Didi Digital

Technology has profoundly changed the way people absorb communications, and even whether they chose to absorb at all. The rapid dissemination of smart phones, broadband and wireless internet connections and ad-skipping digital video recorders has worn the effectiveness of the traditional mass media. Citizens of a country not only have more choice of media, they also get to decide whether and how they want to receive commercial content.

A political or electoral campaign may be viewed as a well-planned marketing effort which seeks to influence the decision making process within a specific group. In modern politics, the most high profile electoral campaigns are focused on general elections and candidates for head of state or head of government, often a president or prime minister or a Chief Minister.

Elections in our country have always been a display of triumph of the best advertising practice, where the political party, which promoted its manifesto in the most relevant way (in the most relatable way for the public), would emerge victorious. With passage of time, however, the advertising techniques in elections are fast changing to suit the requirements of the digital world. Hoardings, wall posters, leaflets, flags and other printed publicity material has always been and are still a part of election campaigning. Nonetheless, real-time promotions on social media[1], backed by smart looking ads on television and the radio are being used in contemporary elections on a massive scale for propaganda purposes, as these mediums can harness the full attention of the voters.

The re-election of Mamata Banerjee as the Chief Minister of West Bengal, and the win of Ms.Banerjee led Trinamool Congress (TMC) in the 2016 West Bengal assembly elections with a gargantuan majority, may be attributed in part to the embracing of new marketing practices. TMC’s electoral campaign in the recently concluded Assembly election in West Bengal combined an enigmatic politician, a commanding message of development, and a thoroughly cohesive modern marketing program.

The "outsider" from the backstreet of Kalighat

What is undeniable is that Chief Minister Banerjee is mass leader, and is able to establish an instant connect with the majority of her voters, especially womankind. The West Bengal Chief Minister likes to project herself as a plebeian folk heroine in crumpled sari and chappals[2] who revels in her street-fighting image.  Ms. Mamata Banerjee is the quintessential “outsider” from the backstreets of Kalighat[3] who surged ahead without a political godfather. She is also regarded as a nonconformist who has little respect for customs and protocol, and that is precisely one of the drivers of her popularity and pull.

Circa 2011

As soon as she became the Chief Minister of the state of West Bengal in 2011[4], Mamata Banerjee channelised her plentiful energy to usher in development and implement socio-welfare schemes that eventually helped her preserve power in this eastern state of India. She doled out loans to the jobless youth for self-employment, scholarships to girls, arranged for free medicine and treatment in state-run hospitals, among others. Yet, in the build-up to the 2016 West Bengal assembly elections, the TMC was caught up in allegations of corruption, with the twin scandals of Narada[5] and Saradha[6] engulfing her partymen.

Most importantly, Didi (as Ms.Banerjee is popularly called in West Bengal) put in place an enormous propaganda machinery to tell the people about the development efforts and welfare schemes undertaken and implemented by the TMC government in the past five years.

Didi Goes Digital

Increasingly, all the politicians with strong grassroot mass bases - from Modi to Kejriwal to Mamata, have recognised that digital technologies are an essential facility to reach out to their voters and they use it as a critical rapid response tool”. Most leading political leaders have realised the need for voters to connect with their prospective leaders and vice versa and used it for disintermediation.

Very early on, TMC understood the value of the internet platforms and information technology for youth engagement. The TMC having realised this used modern internet communication technologies to drive voter engagement (much akin to modern customer engagement programs), ground mobilisation and put in place a counter-narrative to negative publicity around high-profile incidents like the Kolkata flyover collapse or the political sting expose.

Abhishek Banerjee[7], MP and also founder president of the TMC youth wing, directed the party’s communication initiatives, crunched data and led digital and communications war-room from Kalighat supported by former quizmaster and MP Derek O Brien. They raised a sharp core of youth volunteers from national law schools, business schools who worked as a tight 24x7 rapid response team, quickly analysing daily events, news breaks, rival campaigns, prepared briefing memos and factsheets for Mamata and Abhishek which the two leaders used in their direct public contact campaign programmes. The TMC also took its youth-connect strategy one step forward by creating a mobile application that can be downloaded on Android and IOS handheld and portable devices.

West Bengal has 65 million voters. About 21 million people in the state are connected to the internet. A recent IAMAI study found 8.3 million Facebook users in the 18+ voting age in the state, besides finding 70 constituencies in Bengal which were likely to be highly impacted by engagement on social media platforms, particularly on Facebook.

Mamata Banerjee's digital outreach through Facebook and Twitter has been commendable, as she used these digital platforms  to run a series of synchronised online and offline marketing & promotional activities and an extensive campaign for more than 45 days.

Chief Minister Banerjee also became the first Indian politician to use a Facebook 360 video[8] for an election rally. In the middle of the seven-phase election, Mamata Banerjee did a Facebook Q&A to cover more ground and reach out to young constituents. “Q&A with Didi” was a huge hit among first-time voters in West Bengal.

She also did an impromptu Facebook-live[9] ahead of Naboborsho or the Bengali new year, which received huge engagement in views and likes. On 13 April, 2016, Mamata Banerjee had posted her first Facebook LIVE video which got over 2 lakh views in less than 24 hours.

According to the official Twitter handle of All India Trinamool Congress, the TMC chief wrote on her Facebook page: “I am happy to share with all of you the new Facebook 360 degree video that is being used for the very first time ever, for any election campaign in India. Please watch some clips of a padyatra held earlier this week at Bardhaman town. My salute to the Ma-Maati-Manush for their overwhelming enthusiasm and participation. Yes, Trinamool is winning.”

A TMC music video, which claims that the face of West Bengal has changed in the last five years, has been played around 70,000 times across various digital platforms since it was released. The two-minute video has the new party anthem “Paanch bochore bodle geche banglar mukh” (The face of Bengal has changed in the last five years) written and composed by popular singer Anupam Roy. “This is the first State election campaign song to make its debut on Facebook and has gone viral very quickly. It is remarkable how they have made it so catchy and apt for the digital medium,” Ankhi Das, Public Policy, Director of Facebook, told the Press Trust of India (PTI). On Ms.Banerjee’s Facebook page alone, the video got over 45,000 hits. The TMC also has a presence on SoundCloud[10], where they have put out the election campaign song.

Chief Minister Banerjee also used Facebook and Twitter to promote a short film series that went with the hashtag #RealBengal that basically highlighted her government’s achievements in the last five years (2011-16) with 'real stories' of people. She also tweeted these videos on Twitter along with sharing pictures of the various rallies she participated in. Banerjee's Facebook page got liked by about 16 lakh people and her Twitter handle Mamata Banerjee@Mamataofficial has more than 2.6 lakh followers. "Mamatadi is a mass leader and she from the very beginning had gauged the importance of social media - be it Facebook, Twitter, Youtube or WhatsApp. Even if she conducts a rally with two lakh people she believes in posting a Facebook message or a tweet," said Brien, who himself has more than six lakh followers in Twitter.

Last but not the least, the TMC also has a website that has a weekly poll, their manifesto[11], a voter's guide, student's corner and a little widget that counts the number of days in government.

The Verdict

The Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress won for the second time the West Bengal assembly elections with a thumping majority in 2016. TMC secured 44.9% of votes in this election, almost six percentage points higher than in the 2014 general election, to claim 211 of 294 seats. Fighting incumbency and the opposition alliance of the Left and the Congress, the TMC now has a solid two-thirds majority having bagged a total of 211 seats.

With a substantial gain in vote share in the 2016 assembly election (as compared to the 2011 assembly elections), the Chief Minister of West Bengal has established in absolute terms that her politics of redistribution and largesse give her an irrefutable strength , with which she can overcome even her own party’s shortcomings. 

A post poll analysis of conversations on Facebook regarding the Assembly polls across all states (in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Kerala and Puducherry)done by the social media giant shows that Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee was the top leader, figuring in 22 % of the conversations – crowning her as the most talked about political leader on Facebook in India.

Disclaimer / Caveat: Whatever I have stated is publicly available information and does not represent the view of the firm I work for.

(This post is not copyrighted and may be reproduced freely with appropriate attribution of source)

---

[1] Social media are computer-mediated tools that allow people, companies and other organizations to create, share, or exchange information, career interests, ideas, pictures and videos in virtual communities and networks.

[2] Chappals are a type of open-toed sandal, typically worn as a form of casual wear. They consist of a flat sole held loosely on the foot by a Y-shaped strap or thong that passes between the first and second toes and around both sides of the foot.

[3] Kalighat is a lower to middle income class locality in Southern Kolkata from where Chief Minister Banerjee hails. It is also famous for housing the famous Kalighat temple.

[4] In 2011 Mamata Banerjee had pulled off a landslide victory for the TMC-Congress alliance in West Bengal by defeating the 34-year-old Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front government, the world's longest-serving democratically-elected communist government.

[5] A political sting expose on select TMC leaders carried out and telecast by Narada portal.

[6] The Saradha Group financial scandal was a major financial scam and alleged political scandal caused by the collapse of a Ponzi scheme run by Saradha Group, a consortium of over 200 private companies that was believed to be running collective investment schemes popularly but incorrectly referred to as chit funds in Eastern India. Many prominent personalities were arrested for their involvement in the scam including two Members of Parliament (MP) - Kunal Ghosh and Srinjoy Bose, former West Bengal Director General of Police Rajat Majumdar, a top football club official Debabrata Sarkar, Sports and Transport minister in the West Bengal Government – Madan Mitra.

[7] Abhishek Banerjee is an Indian politician and a Member of Parliament to the 16th Lok Sabha from Diamond Harbour Lok Sabha constituency, West Bengal. He won the Indian general election, 2014 being an All India Trinamool Congress candidate. He is also the National President of All India Trinamool Youth Congress the youth wing of the All India Trinamool Congress, a political party in India, currently in power in the Indian state of West Bengal. He is also the nephew of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.

[8] A 360 video is created with a camera system that simultaneously records all 360 degrees of a scene. Viewers can pan and rotate a 360 video's perspective to watch it from different angles. These videos have a “360 video” label in the lower left-hand corner and are viewable on computer, iOS devices and Android devices.

[9] Live videos are real-time video posts on Facebook. Live videos from public figures you follow and your friends will appear in your News Feed. When you're watching a live video or a video that was live, you can tap or click Subscribe to get notified the next time that Facebook account starts a live broadcast.

[10] SoundCloud is a global online audio distribution platform based in Berlin, Germany, that enables its users to upload, record, promote, and share their originally-created sounds. By allowing sound files to be embedded anywhere, SoundCloud can be combined with Twitter and Facebook to let members reach an audience better. By clicking a share button corresponding to the site where they wish to promote the shared content - such as Facebook - and approving the post, artists and publishers can let audiences on that site see the content through their desired media outlet.

[11] Released in five languages, including Alchiki—a language used by Santhals and tribes in Jangalmahal—the  Trinamool Congress (TMC) manifesto for 2016 West Bengal assembly polls  was written in first person by chief minister Mamata Banerjee herself