Here is yet another one!
‘People don’t want to talk about losers – they want to
talk about winners’ says a study report linking ‘Twitter presence and chances
to win elections’.
Though the study has been done by a US university (Indiana
University, Bloomington) based on data from 2010 and 2012 elections in US on Twitter
trend analysis, there are observations that would make the die-hard users of
social media (read Twitter here) in Indian politics particularly happy.
Even if we do not go into the detailed specifics of the
study, it talks about something that matches innately with a trait nurtured and
perpetuated by many of the crooning Indian politicians who sound to have
forgotten if there is something called ‘melody’.
The central-most observation (context: Indian politicians)
of this Twitter-specific study should be the most heartening one.
It says, irrespective of the nature of the tweets (complimentary
or derogatory), those who scored high on Twitter index (here, name mentioned in
the tweets) scored better in the elections. The study quotes results from
different House races in the US
to show the links and prove its point.
Now we cannot say the strategists of politicians like
Narendra Modi or Rahul Gandhi would not come across this study report.
Okay, the team of strategists may be disconnected
from the ground realities of India
(that reflects in poor speechmaking most of the time), they are thoroughly
professional and highly educated for their work assignments and they are right
on the job.
Suppose, the strategists educated in the ivy-league
institutions, pick this study and give it enough of thoughts to implement. What
would happen then?
Some broad outcomes that may be:
We will have almost of the lot of talkative and
not-so-talkative politicians on Twitter even if they are not on other social
media platforms like Facebook.
Twitter would help the big mouths become louder mouths as
they would not have to find some media outlet to ooze out their unrestricted
flow of words; even if they cannot write 'Twitter' or 'tweet'.
As ‘what lies beneath’ doesn’t matter (as the study report
suggests) our dear ‘louder mouth’ politicians would unleash the verbal missiles
with an ever increasing frequency and brutality following the dictum that ‘even
a bad publicity adds to the increasing electoral mileage positively’.
The breaking news stories on media outlets would be broken
even more. There may come a time (and again) when almost of the breaking-news
rundown on political stories would be populated by the stories based on tweets.
The debates on ‘social media platforms like Twitter
redefining the news-media industry’ would get further fillip earning some more good
part-time bucks for the pundits and analysts.
Twitter Inc., the San Francisco, based company would find
a promising market in the world’s largest democracy and second most populous
nation with a rapidly increasing smart-phone and Internet base.
So far, so good! Lucrative prospects ahead!
So, beware!
And be ready for the onslaught!