later, we got a phone call that made us painfully aware of the other side of social media marketing. The jugaad side. The dark side. The one that we've all been aware of, but chosen to ignore.

The Jedi Knights of social media do it the hard way. We identify the best channels to place the content, and seed it over and over again, each time giving the audience a new way to engage with it. We painstakingly identify influencers and engage with them. If we're crowdsourcing, we slave over getting entries in. We slave over curating them and putting together the final piece of content. We track, religiously. We optimise. We celebrate every thousandth like and every hundred-thousandth video view. We celebrate the people who make the content viral.

The Sith Lords, of course, are another story.

We've heard of the agencies - and clients -  that pay money to buy likes on Facebook. The ones that pay people to create fake Facebook profiles and sit around all day clicking the Like button on all their Pages, creating an artificial spike in their Facebook Insights.

We know about the agencies - and clients - that 'crowdsource' videos and other content. The crowd is made up of agency employees and their friends. Of course, the film has been produced by the agency, scripted and staged to the last detail. And then passed off as videos done by fans in the real world.

The phone call we received the other day was one such request.

Why was I so pissed off?

Frankly speaking, we owe the client a lot for Kolaveri. They could've easily insisted we buy likes, we create 'crowdsourced' videos. They didn't. They trusted us to do our jobs and supported us in any way they could. The results are out there for the world to see.

Contrast this to a client who refused to acknowledge that we know what we are doing. Who refused to trust our judgement of content. Who asked us to fake something that could've been done better and for real. All this after Kolaveri.

Why fake an orgasm when someone is willing to work hard to give you a real one?

It all comes back down to two things.

One: The Measurement Curse. Clients are desperate for the numbers that will make their bosses happy and their bonuses fatter. Agencies are desperate for the numbers that will help them retain the business. It's a dirty business, really. As long as clients are going to be rewarding employees and agencies on the basis of quantitative measures - likes, comments, % virality, % engagement - this shit will continue to go down.

Two: The 'Know-It-All' Curse (I haven't blogged about that yet). Clients who don't understand audiences believe they are brighter and more creative than the agency they hire. They don't spend a tenth as much time as we do tracking trends. Or understanding what makes a campaign viral. Or learning about the platforms we use. Yet, they mysteriously always know better than we do.

I'm under no illusions that this rant will change things. But I just have one more thing to say to the Sith Lords of viral marketing.

Agencies can fool the client. Clients can fool their bosses. Agencies and clients can both fool themselves. 

But ultimately, you can't fool the audience.