Whats the buzz about: After the Indian cricket team lost to Australia, an Indian English news channel Times Now began tweeting with #ShamedinSydney. However contrary to the past experiences where we saw the Indian Junta fuming and abusing team India, this time ‘we the people’ showed tremendous support to the men in blue. And it all backfired on Times Now.
What happened next? People quickly realized that Times Now was sensationalizing India’s defeat and was trying to cash in a few hundred thousand mentions which would help it trend on twitter. They obviously knew that Dhoni’s men performed well in this world cup and thanks to them we also reached the semi’s and this was worth a celebration. So when someone at Times Now thought it will be a good idea to fuel ‘the angry Indian’s’ frustration what went wrong? One thing – ‘the angry Indian’ can at ‘times’ be sensitive, sensible and above all ‘argumentative’ as well. All hell broke when the Junta took over Times Now on twitter with #ShameOnTimeNow. There were more than two lakh tweets with this hash tag in 12 hours.
Some of the tweets
Some Thoughts: The Indian cricket fan has always shown his anger when the team looses any match, especially world cup. On any other day the Indian twitterati would have joined the chorus of #ShameInSydney. This time however it was a different story, people showed their love and support for team India and captain Dhoni on social media.
The pressure any player handles is far more than the pressure in the news room. And although team India lost Indians did not loose it by falling in for the social media gimmick Times Now was upto.
Lessons Learnt: Brands have been in the game of predicting and enticing reactions online to increase their share of voice. But like the Share Market there is no formula to get it right. Its a game of trials and errors where we can look back and say ‘yes it worked!’. But when a communication backfires is it all bad for the brand, people are still talking about them, aren’t they? Well time tell us if it still did any good for Times Now. After all as they say – any publicity is good publicity.
Just In: Some people also tired to troll Anushka Sharma, it was again a failed attempt.
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Good 1👏👏