My Live Mint Op-Ed on Why BJP’s Digital Election Campaign Wasn’t A #Fail
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I recently wrote an Op-Ed in Indian business daily Live Mint on why BJP’s digital election campaign wasn’t a #fail.
I have praised BJP’s election campaign before and even argued against dismissing BJP’s campaign as flawed, just because it failed. I have also written about why praising BJP’s election campaign isn’t the same as endorsing it’s ideology.
Here’s the full text of the article –
BJP Wide Web: A Success
BJP supporters dominated online conversations about the elections in the Indian blogosphere and on social networking sites such as Facebook, Orkut and Twitter
Gaurav Mishra
It is tempting to see the Congress’ victory this election as a validation of the tried and tested methods of political campaigning. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ran an aggressive digital media campaign and focused on reaching out to the urban first-time voter, but failed. The Congress ran a traditional campaign, focused on movie songs, local rallies and the charisma of the Nehru-Gandhi family, and succeeded.
However, I would caution against reading too much into this coincidence and mistaking it for causality. It’s not the BJP’s campaign but its Hindutva ideology that has failed the party. The BJP has lost in spite of its brilliant campaign, not because of it.
Over the next few days, with 20/20 hindsight, pundits will argue that the strategy to project Lal Krishna Advani as a strong prime ministerial candidate was flawed, and his attempt to run a Barack Obama-like campaign focusing on the promise of change was laughable. They will point out that India’s 50 million Internet users are a negligible constituency, that the urban Indian youth was never going to step out to vote anyway, and the BJP’s focus on the youth vote was a sign that it was disconnected from the realities of Indian politics. Some will argue that the BJP’s digital campaign was badly designed and ineptly executed, that it tried to use the pull-based Internet and mobile mediums for push advertising, and ended up spamming citizens.
That the BJP’s election campaign failed doesn’t mean it was flawed. Given the ideological and budget constraints he had to work with, BJP strategist Sudheendra Kulkarni did a great job with the campaign.
The BJP ran an aggressive campaign, and tried to position itself as both strong in terms of national security and progressive in terms of economic development. The BJP’s election manifesto was the most well-thought of all political parties and its information technology vision document resonated with the country’s professional class. The BJP set a new precedent with Advani’s blog and ran India’s biggest-ever Google AdWords and short message service (SMS) outreach campaign. Not only that, it also embraced the Web 2.0 value system: It co-opted independent groups such as Friends of BJP into the campaign; reached out to first-time voters through the Advani@ Campus programme and built an army of online volunteers through the Bloggers for Advani initiative.
As a result, BJP supporters dominated online conversations about the elections in the Indian blogosphere and on social networking sites such as Facebook, Orkut and Twitter. One-fourth of the respondents to a recent IMRB survey visited the BJP website, compared with one-tenth for the Congress website.
Perhaps even more importantly, the BJP’s election campaign generated an extraordinarily high amount of interest in the Indian and international media—partly neutralizing the disadvantage of working with a budget of Rs60-75 crore against the Rs150 crore budget available to the Congress.
In retrospect, it’s easy to pretend that the BJP’s defeat in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections was a foregone conclusion, but it wasn’t, and we would do well not to write off the BJP or its campaign strategy too easily. In 2004, an aggressive online campaign didn’t get the US Democratic Party nomination for Howard Dean or the presidency for John Kerry, but it set the foundation for the Netroots movement that Obama tapped into in 2008. I know that India isn’t the same as the US, the BJP isn’t the same as the Democratic Party, and Narendra Modi isn’t the same as Obama. But I also know that the BJP’s love affair with online election campaigning is far from over.
Gaurav Mishra leads research on social media and digital activism in emerging countries as the Yahoo! fellow at Georgetown University, US. He is also co-founder of Vote Report India, an election-monitoring platform. Comment at otherviews@livemint.com
Roy, 
VK and one other person are discussing. 
rahul jauhari 2:53 pm on May 24, 2009 Permalink |
Excellently argued.
I agree it was the BJP ideology that lost, not the digital campaign.
However I believe that merely being present across mediums is insufficient.
Also, you cannot use social media the same way other traditional media are used for communication.
Am no expert here, but it’s an interesting debate
VK 4:38 pm on May 24, 2009 Permalink |
I agree with the basic argument about not writing off the web strategy because of poor overall results, but this: “its information technology vision document resonated with the country’s professional class” is inaccurate to say the least. I’ll just point you to Atany Dey’s website (he’s a member of Friends of BJP, if I am not mistaken): http://www.deeshaa.org/2009/03/16/bjps-it-for-all/
Roger 10:19 am on May 25, 2009 Permalink |
The BJP’s new media campaign may have been brilliant, as you argue, but despite embracing the Web 2.0 value system, the party still propagated its retrograde political, social and economic agenda. And that’s only one reason for it’s defeat. If it refuses to put the government on the mat in Parliament as in the 14th Lok Sabha and continues to remain an obstructionist (walk outs, storming the well, poor attendance, easily bought members, etc) opposition, no amount of tech support from well-meaning friends like you will get it anywhere in the next five years.
And, by the way, Sudheendra Kulkarni, RP Singh, et al came out as asses every night in television debates. Nalin Kohli did much better.
Roy 9:38 am on June 7, 2009 Permalink |
BJP lost because it didn’t reach the ‘real’ voter. They wanted to do arm chair campaigning relying heavily on media to do the job, typically like Brand Managers of MNCs would do. Last time they got Right message for the people they were reaching, unfortunately which was wrong. This time there was not much of a message though was not as metro centric as last times but still reached the same people which they reached last time .
What we muist know is that people like you and me are not the real voter. To get the real voter who matters you have to reach them in person. Media only makes the personal meeting easier.