The Congress Website - www.aicc.org.in
The Congress party has been the only political
party with a website in English and Hindi since
2004 and Urdu since 2006.
In the run-up to the 2009 Lok Sabha Elections,
both the Congress and the BJP launched revamped
websites.
The BJP took the complete Obama route by first
launching the Advani biography and then the
Advani website (www.lkadvani.in). This
was based upon the Obama website using very
similar images and links. This website was
extremely slick, well designed, and
aesthetically pleasing. It was obvious that a
massive budget had been expended in the creation
of this corporate-like website. The effort of
the Advani team was to project Advani as a young
thinking elder statesman. The entire exercise
was personality driven and aimed at what Advani
said in his initial message the “netizens”. The
main BJP site (www.bjp.org) has a very
similar design.
The Congress party,on the other hand, put up a
website which, while containing a huge amount of
information, has the advantage of ease of
navigation, light pages leading to quick loading
and an extremely simple interface. All our
studies of the past had shown us that
connectivity in many parts of India is still
very slow and this kind of site would do far
better than a full bells and whistles heavy
site.
We finally launched the revamped Congress
website in English on 18.03.2009, in Hindi on
21.03.2009 and in Urdu on 22.03.2009. We found
that while the popularity of our website kept
increasing, the L K Advani website was still far
ahead of us. The secret of the Advani website
was finally disclosed by the BJP in an interview
to India Today – “In the first week after its
launch, the website was getting about 5,000
visitors a day but it soon dwindled to 300. This
was when Advani’s long-time aide Deepak Chopra,
an MBA realised that even the best of products
need marketing, thereby resulting in a tie-up
with Google”. In other words the Advani site,
while attracting an initial curiosity, had
stopped attracting visitors or getting hits till
they decided to tie-up with Google for a massive
advertising campaign. This campaign resulted in
an immediate effect with an exponential increase
in the popularity of the Advani site. The same
strategy has been used by the BJP for the main
BJP site. One cannot visit any portal or any
major site without coming across online
advertisements for the Advani site and the BJP.
While we found that the popularity of the
Congress site was gradually increasing and
stabilising at higher and higher levels with
each passing week, we still remained behind the
Advani and the BJP sites. Whenever the Congress
website started getting more and more popular
and getting close to the performance of the
Advani site, the BJP would up the frequency of
its advertisements on the Internet to ensure
larger numbers of visitors and hits.
This was when we discovered that a new pattern
was emerging. Each time we would be closer to a
date of polling the interest in the Congress
website would go up and the interest in the
Advani and the BJP website would go down and,
one day before the date of polling, the Congress
website would overtake the Advani and the BJP
websites by huge margins.
This pattern was seen on the 15th (one day
before the polling on the 16th) and on the 22nd
(one day before the polling on the 23rd). A
similar increase has been seen on the 29th
(polling on 30th April). It is obvious that the
voter is seeking information about the Congress
immediately prior to the casting of votes and
conversely loses interest in Advani and the BJP
on the eve of the casting of votes. The
International Website Monitoring Site “ALEXA”
www.alexa.com gives the ranking of each website
with the best being at number 1, in other words
the lower the figure the higher the ranking. The
Alexa Chart given below tells the real picture:
Placing multiple advertisements on Internet
portals and paying for each click (for each
visitor who visits the Advani or the BJP site)
can only ensure that a large number of visitors
visit the site but cannot ensure their loyalty.
When the time for decisions comes they will very
easily leave to go where they wish. It is like
inviting people for dinner and paying somebody
to ensure the presence of your guests. Upon the
other hand the visitors to the Congress party,
while much less in number, suddenly go up each
time we are close to the elections.
There is another aspect to the Advani site and
the Advani youth attraction strategy which needs
to be exposed. If one visits the Advani site (www.lkadvani.in)
and one scrolls all the way to the bottom there
are a number of links provided saying “Visit our
presence on Orkut”, “Visit our presence on
FaceBook” and to a blog (blog.lkadvani.in)
created on the website itself. Visiting each of
these links is an illuminating experience. The
Orkut link shows that the Orkut community was
created on 25.11.2004 has so far attracted only
27088 members over the last four and a half
years. The FaceBook link shows only 800
supporters. The Blog tells the same story of
apathy and indifference with the initial blogs
attracting 187, 133, 141, 102 comments and later
Blogs getting lesser and lesser comments (18, 3,
15, 8).
It is obvious that the Advani and the BJP site
are a great success in terms of marketing
strategy but have failed to attract the Youth.
Perhaps there is a message in all this – In 2004
the BJP campaign was India Shining and the
Congress campaign was for the Aam Aadmi. In 2009
the BJP campaign seems to be Advani and the BJP
Shining while the Congress campaign is for Aam
Aadmi Ke Badhte Kadam. This is exactly
replicated in the websites.
VISHVJIT P. SINGH
May 6, 2009
