Politics and social networking
Gujarat CM Narendra Modi during his Google+ Hangout session
Campaigning for elections is serious business, and with evolving times, the methods employed by politicians and their parties have evolved as well, especially in the way they exploited the social media. And the response is instant and exciting.
US president Barack Obama’s passionate defence of his term at the White House, followed by some straight-forward and stirring promises for a second term, at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte set the micro-blogging social networking website Twitter ablaze. Excerpts from Obama’s speeches were trending on Twitter, with a staggering 52,757 tweets being spoken about in a minute, by far the highest for any politics-related subject. That was not all. The convention has so far garnered over nine million votes. In comparison, the entire number of tweets on all topics sent during Election Day in 2008 was just 1.8 million!
So which was Obama’s most famous line from his speech that night? "I'm no longer just a candidate, I’m the President.” According to Twitter, that tweet alone was retweeted 43,646 times. Phew! Even tweets from Obama’s official Twitter account were not left out of being retweeted. A tweet, which read, “No family should have to set aside a college acceptance letter because they don’t have the money. — President Obama” was retweeted over 18,000 times.
Last week, going one step further than his usual active online presence, Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi made use of G+ Hangout, a multi-video conferencing feature provided by Google’s social networking website Google+, to interact with the netizens of Ahmedabad. Anchored by Bollywood anchor Ajay Devgn, the chief minister spoke about the need for progress, skill development, strengthening educational infrastructure and his plans for Gujarat. He even interacted with those who were online and part of the Hangout.
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