Continuing from where I left in my last write-up on digital footprints of the Indian Navy (its website and social media
extensions), let’s see how the social media extensions of the Indian Navy fare.
And we can say they continue, even extend
the poor show by the Indian Navy on this front.
While two of the claimed official websites
(www.joinindiannavy.gov.in and www.nausena-bharti.nic.in) are
silent on the social media extensions of the Indian Navy, the other one, that
looks in a sort of ‘abandoned state’, does give away three buttons – tucked on
the extreme right of the webpage – for Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus.
Let’s first go for the Twitter page:
The Twitter handle of the Indian Navy is @INDIANNAVY1
that is not verified. The page says it has 4638 followers while it is following
55 Twitter accounts. That is simply not done for an organization of the scale
of the Indian Navy.
But what leaves us squirming is the content
on the page – just one tweet dating back to August 3, 2012 the month the
account was created. It seems after creating the account, the Indian Navy
thought to dump it – but in that case they, ideally, should have removed it
from their website. Okay, it is not on some of their ‘official websites’ but
then it is also on their ‘official website’.
Now about its Facebook page. Here is the screenshot of www.facebook.com/IndianNavy.
As far as I
could go, I saw the first post done on March 8, 2009, so it has some history –
before this page, too, was dumped in July 2012 – a month before the Indian Navy’s
Twitter handle was created and dumped. Its most recent post goes back to July
16, 2012.
A cursory look at the page’s timeline tells
it indeed served as the official Facebook page though the page now says that it
is a ‘community page about Indian Navy’. Interestingly, on its ‘about page’, it
still says that it is the ‘official Facebook page of the Indian Navy’. And
likewise, it has many entries that kill its aesthetics – like it redirects us
to the Indian Navy’s website through a wrong link (www.nausenabharti.nic.in) – that never
opens.
Find here the screenshot.
And about the Google Plus extension – well,
there isn’t any official Google Plus page of the Indian Navy. Instead, the link
redirects us a Google Plus news feed about content related to the Indian Navy.
True, the organization that cannot maintain
a Twitter handle or a Facebook page cannot be expected to create a Google Plus
page – even if ‘Digital India’ is expects them all to do so.