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Will social media affect parties? fortunes in the coming polls?

With less funding than its political rivals, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has been thriving on its unstructured and unorganised pool of volunteers to engage with people on social media

With less funding than its political rivals, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has been thriving on its unstructured and unorganised pool of volunteers to engage with people on social media. But does a political party?s unstructured approach to interacting with voters sharpen the message or spoil it? Is social media really changing the political approach of parties?

These were some of the questions that representatives from the Congress, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and AAP tackled at a panel discussion hosted by The Financial Express at the Social Media Week in Bangalore on Monday on the topic ?Elections 2014: Will social media be a game changer??

?We are trying to bring change in polity and are not looking at winning seats. AAP is using technology to get the pulse of the people, especially youngsters,? said Prithvi Reddy, a Bangalore-based national executive member of AAP. ?If you make it (social media messaging) organised and structured, the impact will get lost.?

The discussion, which featured AICC spokesperson Rajeev Gowda, the BJP?s deputy spokesperson in Karnataka Aparna Patwardhan, social media professional Kiruba Shankar who is also CEO of BusinessBlogging and Partha Sinha, director at Publicis Worldwide, was moderated by Darlington Jose Hector, resident editor (south), Financial Express.

?Parties need to engage in conversation and not get into the broadcast mode. Social media needs to be a platform for discussion, not advertising,? said Shankar. However, while he felt that the AAP campaign was impactful because it was organic, he also wondered if crowdsourcing the messaging was a recipe for disaster. The BJP?s online campaign is mainly run by volunteers within the organised structure of the party nationally, said Patwardhan. ?We have an organised campaign, we have experts volunteering with us and we also have online volunteers who may not have the time to come to the party office but who can sit at their desktops in their houses and actually participate. They want to volunteer, they want to be part of this change right now.?

The Congress party, which on the other hand has been slower than its rivals in embracing social media, is in the process of putting together its campaign, including an internal one to activate workers, said Rajeev Gowda. ?We will peak at the right time,? said Gowda, who is also a faculty member at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore.

?This is a moment in history where the digital divide is coming down with the internet and smartphone penetration is rapidly going up. This will have an impact on urban India more than the upper middle classes,? said Gowda, noting that it is helping to change a trend in urban parts where people were cynical and stayed away from politics. ?It?s giving people a chance to be politicised. Posting on social media is a political act,? said Gowda.

?This will impact parties more than the voters,? said Sinha, observing that parties will have to develop a conversational approach on social media. He also pointed out that the best use of social media was possibly by the Election Commission in Delhi to get people to actually come out and vote.

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First published on: 18-02-2014 at 04:33 IST
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