Times Now Tracks the Public Sentiment in relation to100 days of Modi Sarkar

Love it or hate it, since past few months Indian netizens were being bombarded with politically inclined posts, messages and tweets. After the formation of the new government, one might have thought that the political content on social media might take a back seat, which was not the case.

Every move of the government was being talked about on Twitter. On 3^rd September 2014 Modi’s government officially concluded 100 days of being in power, leveraging people’s interest in politics. Times Now recently launched a micro site www.100daysofmodisarkar.in to make the most out of the hype around the new government.

In the recent past, Times Now used Twitter to its maximum potential by introducing and promoting several hashtags. To mark the big occasion of the completion of 100 days of the new government, they decided to take go beyond creating hashtags & paved path for a special micro-site.

Objective - Various news channels and agencies gave special importance to this landmark day, since it’s the BJP, who in their pre-election campaign promised to turn around the fortunes of the country to a greater extent, right from day one. Hence it became imperative for Times Now to make the most of it. The micro-site enabled Times Now to add more depth to social media campaign and bring in more conversations and traffic to their content. Once people start sharing their opinions on the topic using various hash tags, it acts as a catalyst to drive more such conversations around the topic through their followers and friends.

Execution -  To mark the completion of 100^th day of the new government, Times Now introduced a micro site with a simple interface following minimal design philosophy.

The front page of the micro site displayed the total number of tweets, using #100DaysOfModiSarkar it also included overall sentiments of the tweets. To make it more appealing, they included the number  of tweets sent out on that particular day itself.

The front page of the micro-site also saw a section embedded with tweets from users using #100DaysOfModiSarkar hashtag. There were few main issues laid out for Modi Government, including that of corruption, lack of leadership, inflation, development etc.Times Now created separate hash tags which were used by users to voice their opinion on these particular issues.

After clicking on any particular hash tag, users are directed towards a fresh page where a user is asked to tweet his/her opinion about the issue.

Alike the front page, the sentiments and number of tweets stats were incorporated here too.

Positives - As compared to their rival brands, Times Now was smart enough to cash on the hype and involvement of the public sentiment towards Modi Sarkar. Through this micro-site, they managed to create a one stop destination to read all the conversations happening on Twitter regarding the topic. The micro-site enabled users not only to participate in the on-going conversation but also kept a track on the conversation unfolding on Twitter. Creating separate hash tags highlighting key issues was the best part of the activity, as it enabled the conversation to be more specific and relevant. It is very rare to see social media efforts of such magnitude carried out to mark completion of 100 days of a new government. Times Now surely struck the right chord with this activity.

Scope of Improvement There is not much Times Now would have added to this activity, but I personally would have loved to see some video content on their micro-site. For every separate hashtag they created such as #Governance, #ForeignPolicy, #Corruption etc . Times Now asked users a question based on it, with that they could have incorporated videos of their expert panels or Editor in chief Arnab Goswami stating their opinions. This may have helped Times Now in pushing their brand in a much better way than it already does. The micro-site itself was not heavily marketed via their channel. Publicizing the article more could have resulted into more conversations and website traffic.

Closing Thoughts It was really astonishing to see a brand take such huge efforts to mark an event like this. But since it is relevant to the brand it created a huge impact on social media. Value that users got on visiting this micro-site was the real force behind the success of this activity. Taking a look at the audience’s conversations / sentiments and creating exclusive properties in sync with the TG is something other brands can take out of this campaign.