Delhi elections 2015: Now, a personal touch to online poll campaigns

NEW DELHI: Personalized campaigns, the kind where someone knocks on your door with a request to vote for a particular candidate, have gone digital too.Template "@ replies" on Twitter to individual users, along with Whatsapp updates, personal pitches over email, Facebook messages, community website Localcircles, and even Linked In, is what one can see as the Delhi election campaign reaches the finishing line.

BJP's cyber volunteers have been tweeting posters of the right-wing party as replies, and also linking their followers and others to the vision document.AAP is running a Twitter campaign where a personalized tweet from the @AamAadmiParty account goes out to people tweeting with hashtags such as #AAPWinning, #Vote4Delhi2015, and #VisionDelhi2015.

Khemchand Sharma, convener of the BJP Samvad Cell in Delhi, says that they have between 4,000-5,000 online volunteers, many of them from "likeminded organizations", who have taken leaves from their day jobs to work on this campaign."The IT team makes the posters for circulation. Samvad cell spreads the message among the masses through social media.They are messaging their friends and family on Facebook and Linked In, besides others on Twitter and Localcircles," says Sharma. An @ reply or mention is a way of tagging a person in a conversation. BJP's "@ replies" from various volunteer accounts also include details on government schemes. For example, "Don't Miss..PAHAL Yojana will end black marketing in LPG: Modi," reads one such tweet, with a link to an article about direct cash transfers.These replies are not automated.

The AAP's Twitter replies, which are automated, link to an image which is a letter from AAP CM candidate Arvind Kejriwal, with neither a call to action, nor a political message."Dear Friend, We often tell young people that they are leaders of tomorrow. No, I don't agree. Your strength is needed today , right now...," reads the letter. Over two days, says Ankit Lal, the party's social media head, they have sent out close to 4,000 such replies. They had begun with Kejriwal's own account, but later shifted the exercise to the party's account.

However, not all have taken the personal pitch route. Radhika Khera of the DPCC social media wing says they have over 9,500 subscriptions to their Whatsapp feed, with content similar to that on their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Out of context replies on Twitter have been seen as spam by some, as was the case last year as well. "Wonder whose idea in AAP was to spam twitter with automated tweets of Kejriwal...this puts off ppl rather than make new fans," tweeted @mehranzaidi on Wednesday . "Given the number of BJP and AAP spam tweets landing on my notifications, I think I should stay off for a week till Delhi elections are over!" wrote @reddygvsb. Lal says they had announced how the personalized letter would be sent as replies to people posting with certain hashtags. "It is like an opt-in. Also, it is a personal reply , so it won't appear on other people's timelines, unless they follow the party account and the account they reply to," he says.