STUDIO C at New Delhi Television (NDTV) is the network’s biggest recording room. Flagship primetime shows, including The Big Fight and We the People, are staged in this indoor amphitheatre, a familiar arena for politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, academics, businessmen and movie stars to spar with each other. In a format now intensely familiar to Indian television viewers, they argue over the day’s issues before a studio audience as the shows’ moderators, the news anchors Barkha Dutt and Vikram Chandra, try hard to not let the debate descend into chaos.
On the afternoon of 26 April 2013, Studio C was quieter than usual. A crowd of nearly 100 NDTV staffers had gathered together to learn about another kind of arena for debate. In front of them, instead of the familiar panel of argumentative Indians, was a lanky man in a casually elegant grey suit, standing before a screen that introduced the event: “NDTV Masterclass with Rishi Jaitly (India Head, Twitter).”
“Twitter is a town square,” Jaitly told the listening NDTV staff, speaking with a subtle American accent. “What happens in a town square is that you may see some friends,” he said. “But you also see celebrities, restaurants, comedians, brands … And the company is moving in the direction of making Twitter a town square for the world, a country or any city.” Since last November, when Jaitly arrived in Mumbai from the United States to take charge of Twitter’s India operations, he has been fulfilling the role of town crier, taking this message from podium to podium. The NDTV crowd was a relatively savvy one; unlike its much bigger predecessors Google and Facebook, Twitter has always found powerful allies in members of the press. (Dutt has had a Twitter handle, @bdutt, since early 2009, has more than 71,000 tweets and 1,090,000 followers; @vikramchandra, a more reluctant user, has more than 268,000 followers.) As in the United States, where Twitter began life as a microblogging service in the Bay Area in 2006, early adopters in India quickly won the short, furious debate about whether it was appropriate for reporters to break news via microblog. In fact, one of Twitter’s first major successes in establishing itself as a platform for both reporting and quickly broadcasting news happened in India, during the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in November 2008.
Jaitly played up some aspects of this relationship at the NDTV session. “Audiences are increasingly craving journalists and brands that come across as human,” he told his audience of reporters and producers. To help NDTV get an edge over its competitors, he said, the network needed to tweet about what was going on behind the scenes, rather than just the polished, packaged, final version of the news. He suggested that his company could “white-list” the NDTV account, so that in the event of a breaking news situation, Twitter would not, as is usual, restrict the number of tweets the account could send every 15 minutes.
Once he had capped off his presentation with a video set to a triumphant score about Twitter’s impact worldwide, Jaitly opened up the floor to questions. One NDTV staffer asked about using Twitter in vernacular languages, another about the vulnerability of accounts to hacking. Rica Roy, from the network’s sports coverage team, asked how she could dispel her mother’s notion that Twitter is like an “ill-informed friend”. “Tell her, Twitter is revealing,” Jaitly replied with a smile, “and if you’re interested in understanding the human condition, it’s an amazing way to explore that.”
Revealing the human condition—140 characters of self-expression at a time—has always been a part of Twitter’s brand identity, even as it was inducted into the communications mainstream on 7 November, when TWTR began trading on the New York Stock Exchange. In its registration with the USA Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Twitter characterised itself repeatedly as “a global platform for public self-expression and conversation in real time”. As the company, which is yet to turn a profit, geared up to put a dollar price on the value of this platform, promotional events such as Rishi Jaitly’s NDTV Masterclass, halfway around the world, suggested that the company was grappling creatively with the enormous challenge of generating revenue from its user base, both at home and internationally. Jaitly refused repeated requests for interviews for this story, and his public relations representative told me only that Twitter did not comment on its business practices. However, it seems clear that his mandate to grow the business includes wooing “influencers” in the fields of politics and entertainment. It has also involved convincing traditional media, with its large consumer bases, firehoses of content, and occasionally pathological suspicion of new media, to look at Twitter as an extended platform of operations rather than a competitor.
During the April NDTV Masterclass, a few months after Twitter established its tentative operational toehold in India, Jaitly said that he was still the sole Twitter India employee and that the company was “just in the moment of kind of getting going” in the country, though “obviously a lot of people are using Twitter here.” Since then, Twitter has hired at least three more India employees and is advertising other positions. Yet the company seems oddly reticent about its specific plans for the country. When a staffer asked whether Twitter was monitoring abuse and misuse of the platform, Jaitly’s smile turned stoic. “I won’t respond to that,” he said. “I’m not going to spend too much time talking about Twitter India and what we’re imagining,” Jaitly told the NDTV audience. “What we’re doing right now is just introducing ourselves to as many people as we can.”
A SEPTEMBER 2012 study by the UK-based online consumer behaviour firm Global Web Index confirmed what observers had known for some time—that Twitter was still growing in the US, its home country, but that it already had a larger user base in some other countries. The study claimed that there were about 33 million active Twitter users in India, among the largest groups in the world. Still, it falls far behind competitor Facebook, which is estimated to have 82 million Indian users. India is also ranked only 11th in terms of the growth of new users according to figures from the past year. And in terms of revenue share, Twitter’s SEC registration confirmed that, as of 2011, 77 percent of its active users are outside the US, but only 25 percent of its earnings (17 percent in 2012) came from international advertisers. Jaitly’s hire last November signalled the start of an effort to nab a larger share of India’s massive social media market.
In July this year, Twitter introduced “Promoted Products”, a paid service that highlights advertiser’s tweets, handles or trends, to India. As it edges ever closer to the traditional model of a content-driven media company through such advertising efforts and new content partnerships, Twitter’s India initiatives can be seen as a clear—but cautious—part of a larger, less organic growth strategy for its global future. Also in July, the media news website Medianama reported that Twitter had extended its partnership with Komli Media, an Indian internet advertising firm. Komli was already the middleman for Promoted Products in Southeast Asia, but they would now sell them for Twitter in India, too. (In the US, where Promoted Products has been available since 2010, and in some other countries, these advertisements are marketed by Twitter’s direct sales team, but there is no local sales force in India.)
Medianama reported that “promoted trends” tags, which display at the top of Twitter’s “trending topics” section, would be sold for Rs 5.5 lakh for 24 hours of trending. “Promoted accounts”, recommendations for accounts to follow that would appear at the top of the “who to follow” section on a home page, would be based on a cost-per-follow model, although the initial spend to sign up would be Rs 6 lakh per handle. Indian brands could also create “promoted tweets”, which would also be sold through a cost-per-engagement model. (Twitter’s self-service advertising, which cuts out the middleman and lets users buy their own promotions, is not yet available in India. In its filing to the SEC, Twitter hinted that it intended to launch this service in “selected international markets”, but did not name India specifically.)
Karthik Srinivasan (handle: @beastoftraal), the hyper-engaged “national lead, social” at the advertising company Ogilvy & Mather, called promoted tweets an “inorganic” part of a breast cancer awareness campaign the firm did for the multinational company Philips. “If you pay for promoted trends/tweets, things actually go really viral very, very fast,” he wrote in an email to me. “We also did organic engagement with influencers because there are people who’ve earned their followers on Twitter by being smart, funny, witty and all that stuff. So we ask them to talk about our campaign and retweet stuff.” Many people were “up for sale”, Srinivasan told me, but as with traditional endorsements, they also wanted to make sure they look good doing it. “There are many people on Twitter who actually take the brand’s promotion and do it in their own way.”
So, for example, on 18 April, Bisleri launched “World Shabaash Day” on Twitter and Facebook, a “buzz creation” initiative planned and executed by the digital marketing agency Flying Cursor. Twitter users like Mandira Bedi (who has over 300,000 followers) chimed in with tweets like “Its #WorldShabaashDay today! I say Shabaash for my husband for putting up with me!!! ;P So who are you showing your appreciation for?” The hashtag was a top ten trend and the Twitter traffic was complemented by a Facebook contest, in which people who watched Bisleri’s new television commercials for their 500-millilitre water bottle could win an iPad, gift hampers or watches.
Contracts in the Twitter economy are easy to write up; advertisers can stipulate the duration of a campaign, and number of tweets and retweets per day among the “deliverables” they want. But the artifice of many of these engagements—iPad contests and gift hamper giveaways—represents a peculiar compromise for advertisers, who hanker after real, unfeigned interest. “When it comes to Twitter and someone [the brand] is looking at their result card or return-on-investment, they preferably look for whether or not their brand has trended,” the digital head of an entertainment channel told me. “Unfortunately, it’s very difficult for conversations to start trending, which is why brands resort to contests—follow us, retweet us and win an iPad or something. My point of view is that such contests don’t really help the brand unless you already have a huge follower base and are doing something for them. For FMCG companies, the easiest way to get itself trending is to start one of these contests where the only winner is the iPad.” The other winners, of course, are the influential users who promote contests and are sometimes paid in cash or with gift hampers.
In India, in spite of smartphone usage having increased by leaps and bounds in the last few years—showing 167 percent growth according to a June 2013 report by the market research company CyberMedia Research—active usage of mobile internet has been slow to grow. This past August, Twitter hired a new head of mobile services and business developments, Gurgaon-based Arvinder Gujral, who formerly ran Aircel’s data services, new products and value added services divisions. Later in August, news came out that Twitter had entered a partnership with ZipDial, a Bangalore start-up that provides mobile phone-based marketing services. ZipDial would help send tweets by celebrities, including Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan, in the form of text messages to subscribers.
Celebrity tweets have been immensely valuable to Twitter’s business in India. Early in 2010, Matt Sanford, then the lead engineer of Twitter’s international team, noted on the company’s blog that sign-ups from India had increased 100 percent since the beginning of that year, “due in part to politicians like Shashi Tharoor and Bollywood mega-stars Shah Rukh Khan, Priyanka Chopra and Abhishek Bachchan” joining the conversation. As part of his efforts, Jaitly even met Shashi Tharoor, the minister of state for human resources development—and as Sanford noted, one of the first politicians to use the platform—to talk about the ZipDial link-up with him. “They offered me the same service that they did to Shah Rukh, but I declined to use it because I thought the price was too hefty,” Tharoor told me.
Valeria Rozcycki Wagoner, ZipDial’s founder and CEO, said the objective of the partnership was to “bridge offline and online engagement”. Wagoner claimed that, among other things, ZipDial has helped Twitter increase its support for local language script through its interface. Twitter confronts the practical challenges of communications in India in other ways: in the past, it has tied up with mobile carriers, including Airtel, Reliance and Vodafone, to offer users limited-time access to its service without cutting into their data usage. Users without smartphones have been able to send tweets as text messages since 2009. But Twitter is still nervous, as its SEC filing implied, about expanding in “emerging markets such as India”, where “feature phones with limited functionality” could stymie its own ability to deliver certain features, and “may limit the ability of advertisers to deliver compelling advertisements to users in these markets”.
ON 22 AUGUST, the same day the ZipDial deal was announced, Jaitly was in an auditorium at Jawahar Bhawan in Delhi, at a conference attended by Rahul Gandhi, Shashi Tharoor and others, including Deepender Singh Hooda, the Congress party’s head of social media. Priyanka Chaturvedi, a Congress spokesperson, told me that Jaitly’s session that day, at the party’s National Workshop on Social Media, was a “very basic interaction” to help workers “understand what Twitter is … how [it] can be an effective mode of communication.” It’s unlikely that Jaitly saw his involvement with the camp as political, although parts of the platform he runs in India erupted with anger at what they saw as a sign of partisanship. “Beware that Twitter in India has a boss who attends meeting in Congress offices,” wrote Subramanian Swamy (@Swamy39), in a tweet characteristic of the lively emotionalism of the political echo chamber that Twitter can often become.
The flak Jaitly got for his presentation recalls the ongoing debate in various countries about electoral endorsements by print and television channels. Doubts about whether the website censors tweets for political content—it doesn’t—are typical in the more neurotic corners of the town square. But censorship would pose an economic problem for Twitter, as it does for any media company on the internet for which more debate creates more content.
In 2011, the New York Times reported that Kapil Sibal, then the minister of telecommunications, had asked internet companies such as Google and Facebook to screen user content for alleged offensive material before it went online. Google, used to repressive requests from governments around the world, responded with caution at the time, seemingly content to let the issue slide out of public attention. But early in 2012, they embarked on an ambitious campaign to get India’s politicians, a class of people deeply suspicious of the internet, to use Google+ Hangouts, the company’s free videoconferencing service, previously employed as a sort of hi-tech fireside chat in the US by figures such as President Barack Obama, his wife Michelle, and Vice President Joe Biden, who each held open sessions moderated by Google employees in which they took questions from the American public.
“We were keen to experiment with Hangouts in India with prominent public figures,” said Naman Pugalia, a member of Google’s Public-Private Partnerships team, which Rishi Jaitly headed for Google India between 2007 and 2009. According to Jaitly’s LinkedIn profile, the job included leading “government affairs” for Google here, and he “mobilized India’s top political parties to use the Internet for the first time…” Pugalia said that in 2012, the team “went to various political parties and we proposed to them the idea of doing Hangouts with people—either on an issue they’d like to solicit public opinion or an issue they’d like to articulate better … you hardly get enough time to articulate a point of view on mainstream media, and questions are outsourced to journalists, whereas in a Hangout, people can directly ask questions of their leaders.”
“Politicians are traditionally people who are averse to technology,” said Nikhil Pahwa, editor of Medianama. “So what Google did was to take a few of them, who were open to technology, like Narendra Modi and Milind Deora, and create a body of work where these politicians are getting visibility and responding to people.” Once politicians are hooked on the advantages of Twitter’s direct communication, Pahwa said, it’s difficult for them to deny that there’s a positive side to such platforms.
Whether they were encouraged by official visits, or adopted the platform on their own impetus, India’s political players slowly grew to recognise that Facebook and Twitter could complement their campaign strategies. Chaturvedi told me that the Congress party had about 20 or 30 people in each state committee working on the its social media efforts. The party may have realised that it missed early opportunities to shape discourse on the internet, where BJP supporters, led by a politically engaged diaspora, seized an early advantage.
“I think it’s an established fact that the BJP is much ahead of the curve when it comes to social media,” Jiten Gajaria, head of the BJP’s social media cell in Maharashtra, told me. Though the form is fleeting—“conversation in real time”—Gajaria believes that social media had greater staying power than traditional media. “In print media, it’s for a day, on a TV show it’s for half an hour, and on social media, it’s as long as you can reuse and share it,” he explained.
During November’s protests against the demolition of the Campa Cola residential complex in Mumbai, Gajaria, who had arrived at the compound in support of the residents, found that he could use #CampaCola tweets to get the news cycle to spin out longer than it may otherwise have, in a week when news channels and politicians were busy with preparations for Sachin Tendulkar’s farewell test at the Wankhede Stadium.
In April this year, The Hindu reported details of a study conducted by two research organisations in Mumbai, the IRIS Knowledge Foundation and the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), which claimed that in 160 electoral constituencies in India, either the number of Facebook users was greater than the margin of victory in the last general election, or Facebook users constituted more than 10 percent of the voting population. Its objective, avowedly, was to demonstrate “the clout of social media”, rather than to make electoral forecasts. But the question of whether social media engagement could have an impact on voting patterns and electoral outcomes lingered indeterminately, debated, as is now the custom, both online and in the press.
“I think people initially started using social media to voice their opinion,” Gajaria told me when I asked him about how voters interacted with Twitter. “But looking at overall results of a lot of things, including voter registrations, I’m forced to say that people are getting enthused to vote. What would earlier be armchair critics are now predominantly becoming voters and going one step further, they could also be ‘level one’ influencers going forward.” Gajaria said that a group of 30 to 40 social media activists, anticipating next year’s general elections, have been organising voter registration drives in Mumbai and Pune. Kushal Mehra, a member of the BJP team that runs the “Vote India Vote” campaign, told me that by setting up stalls in various buildings across Mumbai, he and his band of fellow social media activists registered 7,000 (mostly young) people—not a particularly remarkable number for registration drives.
The Congress’s presence on Twitter remains relatively muted, although politicians such as Tharoor, chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir Omar Abdullah, and younger MPs like Milind Deora have found the platform an effective way of bypassing the contrivances and inconveniences of mediated speech. The party’s National Workshop on Social Media was part of a greater effort to catch members of the party up on new media, the Congress’s Chaturvedi said. Afterwards, the party’s communications team decided that Jaitly’s information session, as well as another one run by Facebook representatives, was useful enough that they should replicate the exercise themselves in other cities.
But my conversations with Chaturvedi and others did establish that if a true measure of political engagement on social media is to be found, it will be via Facebook, rather than Twitter, which remains, for most political activists, a medium for generating and circulating news. A social media researcher and volunteer with the Aam Aadmi Party told me that 200 people from everywhere in the world (“apart from Antarctica”) were volunteering with the AAP to push certain stories. Though Twitter hadn’t held an official workshop with them, this person claimed that the company did offer them a deal on promoted tweets—two tweets for the price of every one they bought—and tried to persuade the party that Promoted Products had been used with “great success” in elections in Venezuela and the USA.
The AAP volunteer said the party turned down the deal because its social media activists already collaborate to push certain trends on Twitter at specified times every day. The party coordinates on its “Twitter Trending” and “Twitter Storm” groups on Facebook, to decide which hashtag they will push at least once a day, usually at around 9 pm. “We are not a cash-rich party and we’ve had an organic growth till now,” he said. “We’ll get a bad name by doing that [buying promoted tweets], because already we are trending, and our supporters are doing it without taking a penny.”
IN THE SUMMER OF 2013, Twitter entered a partnership with the Indian Premier League during its summer 2013 season. A counter of hashtagged tweets about the teams playing against each other would run on television during the live telecast. Sony Max, the channel that broadcast the tournament, also started the “eit20” hashtag for Extra Innings—the post-match analysis show on the channel. “People could tweet their comments and questions at the hashtag, which would be answered by commentators on Extraa Innings live,” said Vaishali Sharma, the channel’s marketing head. “Throughout the tournament we received approximately 89 to 90,000 tweets on the handle.” A social media manager would oversee the torrent of tweets and, depending on the subject of discussion during the show, flash a relevant tweet, which panelists would then answer.
“So one of the things that’s happening in the context of Twitter is a special relationship developing between Twitter and television,” Jaitly told his audience at his NDTV Masterclass, back in April. “Twitter used to be a very consumption-oriented experience … but one of the things we see happening around the world is that conversation about television—whether it’s in news or in entertainment—is beginning to happen on a number of platforms. What’s interesting about Twitter is that because we are a default public platform … the implications are much more profound from a marketing standpoint, from a listening standpoint, from a research standpoint.”
Forbes magazine dramatised this relationship in an October 2013 cover story with the headline “How Twitter Will Save TV (And TV Will Save Twitter)” and Forbes India supplemented the story with another one about “multi-screen” engagement (simultaneously accessing television and social media) in India. On 21 October, social media blogs reported that Twitter had struck a deal with Airtel Digital TV to allow users to send their tweets about programming for live broadcast. The deal relies on a service provided by a Bangalore television technology start-up, BrizzTV. “TV is a very passive media,” BrizzTV’s CEO Amar Sahu told me. He quoted a Nielsen’s report that estimates that 85 percent of people in the US engage with a “second screen” in the form of a mobile phone or tablet while they watch. “Now people want to participate and have that belongingness with the stars,” he said. Accessing Twitter’s data for developers, his company, as others have done in other markets, developed the technology to display tweets on the television screen—now in use on channels like Star Sports, Aaj Tak, Times Now and Star Plus. @TwitterIndia tweeted about the deal, but as Sahu confirmed, “Actually there’s no partnership, per se, between Twitter and Airtel … Partnership is between me and Airtel.”
Thus, despite such efforts, it’s not clear how a growing Indian user base financially benefits Twitter. The company’s SEC filing noted that it records advertising revenue based on the billing location of advertisers, and therefore that “engagement by international users with ads placed by advertisers located in the United States increases our advertising revenue per timeline view in the United States.” The Promoted Products service costs significantly more in the US than in India, and a large international user base clicking through to American ads would accrue more dollar revenue. A big user base with unfettered access to American product advertising could help drive Twitter’s earnings.
For Twitter, television partnerships represent how the company can best capitalise on its vast base of passive consumers. “We’ve done a poor job as a product, explaining the value to people of Twitter—notwithstanding hundreds of millions of users,” Rishi Jaitly told his audience at NDTV. “Twitter’s failure—and its success—has been that we are so associated with tweeting … There are some places in the world that are much more anchored in consumption—the follow. And I think we need to do a better job as a product in reinforcing and celebrating listening.”
This perception of Twitter as a soapbox is one that was echoed by the AAP activist I met. “Twitter is basically for the classes, not the masses,” the activist said. “The classes are there. Right from Rajdeep Sardesai to Ashutosh to Barkha Dutt … everybody is there, even some top-notch politicians. Sagarika Ghose had a very nice conversation with [Kejriwal] on Twitter. Twitter is a way to come into [the] media light. As simple as that. Twitter is not for reaching out to the masses or to get people out of their homes to vote, but to get the media to talk about us.”
@rsjaitly tweets an average of five times a day these days, about everything from television shows to sports events to social justice projects. He wrote an update last month about two new employees joining the company, and snapped a picture of the view outside Twitter India’s central Mumbai headquarters, looking out over the former mill district. On 6 November, about a year after he first arrived in the city, he finally launched Twitter’s India blog, one of seven country-specific blogs the company runs. The first post, dated 6 November, was titled “Hello India, #ThankYouSachin”. In it, Jaitly tried to tell the company’s India story through a collation of tweets—starting with the writer Vijayendra Mohanty (@vimoh) in 2006, saying, “Discovering twttr! It’s fun to be here,” going on to 2010’s “Finally the original SRT is on twitter n the first thing I’d like to do is wish my colleagues the best in the windies” (from Sachin Tendulkar).
Jaitly then described Twitter’s biggest campaign out of India yet—#ThankYouSachin, created in partnership with the Board of Control for Cricket in India and the social engagement platform Digigraph. In honour of Tendulkar’s final test match, fans who tweeted the hashtag to @BCCI were sent a signed digital picture from the cricketer.
The conversation began weeks before Tendulkar actually came out to bat, energetically promoted by Jaitly and Twitter, whose newest team members include a sports partnerships manager, Aneesh Kumar Madani. As the second India–West Indies test progressed, the platform saw an unprecedented outpouring of love. “My childhood is now officially over. I cried with 40,000 others in the stadium. #ThankYouSachin,” the stand-up comedian Papa CJ tweeted. Over 3 million people—from Mick Jagger to Mahendra Singh Dhoni—joined in the campaign.
The vast majority of the farewells, though, were from non-celebrities, most of them untutored and spontaneous. On television, many saw their tweets flash alongside the match. On the third and last day of the game, Star Sports displayed a #ThankYouSachin counter on screen, showing that there had been over 22 lakh uses of the hashtag during the match. Two days before his last appearance in professional cricket, Tendulkar himself tweeted, as @sachin_rt, “I am really touched with #ThankYouSachin messages. Your support all these years have inspired me to give my best.” It was retweeted more than 16,000 times over the next few days.At Twitter India, the gratitude was palpable. “This tweet from Sachin Tendulkar @sachin_rt is now the most RTd tweet of all-time in India,” a message appeared the day after on @TwitterIndia (Tweets: just over 700. Followers: 812,000). “#ThankYouSachin.”