Gujarat Assembly elections: Poll panel on toes, parties take the cyber route

BJP, Congress increase their social media presence as Gujarat Assembly elections inch closer.

With the Election Commission getting tough on aggressive poll campaigning and expenditure of candidates, political parties in the state have stepped up their social media presence to grab the eyeballs of voters. Fanpages have been mounted, twitter handles tweaked and party songs are set to get the ball rolling on the Internet for the December polls.

While Chief Minister Narendra Modi's fanpage on Facebook has close to 9,28,780 likes and 9,88,519 followers on Twitter, state Congress president Arjun Modhwadia has 88,969 likes on his Facebook page and 6,200 followers on the microblogging site.

Both maintain personal blogs, stage managed by an array of content writers and agencies, which leads one to ask just how important the social media juggernaut is to the political class in the state?

Songwriter and adman Prasoon Joshi says, "Social media has a reach in creating an atmosphere but it has no direct impact on actual votes. As Internet penetration is still low in our country, absolute reach through social media is not there. Conventional media has always been more important. But conventional media is increasingly overlapping with the social media these days. Social media creates more touch points for parties to be accessible to people. Brands are made not on how much you communicate but what you communicate and how much you propagate new thinking."

As the Model Code of Conduct is in place, parties' ads and smear campaigns are not visible in the electronic and and print media. So they are finding their way on social networking sites and blogrolls of politicians.

"Social media is an emerging media and we have made sure that we have a strong presence on the same. As a party, we have given a lot of importance to this tool as we find that a lot of youth and women are active on the same. We recently launched a Facebook page, Join Hands for Change, which 30,000 people have joined. We also launched five songs sung by an array of stellar Gujarati singers, which has been downloaded and liked by people" said Modhwadia.

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