Social Media Marketing: Failure Story – “Advani for PM”

Mr. L.K. Advani, one of the senior most leader of BJP (Bharitya Junta Party), tried his hands on Social Media with a 360⁰ campaign. It included Youtube, Facebook, Blogs, Orkut, Portal and google adwords. There was a time when you searched for Congress or Sonia Gandhi and link for Advani’s website was there in the top paid results. The total spend was over 250 crores. But the campaign was a huge failure in many ways. Lets discuss the same on the basis of 5 steps defined by Dr. Sunil Gupta from HBS.

1.      Understanding the medium: The medium proved successful for Barack Obama during his campaign. BJP recruited lot of PR and advertising agencies and allocated them huge budgets. But the difference in culture was not understood properly and the internet penetration percentage is very high in U.S.A. as compared to India.

2.      Positive and Negative Reactions: They were really prompt in replying to the queries and comments on various forums. They were able to engage lot of people and got support from various other non-official communities on net.

3.      Objective: Their aim was to promote BJP’s ideology and create a buzz in cyber space by connecting to youth. They also wanted to gather volunteers and got around 7000 of them from this campaign.

4.      Engagement: Though they were very active on cyber space but none of the leaders talked about the website on other offline media except Narendra Modi. They even launched a 30 page document on the IT policy of BJP but the campaign was not supported properly from other promotional activities. The communication was not integrated and thus did not get desired results.

5.      Return on Investment: BJP emerged as the second largest party after the elections with 157 seats (181 in 2005). The following statement sums it all, “BJP's performance in the election was much unexpected and the success of the NDA that had been hoped for had not materialized”- Rajnath Singh.

To sum it all up, this strategy failed as compared to Obama’s campaign due to the cultural difference. The tech savvy youth in India is the group of people with lowest voting interest and the internet penetration is very low in India. The communication was not integrated and never achieved desired impact. We can conclude from this that in India where 70% population still resides in village a social media strategy for elections will not work.