Social Change and the Web

The web is increasingly being used as a marketing tool. There is so much content on the web that people get lost in tons of data. Judging good from bad, relevant from irrelevant and authentic from unauthentic is not easy. Inspite of the tremendous potential of the web to get a campaign heard, web marketing is increasingly getting complicated. People outrightly reject new marketing initiatives with which they cannot connect with. At the end of the day, there are very few campaigns which utilize the full potential of the web, others just decay into this sea of eternity.

The most successful campaigns are invariably the ones with a social aspect attached to them. I consider The Pink Chaddi Campaign to be one of the biggest success stories of the web in recent times. The campaign was aimed at teaching the Ram Sena a lesson who took up the role of moral policemen and beat up women who they considered indecent. The idea was to flood the office of the Ram Sena with pink chaddis (which I think is symbolic to women empowerment). People across the country were livid with the incident of women being beaten up in Mangalore, and thus quickly connected with the initiative. The campaign spread like wildfire across the web, mostly with the facebook community which swelled to 52000 members within 2 weeks.

The idea is to have people connect with your initiative, which is more probable if your campaign is social in nature. Another great success story is the Jaago Re campaign of TATA tea. The campaign was not originally started by TATA tea, but they did well to synergize TATA tea’s marketing with a social cause. The campaign has already registered 2.5 lac voters becoming a nationwide success. This has got TATA tea a visibility on the web which no other means could have got.

There are many other examples like these across the web. A word of advice here would be to not deliberately try and connect a social campaign with your marketing strategy. People have a knack of kicking out the phoney. Afterall, jaagore and Tata Tea make sense together.

Social entrepreneurs today have powers like never before. They have a web at their feet which can spread their message like never before. An individual social change maker today has powers even greater than that possessed by Jesus Christ, Mohammad Prophet or Gautam Buddha. They were great men who had an extremely powerful idea. The only thing they did not have was a blog which could be followed by millions of people or a mail server which could send newsletters to huge mailing lists.