#GoBackModi - Pakistan or Tamil Nadu who trends it?

Love Him or Hate Him you cannot ignore him. Mr. Narendra Modi has this polarising effect on people. The PR team of Indian government has done an excellent job of promoting the PM's Image as a person who loves Tamil Tradition.

The carefully curated Tweets, in tamil

The  selection of food menu to showcase Southern Cuisine

 Summit Menu 

And most importantly the optics, a prime minister in perfect dhoti and angavastram.

Everything is going on well where can it go wrong.

Enter the Tamilians, the villans where some of them started trending #GoBackModi

and #GoBackModiWelcomeXiJinping. Now they went even more a step ahead and trended in mandarin #回到莫迪 . The Spin Narrative : It would still not have been a big issue for PR, as it could have been credited to political opponents who are trending. The governments PR team did a bad move where they started circulating a fake Hastag analysis saying 40% of tweets is from Pakistan. Now this is something a hare brained scheme from some amateur who has no idea of Twitter and Hashtag analytics. Some news papers have also picked this up and published news reports.

North east times

times of India report

Republic Report

Twitter Influencers folly:

The Twitter Influencers who are pro-Modi started to pick this up and trended the tweets which suspected Pakistan angle, and some regional newspapers also followed it.

Twitter users were quick to burst this narrative when people started their own analysis of the trend and further burst the myth. a twitter user made a detailed trend analysis and posted the result, which you can read here https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182865025213575169.html

So what did the PR Team did wrong?

• Simple, when you have negative sentiments towards your subject, you try to minimise the attention. So they should have ignored #GoBackModi
• If you plan on reducing the impact do a counter narrative #TNWelcomesModi, In this case this did not work as, the trend was inorganic and most handles promoting it was from affiliates of BJP.
• If nothing works you should be silent and wait for the trend to end naturally, it would have ended in two days, here the PR team did a great blunder and planted this story about Pakistan angle which made this trend even more popular. 

To Summarize the mood of people in one tweet, you should look at this exchange which happened between Rajdeep Sardesai and a twitter user

Edit On 14-12-2020

So I came across this new website called https://hashtagify.me/ so it offered some new tools, so I tried this tool on this #GoBackModi and the results are below.

So It settles, most of the tweets are from Tamil Nadu, Kerala and other southern states. 

#BoycottMillennials - An analysis - Is this a PR Failure

This is not a political post, now that the issue is out of the way lets check if this trend #BoycottMillennials is a Public Relations failure of Indian Government.

The first term of Narendra Modis government got over with euphoria that a Nationalist government was in place, #Demonitization #GST #Petrol #Diesel price hike and #Rafale was all forgotten and forgiven. Then came the big victory for the second term, this promised to be a big reformist period where all problems will be solved. But recent days the events in public  domain makes me wonder does the Indian government has a PR department, do they advice MPs and Ministers to properly address the media. 

The most recent headline which caused a big backlash

"Millennial mindset of using Ola, Uber is adversely affecting auto sector: FM"  

It caused a  trend  #BoycottMillennials there was also another associated trend 

#SayItLikeNirmalaTai these trends are a PR nightmare, not only were they sarcastic about the current statement but also they linked all the past failures of the government.

• Aviation Industry crisis
• Real Estate crisis
• Parle G production shutdown
• Roti Namak in Midday meals
• Stock Market fall
• Unorganised sector job loss
• Highest Unemployment rate

A small glimpse of the various tweets, most of it is from users who are known for their satire but majority of the tweets with less engagement was from relatively unknown handles of common people. this is a huge PR disaster for  the government as the common man starts mocking because even they can identify the spin doctors.

There was around 61 news posts about this trend #BoycottMillennials and 371 posts on twitter around the time I created the tracker.

So I wanted to find if there is any related hashtag and when I checked the dashboard I got this a word cloud #SayItLikeNirmalaTai and some other tags. The essence is people correlate economic situation with a satire tweet trend which is not good for the consumer confidence.

The PR Failure:

I believe the public relations team of Indian Government has failed bigtime, when people are anxious about growth and jobs many ministers and MPs are shooting of their mouth and causing doubts whether this government is serious about addressing the economic crisis. The finance Minister was unlucky as the statement created a huge furore, but taking into account the past interactions of ministers with media and the callous manner economic questions were answered I can sympathise with the #Millennials as they feel angry. 

It is not a PR Failure:

So when I floated this idea that this social media trend is a PR failure, there was another contrary view presented by the alternate thinkers , government giving space to this trend itself is a diversionary tactic. The best way to hide a scandal is diversion by making an outlandish statement which diverts attention. This is also possible as every time there is a serious issue one outlandish statement will be uttered by the MP or minister and we would focus our attention over that. 

So either way this presents an unique chance for us to observe how PR is being managed by the  Indian Government and also analyse how people react and interact to these statements.

I have created a real time tracker for this trend so you can keep a view of this hashtag.