Indian Politics Embracing Digital Media

Indian politics has found its new love, love for social media. Parties are going gung-ho about adding digital component to their 2014 election campaigning and overall strategy. While some are making initial strides, some have already crafted their digital marketing strategy.

Reaching out to potential voters through digital medium is not a completely new phenomena, in USA parties are using it for more than 10 years now but this medium really came into limelight for political branding use after much quoted and successful Obama presidential campaign. After Obama won 2^nd term in white house there has been lot of discussion around and about his digital marketing team.

Although in India, most politicians are still getting introduced to this new trend, there definitely are some notable early adopters of technology. From congress’s Shashi Tharoor and Milind Deora to BJP’s Narendra Modi, Arun Jaitely and recently Arvind Kejriwal of AAP.

Narendra Modi, the prime ministerial candidate of BJP, is arguably the first political person to realize power and role of social media in political branding and leveraged this wisdom to project himself as the face of developing India.  He is also leading his party in the same way. BJP has crafted digital strategy and has employed some brilliant people in digital marketing industry to campaign for upcoming 2014 elections.

Congress, although a slow adopter, also don’t want to left behind and is conducting crash courses in social media for its leaders and volunteers to catch up with its rival. Aam Adami Party chief, Arvind kejriwal has more than 1 million followers on Twitter.

All parties are setting aside a portion of their election budgets and time to connect to potential voters via websites, Facebook pages, twitter, Google hanouts and various mobile Apps.

I think this piece is like just scratching surface of a much deeper layer, there is a lot more going on and all that, of course has it’s own pres and cons. All that remains to be noticed.