Prashant Kishor may have been perfect for Nitish Kumar and Lalu Yadav to win Bihar and is now the Congress party’s only hope for revival amongst the young Indian hearts. But not just Prashant Kishor, there are many agencies and individuals that work behind the scene to push our own Goan leaders online.
“ The challenge in being a social media manager is to be able to connect with the politician and his audience. Each politician has a different demography to cater to and different issues to focus on. You also need to know how to diplomatically comment on issues without stirring controversy. Sometimes the politicians will have a particular way of speaking, a style of sending text messages or his way of connecting with the people. You need to channel that so that his personality comes through”, stated Nathaniel D’Costa, Creative Director, Spangle Digital Media Services.
“Our very own Vishnu Wagh, Jeetendra Deshprabhu, Digambar Kamat, Vishwajeet Rane, Reginaldo Lourenco and even others have their very own professional media managers. Be it to either post or to share their posts in either groups or sometimes to initiate discussions on these posts to get the likes and attention,” explains Barry Rodrigues, a Verna based social media manager.
It’s easy to take quotes out of context on social media, so one has to be very careful of the mood of the people and the things you can say,” chips in D Costa
Of course, manipulating on Social Media has become a given for politicians. And not surprisingly, the BJP is adept at it. Anant Dessai, a BJP party member explains how the BJP has a cell that creates many fake profiles, to like and reply to Facebook status and Twitter tweets only to gain traction and create numbers under a post, which then gets more people attracted to the posts.
Accounts professor and a social media activist himself Dr Sanjay Dessai feels that just putting posts is not enough as politicians do. He believes that Social media political promotion is effective only when you do follow up with ground work.
Dr Dessai points out how MP’s like Narendra Sawaikar and several BJP members more often than not post pictures only of inaugurations and their discussions and successes in the Lok Sabha but rarely post pictures and posts to discuss the negatives or the wrongs of their governments.
There is a feeling gaining ground that most politicians even in Goa are on social media for publicity and is not a genuine attempt to connect with people and their issues and to use a medium to reach out to people.
But then there are some street smart politicians too who manage their accounts themselves and don’t think twice before posting and end up saying things which are not politically correct
But social media consumer Wahed Sayyed, ends with a voice of reason when he says that politicians should just concentrate on their job of working tirelessly for people and finding success through good administration or responding to grievances of people especially the ones that are raised on social media and then let the accolades come from the public and not the other way round.
