The
Indian General Elections of 2014 will be remembered for their massive numbers.
According to the Election Commission of India, the voting schedule has involved
814.5 million people, making it the largest election ever in history. On
May 16th the results were declared: the National Democratic Alliance led by the
Bharatiya Janata Party won, beating the United Progressive Alliance led by the
Indian National Congress.
What
happened next signified, why the nature of this campaign was different than
anything that the Indian electorate had seen before.
Narendra
Modi, leader of the BJP, made his victory public right away, by tweeting “India
has won! The tweet went viral and the landscape of India elections had changed
for all times to come.
How was it done?
As per a report in Digital
in the Round, Mr. Modi effectively deployed the dual strategies of using
Social Media as a campaigning tool and deploying technology for mass outreach. For
the first time in Indian electoral history a campaign effectively used Facebook
and Twitter to not only increase awareness but also for GOTV (Get out the vote)
purposes. In addition the Modi campaign utilized technology for increasing
reach through the use of 3D imaging. We have explained both the factors in the
discussions below
Using Social Media as a platform to Connect,
Message, Mobilize, Engage
He accustomed his voters and large part of
the Indian population to a new type of communication from the beginning
of the electoral campaign. It started in July 2013 with a digital campaign
called “Mission 272+”, referring to the number of seats the BJP needed for
a majority in Parliament, which eventually became an Android
app. BJP supporters could enroll themselves as voters in a BJP
database and enlist others via mobile phone. The feature of enlisting
others was crucial as it gave the ability to recruit supporters in the hands of
every supporter thus converting every supporter into a mobilizer.
As
the basis of the entire campaign Modi used his Facebook and Twitter pages. 15
million people liked his Facebook
page until now, and he is only second after the US President Obama in terms
of fans following politicians. As the election trend in the Indian pages
was growing, Facebook added the “I’m a voter” button which people could click
after having voted. This increased the interactivity of the social media
platforms (more details on Lighthouse
Insights).
Among
all social media, Twitter had a predominant role during the entire campaign
period, but not only for the BJP’s leader. Twitter
India stated that there have been
56 million election-related Tweets from January 1st until May 12th. It
became the medium of choice for people to consume political content and – even
more important – to relate with politicians. Modi’s Twitter page counts
4.27M followers. According to Twitter India, 5 out of the 10 Top
Elections Tweets have been sent by Modi, including the victory tweet
and the selfie
with his mother.
On voting day he tweeted a selfie with an inked finger (that means that he voted) and he invited people to share their ones using the hashtag #SelfieWithModi. Needless to say, a huge number of voters started to tweet their inked-finger selfie. In this way he engaged prominently young people that are used to this practice, but not only. Indeed, several elders did the same in order to motivate others to come and vote. Then, all the shared images went on his web page and became part of the giant mosaic of the leader.
Thus
by using a combination of Mobile technologies and Social Media, he was not only
able to reach out to a large number of young, middle class voters but he was
able to effectively build his support base and engage with them in a sustained
manner at almost ZERO costs to the campaign!
Using
Technology to increase outreach
In
order to cover large parts of India in as personalized manner as possible, he
used a new technology that politicians have never used before: 3D holograms.
This enabled him to hold 100 different
rallies around India at the same moment reaching 14 million extra voters
while standing in his studio in the Gandhinagar residence. Voters could go to this “hologram 3D” rallies
to see Narendra appearing on the same and talking to them as if he was actually
there.
Using
technology and Social Media allowed Narendra Modi himself as the leader to communicate with his
supporters, creating a direct link between him and people.
The
campaign has been compared with Obama’s campaign in 2008 and then in 2012.
However I would contest that there is one key difference that separates the two
campaigns and that is the use of BIG DATA. I believe that Big Data will very
soon transform the political landscape in India too and fundamentally alter the
way we run our campaigns.
Analyzing
the Obama Campaign
After
the voters returned Obama to office for a second term, his campaign became
celebrated for its use of technology—much of it developed by an unusual team of
coders and engineers—that redefined how individuals could use the Web, social media,
and smartphones to participate in the political process. A mobile app allowed a
canvasser to download and return walk sheets without ever entering a campaign
office; a Web platform called Dashboard gamified volunteer activity by ranking
the most active supporters; and “targeted sharing” protocols mined an Obama
backer’s Facebook network in search of friends the campaign wanted to register,
mobilize, or persuade. [1]
This sounds very familiar to the Modi campaign. However this is where the
similarities ended.
In
Mr. Modi’s campaign social media was primarily used as a means of directing
message to the audience. Although there were elements of engagement and
mobilization, messaging was the key goal. Persuasion was the key strategy.
However in Obama’s campaign, more so in 2012 than in 2008, the main goal was GOTV.
Not persuasion but mobilization.
This
assertion begs the questions that aren’t elections won by persuading voters in
the middle? This is where the Obama campaign differed significantly from the
Modi campaign.
The
core belief behind this assertion is the fact that traditional methods of
classification of voters relies upon polling techniques which slot a large
number of voters as in between due to the fact that we simply do not know
enough about the voters to slot them correctly.
What
the Obama campaign managed to do can be synthesized in 4 simple steps:
1.
Use Social Media and online campaign to spread
the key campaign messages and collecting key user data like emails and mobile
numbers
2.
Use Emails as a means to engage, fund raise and
collect user preference data
3.
Use data collected from the two mediums above to
correctly determine voting patterns through BIG DATA analytics
4.
Create a new kind of neighborhood volunteer
organization to provide real time updates on voter patterns and thus allowing
to target the persuadable voters much more effectively and on polling day to
effectively get out the favorable votes
While
Mr. Modi’s campaign excelled in Point 1, the aspects that he missed were Point
1,2 and 3, which are key to unlocking the true value of online campaigning.
To
illustrate the point further, in the 2008 presidential election, Obama’s
targeters had assigned every voter in the country a pair of scores based on the
probability that the individual would perform two distinct actions that
mattered to the campaign: casting a ballot and supporting Obama. These scores
were derived from an unprecedented volume of ongoing survey work. For each
battleground state every week, the campaign’s call centers conducted 5,000 to
10,000 so-called short-form interviews that quickly gauged a voter’s
preferences, and 1,000 interviews in a long-form version that was more like a
traditional poll. To derive individual-level predictions, algorithms trawled
for patterns between these opinions and the data points the campaign had
assembled for every voter—as many as one thousand variables each, drawn from
voter registration records, consumer data warehouses, and past campaign
contacts.
At
the same time, Obama’s campaign was pursuing a second, even more audacious
adventure in persuasion: one-on-one interaction. Traditionally, campaigns have
restricted their persuasion efforts to channels like mass media or direct mail,
where they can control presentation, language, and targeting. Sending
volunteers to persuade voters would mean forcing them to interact with
opponents, or with voters who were undecided because they were alienated from
politics on delicate issues like abortion. Campaigns have typically resisted
relinquishing control of ground-level interactions with voters to risk such
potentially combustible situations; they felt they didn’t know enough about
their supporters or volunteers. “You can have a negative impact,” says Jeremy
Bird, who served as national deputy director of Organizing for America. “You
can hurt your candidate.”
The
volunteer organization that was thus set up has given birth to a new form of
community organizing. An enormous amount of power is unlocked by the incredibly
simple act of distributing different roles to people who actually feel
comfortable taking them on and converting volunteers into independent yet
connected community mobilizers. The program's innovative "neighborhoodteam" structure and the philosophy of volunteer management underlying it
that is best summarized by the field campaign's ubiquitous motto:
"Respect. Empower. Include."
Every
neighborhood was under the leadership of an NTL (Neighborhood Team Leader). An
NTL will work with a person from the campaign team called the Field Organizer (FO)
to recruit other team members such as coordinators for canvassing, phone
banking and data management. An NTL’s team would be responsible for connecting
with all of the Democratic and undecided voters within their
"turf." Other volunteers who stepped forward in the area would not be
managed by the FO, but by NTL's team. As team leader, an NTL would report
results to the FO, a couple times per week and would be held accountable for
meeting specific goals by certain deadlines. It is unusual for volunteers to
have persistent roles and responsibilities. That is the norm for electoral
organizing campaigns, and perhaps organizing in general these days. In
contrast, the Obama neighborhood team members are organizers themselves,
sometimes working more or less as staff alongside the young FO’s.
Thus
the next wave of innovation in campaigning in India will come in the field of
use of collecting customer data, analyzing the data and using that data to GET
OUT THE RIGHT VOTES!!
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