Poll panel watching,Cong,BJP take the cyber route

While CM Narendra Modis fanpage on Facebook has close to 9,28,780 likes and 9,88,519 followers on Twitter,state Congress president Arjun Modhwadia has 88,969 likes on his Facebook page and 6,200 followers on Twitter.

With the Election Commission getting tough on aggressive poll campaigning and expenditure of candidates,political parties in the state have stepped up their social media presence to grab the eyeballs of voters. Fanpages have been mounted,Twitter handles tweaked and party songs are set to get the ball rolling on the Internet for the December polls.

While CM Narendra Modis fanpage on Facebook has close to 9,28,780 likes and 9,88,519 followers on Twitter,state Congress president Arjun Modhwadia has 88,969 likes on his Facebook page and 6,200 followers on Twitter.

Both maintain personal blogs,stage managed by an array of content writers and agencies,which leads one to ask just how important the social media juggernaut is to the political class in the state?

Lyricist and ad-man Prasoon Joshi says,Social media has a reach in creating an atmosphere but it has no direct impact on actual votes8230;. conventional media is increasingly overlapping with the social media these days,

As the Model Code of Conduct is in place,parties ads and smear campaigns are not visible in the electronic and and print media. So they are finding their way on social networking sites and blogrolls of politicians.

As a party,we have given a lot of importance to this tool social media. We recently launched a Facebook page,Join Hands for Change,which 30,000 people have joined. We also launched five songs sung by an array of stellar Gujarati singers,which has been downloaded and liked by people said Modhwadia.

If the Congress in banking on songs,Modi has penned Garba poems,which will be used during Navratri by his fans.

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He Modi has actually gone one step forward and connected to the common man by having a write to CM,invite him for an event and request and appointment on his website. His reach is palpable as even the Google Hangout of US President Barack Obama never crashed,but Google executives had to try hard to revive Modis Hangout because it crashed due to the sheer numbers of people trying to access it, said Rajika Kacheria,convenor of BJPs Information Technology Cell.