As most people know BJP was going pretty aggressive with its online campaign for the upcoming elections and also positioning its Prime Minister Candidate Mr.L.K Advani as the next Prime minister through blog, twitter and online ads across the online world. BJP has been so aggressive with its online marketing that its ads are even running on what one would call objectionable sites.
Looking at this it seems Congress which is the ruling party has woken up to the strategy followed by BJP and is looking to ramp up its own social media marketing inorder to take on BJP.
As this Indiatoday article reports Congress is working on launching a special website and also plans to use social networking sites such as Orkut, Facebook and YouTube for campaigning. Like BJP it also plans to advertise via search engines like google. It seems the election season and the bitter battle between the ruling and opposing party and their use of online media could increase the online spend numbers substantially for 2009.
All in all it remains to be seen how congress positions its online campaigns as BJP seems to be clearly playing the advani card when it comes to garnering support. It will be interesting to see if Congress uses Sonia Gandhi or Rahul Gandhi in its online ads to garner support from the online audiences. Whatever may be the result of the upcoming elections one can be rest assured that 2009 can be termed as the year when Politics & politicians became online savvy and I believe this trend will rival the online savviness of US elections in the years to come in India.
I see Congress using Jai Ho and it seems they also have a video on YouTube for the same.