Polls ahead, social media warriors hard at work in Chandigarh

“Our strategy is just the positive strategy…we don’t want to pull down others. We just want to display the development works carried out by us. And it requires lot of brainstorming as after you create the content, you have to design it and then ensure it reaches out to maximum people ,” Vikram Bansal said. He added that social media is now considered part of the mainstream campaign. “It is the most effective and economical though where with one content piece or a video you can reach to thousands of people,” he said.

The raw material was being collected in the last five years. Each and every newspaper clipping concerning the development of Chandigarh, for or against Bansal, statements of the BJP were being collected by the team. BJP chief Sanjay Tandon who in the fray for the ticket has his son Saransh Tandon and his team handling the work. There are four ‘social media warriors’ who have been tasked only to respond to people posting negative comments.

“Our intent is to respond with information about the work done by the government and not to pull someone down. So we have kept those four people only to respond to comments,” Saransh said. “We have people who capture the event and then the content is created and subsequently designed,” he said.

Be it Tandon’s Chai pe Charcha or Kirron’s Coffee with Kirron, social media users have been relishing it all. For Aam Aadmi Party candidate Harmohan Dhawan, his sons Bikram Dhawan and Harman Dhawan figure out the day’s strategy with their team.

“After we help out dad in door-to-door campaigning during the day, at night we sit with our team of experts in our ‘war room’ and carry out this work. It requires lot of skills to make the message attractive and in that way it is easy for us because I and Harman both are already into social media ad campaigns,” Bikram told Newsline.

For the candidate from Chandigarh ki Awaaz party Avinash Singh Sharma, he had hired an IT team for it but they weren’t satisfied and now they hired another one.
“We have social media managers and then we have a group of around 40 promoters who promote the content to different pages. We have fan page, official and party pages. We ensure that we are active throughout in Twitter, Instagram, Facebook,” Sharma’s son Aditya said.

Meanwhile, Sanjay Tandon Friday had “Bus pe charcha” as he travelled in a CTU bus to take the feedback from people. Tandon went around from 3 pm to 4.30 pm on the route from PGI to Ram darbar. “ Nine out of ten people I spoke to, said that they want Modi ji again. Infact when we hold events, we are addressing a set crowd. But meeting them randomly is very important,” he said.