Lessons on Social media marketing from Jallikattu Protest

2018-07-15T03:04:00.000-07:00

My memories go back to about a year and a half earlier, in the month of January 2017 to be exact, The citizens of tamilnadu especially the youth fought for the revival of their cultural and traditional sport Jallikattu.(the bull taming sport). More than 10 lakh people congregated in the Chennai's famous marina beach. The fight became a mass movement that tamilnadu or for that matter no part of India had witnessed before.

The crowd swelled to massive proportions as information spread rapidly. The tamilians settled in USA, UK, Canada etc all staged protests and expressed their solidarity to their Indian counterparts to revive the game . No violent incident, or stone throwing or crimes were reported during this mass movement from January 17^th 2017 to January 22^nd 2017, in the marina . Our students and youth made us proud by showcasing their responsible citizenship behaviour . They helped the police in guiding the traffic and maintaining law and order. Needless to say,the news channels reported that they had never seen such a model protest.

The question was ..how did the information spread so rapidly,world wide? The answer was the Ubiquitous social media.Social media not only spread the word far and wide, it created awareness on Jalikattu, transmitted emotions of tamil people, enabled support and resources reach the volunteers.

It had been an exemplary protest aided by an exemplary media called THE SOCIAL MEDIA.

Just as we were rejoicing the fact that our youth displayed a perfect model not on Police - student collaboration, there was a twist in the tale. Republic day was round the corner (26th Jan) and police wanted the students to vacate. Students refused.The calm was eviscerated. Social media was now flushed with the videos of Students being hit with lathis,., a pregnant woman being pushed so hard by police that she miscarried. The posts became viral on twitter. More people became angry at the police and thus the much acclaimed model protest soon turned into one of the most violent protests ever. The tamilnadu police later issued a statement to say that these videos were fake and the people hitting the citizens were not police but some unruly citizens dressed in the police Costume.

But the damage had been done. the reputation of our police force became murky.As a top police officer acknowledged after the jallikattu incident that it was a mistake for his force to have ignored what was spreading quickly on Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter. He said that One lesson for the police force is to track the social media, particularly messages going viral and take cognizance and issuing official comment on the videos much sooner.(source; News paper report)

This incident is so live in my memory because it woke me up to the fact that social media has moved beyond keeping touch with friends. It is a tremendous platform to crowdsource. The Social Web exposes the good, the bad, and the ugly. It raises up what works. It puts down what doesn’t .It does so without regard for the interests of any specific party. It can be a crisis management tool . It can also create crisis. Nevertheless, Social media is here to stay whether we want to be in it or not. It is upto us to use it appropriately.

So what lessons can the Businesses learn from this incident? One that Social media is a powerful platform. Two , Social Media cannot be ignored any more as ignoring what is posted about your organisation on the social media would tantamount to be unaware of what is being talked about you and you run the risk of the image of your organisation being tarnished in the market place. Three ,You can also steer the conversations suitably in the market place so that Social Media works for you and not against you.
So this blog is for all those who want to understand the fundamentals of social media and implement social media marketing in their organisations.

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SOCIAL MEDIA RESEARCH

Lessons on Social media marketing from Jallikattu Protest