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by Sruthi Krishnan

Efficacy lies in the larger impact it has on voters

Chennai: With political parties wooing voters online and using social networking sites to recruit activists, cyber space is becoming critical to campaign agendas. But how effective is a campaign that you join with a click?

“Before we start measuring the efficacy of an online campaign, we need to determine the context within which online campaigning works,” says Nishant Shah, Director (Research), Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.

For instance, the efficacy of a campaign such as ‘Jaago re’, which encourages people to vote, cannot be determined by looking at the number of people registered on the site or daily traffic; rather, its efficacy lies in the larger impact it has in terms of visibility, transparency, and other such factors, he says.

But numbers do matter and what is considered “merely signing up” is a significant activity, argues S. Shyam Sundar, co-director, Media Effects Research Laboratory, Pennsylvania State University in the U.S. “In social networks, an important piece of currency is the strength of a given node in the network.” Hence, by signing on, users are sending a signal of endorsement, which is similar to people showing up at a political rally — it is a measure of success, even though not everyone participates actively.

An online group is a platform to gather people, but that is not enough. People have to be commandeered on the platform to do something concrete to generate value, says Mahesh Murthy, founder of Pinstorm, a digital advertising firm. “The Indian political party online groups seem to have gathered people but are not directing them to action except in stray cases such as Meera Sanyal in South Mumbai. I would largely discount the BJP and Congress online groups for now as mostly valueless.”

Whether or not a campaign fulfilled the objectives it set out to accomplish is a measure of its efficacy, says Mr. Murthy. This can be measured with metrics such as engagement (amount of time and depth of user’s involvement in the message), brand impact (visibility of the message to target user), clicks, sign-ups, ‘viralness’ (how much users spread the message) and persuasion scores (measuring how persuasive the message is), he adds.

“In the specific case, say, of the BJP’s campaign, it seems to have several objectives,” says Mr. Murthy. He outlines three of those — to negate the impact on youth of Narendra Modi and project L.K. Advani as the sole BJP leader; to project the 81-year-old Mr. Advani as a relevant leader to an audience of urban 18 to 35-year-olds; and to project the BJP as the ideological choice at the polls.

He adds that the campaign has done really well on the first two but failed in the third objective. “The campaign merely projects a leader and doesn’t tackle the issues the audience cares about — from Babri to Ram Sene and more.” In advertising terms the campaign has established high reach and frequency levels and is very visible online – but it probably has done very little in the persuasion scores,” he says, adding that it had succeeded in neutralising Modi’s appeal among a section of the public and projected just one leader of the BJP.