The Center’s Internet & American Life Project initially started with a phone survey about the habits of users of social networking sites, and reported the findings in a June 2011 report called “Social networking sites and our lives”. The survey had 877 respondents comprising a representative sample of the nation-wide users, and since the report showed that Facebook was overwhelmingly the most dominant network, they further took permission from 269 of those respondents to access their profile information and computer logs to match the responses from the telephonic survey, during the month of November 2010, when the survey was being conducted.

A typical Facebook user in the sample was moderately active over the month of observation. The activities being assessed were, sending out friend requests, adding content, and ‘like’-ing the content of their friends.

However, certain users performed these activities much more frequently – daily or at least, multiple times in a week. These users comprise 20 to 30% of the total users, and are given the label of power users, and due to them, the average Facebook user receives more friend requests, personal messages, photo tags, and ‘likes’ on his content than he/she sends out.

Power users also tend to specialize; 43% of the users in the sample were power users in at least one type of Facebook activity – sending friend requests, sending private messages, tagging friends in photos, or ‘like’-ing content. Only 5% were power users in all four of these activities, 9% in three, and 11% in two.

• Friend requests: On an average, the Facebook users in the sample get more friend requests than they send out – 63% received at least one friend request during the month, but only 40% made one.
• ‘Like’-ing content: Users in the sample pressed the ‘like’ button for their friends’ content an average of 14 times a month, and received a ‘like’ on their content from friends 20 times a month.
• Photo tags: 35% of users in the sample were tagged in a photo, and just 12% tagged a friend in a photo.
• Private messages: Users received an average of 12 messages in a month, but sent only 9.
• Status updates: It is more common to comment on friends’ updates, users in the sample made 9 updates in a month, and received 21 comments.
• Gender differences: Women contribute more new content – women in the sample made an average of 21 new status updates, while men made only 6.

The complete report can be read here.

It is worth noting that the results of the survey show no evidence of Facebook fatigue, i.e. there is no decline in the frequency of activity if a user has been on Facebook for a long period of time, on the contrary – the more time that has passed since a user started using Facebook, the more frequently he/she makes status updates, uses the ‘like’ button, comments on friends’ content, and tags friends in photos. Similarly, the more Facebook friends someone has, the more frequently they contribute all forms of Facebook content and the more friend requests they tend to send and accept.

Do you think having such power users speaking for your brand helps increase exposure? How do you think you can leverage these power users and harvest the potential of their large networks for your brand?

General Electric has conducted a study to measure this difference and gain insights from the results. They used the website Buzzfeed to distribute ‘The GE Show‘ video both by paid placements and by sharing. The testing was done by digital-advertising measurement firm Vizu, and the objective was to define how attitudes changed depending on the mode by which someone was exposed to the campaign.

The results clearly showed that people who came across the campaign via sharing had a significantly bigger lift in positive attitudes toward GE than people who came across it via paid placements.

• The testing was done by means of an online survey, wherein consumers were asked to answer the question ‘What comes to mind when you think of General Electric (GE)?’
• The responses to the survey were filtered according to whether they had been exposed to the content via sharing, via paid advertisements, or had not been exposed at all.
• Overall, 42% of the responses about GE by people who had not seen the campaign were positive, as compared to 55% by people who had seen paid advertisements and 77% by people who had been exposed to it via sharing.

Paul Marcum, director of global digital marketing and programming at GE, was interested in quantifying the difference in attitudes towards the brand, and said that for GE, the study was a lesson on “the value of advocacy, and that absolutely will inform marketing decisions.”

He acknowledged that it’s hard to get exposure via sharing without having sponsored advertisements in the first place and said that marketers need to increase that, and hope that peer-sharing goes up along with it.

Different sharing platforms thus have their own advantages and disadvantages here, depending on the user-base, and the methods and extent of sharing that happens.

Tell us – what methods of sharing content with consumers have worked best for you?

However, several cases have proven that jumping on to a bandwagon can backfire very badly especially if the context is different. One example is that of the fashion brand Kenneth Cole who used the #Cairo hashtag to publicize their new spring collection during the time of unrest in Egypt last winter. The brand caught a lot of flak for this and was widely condemned. They eventually deleted the tweet and issued an apology on Facebook.

Another example is the baked goods company Entenmann’s, who used the #notguilty hashtag, which at that time was trending due to the controversial verdict of the Casey Anthony murder trial. The backlash faced by them after the tweet was quite extreme, and people continued to be outraged even after the public statement made by them that the use of that particular hashtag was unintentional. People didn’t believe that it was a mistake and accused them of trying to take advantage of a very serious situation to advertise their products.

A study by Social Media B2B has shown that these tactics aren’t necessary. Their analysis indicates that posts without hashtags perform better than posts with hashtags.

• For the analysis, the study compares over 37,000 posts from 103 Twitter accounts belonging to professional marketers, with companies differing in size, and including most major industries.
• In 53% of the accounts, posts with hashtags actually performed worse than posts with hashtags.
• In 21%, there was no significance difference in posts with and without hashtags, and only 26% of the accounts had more engagement in posts containing hashtags

Further analysis of the accounts that showed significant differences using or not using hashtags revealed that there are some general practices and insights to be noted when using hashtags successfully.

• Overly generic tags don’t work. A very broad tag like #socialmedia or #cricket will generate so many results that locating your tweet in the horde is pretty much impossible. Thus, contextual hashtags should be utilized more.
• One hashtag for a large conference is not feasible, for the same reason. It is better to have hashtags for individual speakers, or streamline on the basis of content in sub-events.
•  Create your own hashtags for important events, make sure they are known to people in advance, and make them relevant! Thus, advertising or marketing the hashtags is important.

It is of primary importance to provide content that is useful and interesting to your followers, use hashtags only when they follow naturally and add value. Thus, it is advisable to create a hashtag around the content but not create content around a hashtag as that can sometimes have an unforeseen adverse effect.

Do you think overusing hashtags does work? What kind of hashtags do you think work better? Has using hashtags worked for you? Share with us.

The study analysed 30,000 posts by over 500 pages with large numbers of followers and concluded that the average lifespan of a post is 3 hours and 7 minutes. Even though every page is different and needs to figure out its own optimal post rate on the basis of the needs and interest of its fans, this proposed average lifespan works well as a general benchmark.

As per the study, a post receives the maximum amount of comments and likes within the three hours of its posting and then the engagement then begins to dwindle. On the other hand, frequent posts eat into each other’s share of attention, and dilute focus and interest.

It must be clarified that EdgeRank does not recommend posting every 3 hours – so many posts in a day would bombard peoples’ newsfeeds and tick them off, and moreover the content could not possibly sustain a high level of quality throughout. As a general guideline, 2-3 posts in a day would be considered advisable, however, this may vary depending on the type of content a page publishes.

What is the optimal post rate for your brand? Share with us.

Some other key points of the report are:

• Every minute, approximately 60 hours of video is uploaded.
• The 4 billion videos being streamed daily are not getting monetized.
• Roughly, 3 billion videos a week have their share in monetary gains

It was revealed that on an annual basis display ads were generating $5 billion in revenue but the share of YouTube as a channel was not revealed.

As YouTube becomes more mainstream by being introduced to smartphones and easier accessible due to advent of technology premises like 3G, the numbers were likely to rise. If integrated with smart TV’s, one of the key trends to watch out for in 2012 YouTube will make further inroads.

Category: Best Short-term campaign

Title: Maruti Suzuki Ritz – Live the moment

Share a little about your organisation/ brand

Maruti Suzuki Ritz is one of the hatchback car’s in India. It is targeted to young audiences who prefer a stylish car with excellent performance and sporty design. There were around 100,000 cars sold in the segment in October 2010.

Executive Summary 

The ‘Live the Moment’ social media campaign played a role in a full 360 degree communication across TV, Radio, On-ground and Digital. With its social tools, it successfully managed to amplify the ‘Live the Moment’ philosophy reaching users across the digital space. This was the promotion in which a car was actually given away as a prize through a social contest. A target of 25000 moments seemed challenging to start with but almost double the number was achieved.

Nature of the programme/ activity/ campaign

Business to Consumer

Duration of the said programme/ activity/ campaign. Start date end date

January 2011 – March 2011

Background

Maruti Suzuki Ritz sold over 100,000 cars in just over a year. To celebrate the achievement Maruti Suzuki Ritz wanted to create excitement and pride amongst Ritz owners as well as reach out to potential customers.

Objectives

The objective of the program was to use social media to let people share the moments of their lives. With the Ritz as the backdrop this was intended to get Ritz owners together on a social platform and build pride and excitement among the Ritz owners and their friends and family. The target was to collect 25,000 moments in 2 months.

Strategy and Planning

We launched a social media program to help users do precisely that. This was to complement the mass media campaign around ‘Live the Moment’ and build further buzz around the brand.

Stakeholders

The initiative was led by the marketing team at Maruti Suzuki Limited and sought to engage the existing Ritz owners to play up the feeling of pride in owning the car as well as their friends and family who could potentially be future customers.

Choice of channel/s

The strategy was implemented across all social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, auto blogs and forums and culminated in a microsite which helped collate all the moments from participants and viral them out to their friends and family.

Implementation

The ‘Live the Moment’ microsite allowed users to login to the site using their Facebook or Twitter account or by registering on the site. They could then submit any moment in their lives that was memorable to them. The best moments had a chance to win awesome prizes including a Maruti Suzuki Ritz car.

To win a person had to collect a minimum number of votes before the jury would look at his entry.

The website allowed the user to invite his friends on Facebook and Twitter to vote for him as well as a feature by which he could invite all his email contacts as well. Using APIs, a contact importer was built through which the user could fetch all the contacts form email.

All moments were shown as pixels on the moment’s wall, to view any moment one had to simply click at the pixel. The site featured a search by which one could locate moments using their moment number or the name of the participant. There was even a live stream built-in where the moments were displayed as soon as they were entered.

To create a full 360 degree impact, on ground promotion as also undertaken at Café Coffee Days and PVR Cinemas across the country. Promoters collected moments from users offline and the website provided them an import facility to add these moments to the Moments Wall.

Impact and Outcome

Maruti Suzuki Ritz generated thousands of moments and established the brand objectives.

• Close to 50,000 unique entries submitted by users
• More than 2.2 million users visited the microsite
• More than 2 lakh votes received by entrants
• More than 1 lakh fans added on the Maruti Suzuki Ritz Facebook page.

Learnings

The thing that worked for the campaign was the fact that people wanted to share their experiences specially with the car they love. While the program allowed people to enter any Moment, most of the entries revolved around what people did with the Ritz. By building social viral ability it was possible to reach a large audience and get participation from a large section of society with very small media budgets.

What next

Second social media campaign along the same lines has already been launched.

Testimonials

N/A

External Agencies: Any partners who helped you with strategy

The strategic planning and implementation of the campaign was handled by our Digital Media Agency Interface Business Solutions (I) Pvt. Ltd.

External Agencies: Any partners who helped you with implementation

The strategic planning and implementation of the campaign was handled by our Digital Media Agency Interface Business Solutions (I) Pvt. Ltd.

Suitable title

Maruti Suzuki Ritz – Live the moment

Fact Sheet

Name of Company: Maruti Suzuki Ritz

Category: Automotive

Case Study submitted by: Sabyasachi Mitter

Website:  http://www.marutisuzukiritz.com/

Category: Best Short-term campaign

Title: Nokia N8 in social media – The art of storytelling and the power of UGC

Share a little about your organisation/ brand

Bloggers’ Mind is a word of mouth and conversation analytics company. At Bloggers’ Mind, we map, measure and analyze conversations within the Social Media arena that includes social networking communities, blogs, forums and other Internet properties.

Executive Summary

The Nokia N8 social media campaign was a success and generated over 20000 conversation in a span of 2 months. This was an example of an experiential social media campaign that led to creating a global impact and became a big talking point across markets. The Nokia N8 generated over 8000 referrals from bloggers and consumers as a result of the campaigns.

]]> http://www.indiasocial.in/case-study-nokia-n8-in-social-media-the-art-of-storytelling-and-the-power-of-ugc/feed/ 0 http://www.indiasocial.in/case-study-bell-bajao-ringing-louder-against-vaw/ http://www.indiasocial.in/case-study-bell-bajao-ringing-louder-against-vaw/#comments Wed, 04 Jan 2012 05:54:15 +0000 Editorial http://www.indiasocial.in/?p=2215 IndiaSocial Case Challenge – edition 2

Category: Best Short Term campaign

Title: Bell Bajao! – ringing louder against #VAW

Share a little about your organisation/ brand

Breakthrough is a global human rights organisation that uses the power of media, pop culture, and community mobilisation to inspire people to take bold action for dignity, equality, and justice. Based in India and the United States, Breakthrough addresses critical global issues including violence against women, sexuality and HIV/AIDS, and immigrant rights and racial justice.

Breakthrough’s Bell Bajao! campaign not only addressed men in the context of violence but gave ownership to intervene and effectively end domestic violence. This multimedia campaign supported with on ground youth mobilisation has reached over 130 million people in India. Bell Bajao! has become an action call to men & boys alike to step out of the role of a perpetrator and spectator of violence towards women.

Executive Summary

The Bell Bajao site that started out as a support tool for the campaign on ground has now become an important scaffold for the grassroots work and has an influential following and fan base on Facebook and Twitter. The Bell Bajao blog has acted as a platform for breaking many gender stereotypes by featuring budding female bloggers/writers, LGBT activists and many men & boys who have expressed their lack of identification with the existing concepts of masculinity and practices of patriarchy. For all these bloggers, writers and activists, the internet offers a relatively safer space to freely express themselves either on conditions of anonymity or due to the reduced degree of direct confrontation in the cyber space. Beyond Bell Bajao raising awareness and reaching out to individuals in the cyber space to contribute in the campaign, Bell Bajao is commonly mentioned as the ‘go-to’ cause/campaign for all news and views related to violence against women.

Nature of the programme/ activity/ campaign

Organisation & online community stakeholders

Duration of the said programme/ activity/ campaign. Start date-end date

October 2009 to present

Background

The Bell Bajao! online campaign was originally conceived to support the human rights and gender training as well as community mobilization activities that Breakthrough has been vigorously sustaining through various since a decade now. Bell Bajao! took a multi-dimensional approach by raising awareness about domestic violence in public service announcement (PSA) advertisements aired on national television, radio channels, gender and human rights training workshops, multimedia equipped video vans running across different districts of the country and online platforms via prominent video streaming channels like YouTube and Vimeo.

The role of social media was critical to take on the social normative values at a big scale. To create a context to raise awareness on domestic violence that would excite an unlikely audience to participate in the dialogue process. It essentially can be held responsible for bringing the issue of domestic abuse out of the closet and into the next door’s neighbour’s conscience. The Bell Bajao blog is one of the few user generated platforms that encourage the exchange of opinions, studies, experiences or personal stories on issues from gender, violence to sexuality.

Objectives

The main objective of the Bell Bajao campaign was to raise awareness on domestic violence by bringing it in the purview of mainstream discussions in platforms that have mass viewership and readership. These platforms include social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter; the blogosphere; video sharing websites like YouTube and Vimeo; and news dailies and wires (print & online).

The biggest milestone for the Bell Bajao online campaign was the micro campaign during the global 16 Days of Activism in 2010 called, 16 Days of Tweetism. In this period, more than 16 bloggers contributed unique and interesting articles on emotional abuse in romantic relationships, violence against women in political and military conflict zones like Manipur, Kashmir & Jharkhand (Naxalite region). These blogs spurred dialogues on pertinent issues of women’s rights via the engagement of online supporters (esp. men & boys) on social networking spaces like Facebook and Twitter. It encouraged a lot more people to come out of their private closets of suffering/abuse. Through Bell Bajao‘s 360 degree campaign online, Breakthrough aimed to achieve three basic and important goals to set the ball rolling on raising awareness and consciousness on domestic violence.

Youth Engagement – targeting young minds and engaging them in attractive mediums of edutainment. This defines the reason behind Bell Bajao‘s presence on Facebook and Twitter. The campaign is not just about promoting Breakthrough‘s human right approaches and work but to engage the youth with women’s rights and issues with a more casual tone and language that they can easily connect with.

Gender Rights Training – Through Breakthrough’s online training session on the site, that includes its legal implications in India that talks about Protection of Women against Domestic Violence (2005) and listed resources, Bell Bajao aimed for young individuals to gain a deeper insight on how violence against women is entrenched in social constructs of gender and patriarchy and for an intense engagement to challenge their set notions about society. The process of transformation (not dependent on an external facilitator), however, must not be limited to the direct consumer and guide the individual to raise awareness in his/her social circles like friends and family as well as in his/her community.

Endorsement of Community & Celebrity Influencers – Breakthrough also aimed to gain the support of high profile stakeholders like celebrities from the entertainment industry and local community leaders for the Bell Bajao cause as their views are influential in forming public opinions and would encourage more people from the community to speak out and take action against the issue.

Strategy and Planning

Bell Bajao agreed on and has been consistently following a minimalistic strategy of blogging and discussions/debates of the blog posts on social networking platforms. This is further supported by campaign propagations in different parts of the year such as festivals, international days, during buzzing trends of activism and human rights dialogues around the social media spaces.

International Women’s Day (2009): In recognition of International Women’s Day on March 8th, Breakthrough called on men and boys to join the fight to halt domestic violence and ‘Bell Bajao!‘ (Ring the Bell). Men & boys were asked to join the blog action week ‘It Takes Two’ from 1st March till 8th March on the Bell Bajao blog and tell their stories.

• Write about individuals whose passion, work or personal stories inspire you
• Share photographs, videos and other visual material
• Tell us who you are, include a short description of yourself
• The best blog posts have a chance to win movie tickets and flower bouquets.
• Celebrity influencers like Bollywood actor and Bell Bajao ambassador Boman Irani contributed to the campaign by lending their voices for the cause of fighting domestic violence

Bloggers were engaged as per the theme for this year’s 16 Days of Activism in 2010 that was on Structures of Violence

The strategy was devised with the purpose and goal to help start dialogues on pertinent issues of human rights, engage online supporters (esp. men & boys) via social networking spaces like Facebook and Twitter and encourage more people to come out of their private closets of suffering/abuse to make the 16 Days of Tweetism a successful campaign. Overall, through this campaign propagation take the Bell Bajao campaign to the next level of a symbol and a clarion call to end all violence against women. Bell Bajao got as many as 657 tweets and retweets and more than 16 blogs from 16 bloggers during the 16 days from 25th November to 10th December, 2010.

Stakeholders

The main stakeholders of this campaign are the ‘Youth’ – an almost equal proportion of males and females, most densely in the 18-24 age bracket (composing of college going individuals and young digital activists) and the second highest level of engagement in the 25-34 age bracket of young, economically productive professionals. They are socially and digitally very active and serve as the most influential target audience for raising awareness on different topics and issues.

The older category under youth follow closely behind on the heels of the digitally active late teens and early twenties, although they bring valuable capacities of their own because of which any campaign cannot solely rely on young adults.

For a campaign like Bell Bajao, majority of survivors of abuse have reached out from this demographic or have shared stories/instances. For this category, the resources that Bell Bajao offers in terms of helplines and advocacy toolkits keeps them engaged and optimistic about the real world differences the campaign is making and can further create.

Choice of channel/s

The site became an importance resource for all those who were seeking help for themselves or loved ones as it provided a list of helplines in the major town and cities of the country and has remained an accessible resource center to reach out to via email for any further information. Moreover, a dedicated domestic violence website allowed for raising awareness with general audience online as well as intense engagement with activists, digital natives and the youth with photography contests, blogathons, media downloadables and a multimedia version of our training toolkits that are used with. We used WordPress, because it allowed easy access to the backend of the site for moderation, content management since the issue is a sensitive one and creative freedom to make changes without a 24 on call technical support that can be less affordable for a non profit.

• YouTube: for showcasing videos of change stories from the community, the Bell Bajao ads and Breakthrough Rights Reporters program videos that show the latest community initiatives, on ground gender and human rights training workshops, community mobilization events, people who rang the bell, personal stories of change from the community and the leaders as well as re-enactment of scripts and concepts penned by the Rights Reporters themselves.
• Flickr: for pictures as it is the largest and the most inclusive platform for general users, amateur photographers as well as high end professional photographers.
• Facebook: It provides a very wide platform for raising awareness on issues, personal engagement of the user in the cause, sharing in many personal and professional networks, donation, participation in discussions and an onus to contribute in a variety of creative ways to a cause.
• Twitter: widespread virality of issues, engaging and partnering with fellow organizations, initiatives and individuals working or share strong interest in women’s rights, human rights and violence against women, visibility to and access for major funding aand corporate agencies.

Implementation

The media team and education team at Breakthrough work in close tandem on the Bell Bajao campaign online contributing towards both the concept and resources for the campaign. The media team coordinates content from the users directly in the form of blogs, tweets and photographs; from newswires, publications and research studies and from the gender and human rights expertise of the education team. In this sense, the education team generates content like knowledge and theory of domestic violence in India and resource databases of helpline numbers, case studies of domestic violence, service provider organizations, legal counseling cells etc.

The media team has provides the various platforms and tools to creatively present and disseminate this knowledge to be accessed by the user and engage individuals in conversations with them. This is done via the blog where event reports of all advocacy meetings, conferences, community mobilization and training workshops are posted; social networking platforms like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter that directly reached out to the user in his/her personal newsfeed; video sites like YouTube and Vimeo which have been instrumental in exposing Breakthrough’s on ground work and impact stories from the community. The media team has worked in close quarters with social media consultants like Blogworks, Merrymen (16 days of activism) and Brands at Large for the social media outreach strategy for the campaign.

Impact and Outcome

Google Analytics tool has been used extensively to track the number of visitors on the Bell Bajao site, the loyalty of visits, the average time spent on the site by a user, the traffic sources of the website and the content on the site that they are engaging in. The total no. of visits on the Bell Bajao site since the campaign site went live has been 59242 with an average of 116.5 visits per day and 2 minutes 30 seconds spent on the site, from the analytics of an average monthly trend. Google search engines and direct urls are the highest traffic sources for the site with keywords, ‘Bell Bajao‘ and ‘domestic violence’. The keywords and high usage of direct urls are reflective of the popularity of the campaign in familiarity with domestic violence. This also gives us a feedback that most users on the site are those who have searched for domestic violence knowledge and resources online.

Facebook insights tool is used to gain information on the proportions of youth demographics (age, location, gender) that we are reaching out to, are exposed to the content on the site that we share and all those who are participating in the discussions and micro campaigns on social networking platforms.

The Bell Bajao page engages an almost equal proportion of males (43%) and females (54%) with the highest in the 18-24 age bracket (47%) followed by the 25-34 age bracket (28%). Highest engaged Facebook users are from India, United States of America and the United Kingdom.

Various Twitter tools like Tweetreach, Twitalyzer, Tweetcloud and Tweetstats are used to measure the reach of our tweets with the number of times they have been retweeted, how many twitter followers have retweeted them, exposure rate on the number of tweeple, status of @Bell_Bajao as a social influencer and the keywords of the dialogues we’re perpetrate and participate in. During 16 Days of Tweetism (25th november – 10th December), we aimed for 800 tweets mentioning ‘#16DOT’, however, fell short by a small margin with a total of 657 tweets. However, what is important to highlight here is that our Tweet vs. Retweet pie is almost 50%. Our Twitalyzer results that showed the micro campaign had an effective reach of 4911 Twitter users.

Learnings

Bell Bajao Blog has most successfully worked with the broad youth demographic in raising awareness on the issues of domestic violence and violence against women and gaining their signification support and contribution to the Bell Bajao campaign. Secondary tools like Facebook and Twitter have worked as important scaffolds of the online campaign and became lucrative platforms for campaign propagations like 16 days of Tweetism and International Women’s Day etc, promoting the usage of resources like helplines, training sessions etc. Breakthrough continues to struggle with effective results and impact in connecting online engagement with grassroots resources, training and youth mobilization. One example of this would be mobilizing online communities to consistently participate virtually or/and by on ground presence with the video vans during its movement. The idea, however, has also been to mobilize urban, educated digital activists to participate in on ground initiatives.

The greatest challenge of Bell Bajao campaign online is the constant need of re-inventing the different ways to address issues of violence against women like domestic violence. Besides the usage of cutting edge tools, the challenge of the creative is to both captivate and engage the online audience, particularly the youth (and in our case men and boys), and also via these innovations inspire a trend of change in mindsets and attitude. Along with the challenge of conquering these lofty social media peaks, the accompanying challenge to efficiently track, measure, document and analyze the figures and testimonies against designed indicators of influence in the metrics of increase in awareness and impact as reported action taken to stop domestic violence. Some of the important insights learned as the campaign looks forward to sustaining itself online for almost three years are –

• Important to optimally and productive use the time period when certain topics are trending as that tends to draw attention in numbers. Twitter provides small windows of opportunity to gratify this and one needs to be on constant alert to amplify the noise levels on the campaign and cause in these opportunities
• Important to actively update blogs to sustain discussions. Blogs are one of the only effective ways for an important issue like domestic violence to never fall off the radar of law makers, policy makers, service delivery organizations, the youth and society in general
• All content especially for an issue like domestic violence, resources and other usable/downloadable materials on the site must always be updated and revamped to sustain the basic interest and engagement of loyal visitors. Blogs most likely ensure the new traffic to the site
• Important to have users contribute directly to the site/pages/handles for higher ownership of the cause and campaign and to be inspired (rather than manipulated) to spread the message in their online networks and social communities
• A campaign is never bigger than the cause itself

What next

Bell Bajao campaign will sustain on ground as a part of the community mobilization and leadership/capacity building workshops and trainings for another 2 years and is serving as an entry point for serious issues of violence against women like sex selection and early marriage, that are more sensitive in nature and strongly rooted in cultural and political patriarchy of the Indian society. Meanwhile, and going forward to the near future, the Bell Bajao campaign will sustain itself on the online and social media space with concurrent discussions and dialogues on the blog and the social networking sites as well as periodical connections with on ground events and stories.

Beyond the territories of the Indian sub-continent, the Bell Bajao campaign at the global level will address the issue of domestic violence in the localized contexts in foreign shores, beginning with addressing the Indian/Asian diaspora of women and youth.

In order to address the issue of domestic violence and all its implications – legal & cultural, across the globe and in localized regions, the campaign will seek out the support and contribution of local community youth, leaders and influencers and the partnership of local organizations and diaspora (desi) sites on the social web. As per our analytics and aspirations, the Bel Bajao campaign has most frequently exposed to and accessed by online youth in India, North America and the United Kingdom. This necessity arises from connecting local and contextual reality, of not only survivors of violence but the community in general, to online discussions and representations.

Testimonials

Live/post tweets of men ringing the bell:

• http://twitter.com/#!/thelinecampaign/statuses/74844519195095040
• http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=481747092509&set=a.381926817509.161916.163127752509&type=1

Victim from Abu Dhabi rescued via Twitter -

• http://bellbajao.org/2010/01/12/beaten-up-every-now-and-then-even-during-chemotherapy-somebody-ring-the-bell/

External Agencies: Any partners who helped you with strategy

Blogworks (2009), Merrymen (2010) & Brands at Large (2011)

External Agencies: Any partners who helped you with implementation.

Merrymen helped in the concept and implementation of 16 Days of Tweetism during 16 Days of Activism, 2010

Suitable Title

Bell Bajao! – ringing louder against #VAW

Fact Sheet

Name of the company: Breakthrough’s ‘Bell Bajao!’ campaign

Category: Non-profit/NGO

Case Submitted by: Breakthrough

Website: www.breakthrough.tv