While it has been long that I last wrote my blog and I was waiting for real incident on the web to actually write something meaningful. There were many topics but one which affected me is actually problematic for the booming digital industry.

Ok, let me start with a question: 

What would you do if you see this tweet on a Friday when a new Bollywood move (in this case D-Day) is released? Obviously your plan would be to read the tweet reviews, go on to other sites and then plan to watch it if they are good. Right?

And what if you click on the link to understand that there is NO review.  The link content is:

Is this not cheating for personal benefit? Let me explain – the site sensationalized the headlines and prompted the user to click the link thus making sure to take the page views number high. These page view numbers are then taken to various brands and asking them to advertise on their portal.

What the brand was trying to do is ‘crowd-sourcing the tweets’ which is innovative but was it actually a review as mentioned in the tweet?

A very big question which arises here is – Should social media be regulated or regular media be checked?

Sad & bitter truth – The goal of the brand is not the quality of content but the views on the content. It is how the success metrics are defined in the campaign.

Writing very specifically of the above case, there are ‘n’ numbers of news channels with ‘n’ number of movie reviewers. The brand would want many views and interactions and Social Media agency is under tremendous pressure to bring an idea which is a Kolavari Di or viral (this is another problem). This propels the social media handlers to sometimes go overboard to spread the brand name.

Coming on to a conclusion for this problem is difficult because wrong practices are leading to success for the brands. The content if ethically monitored may undergo changes and in-turn would not ensure the so-called clicks and then result in the failure of the campaign.

But the bottom line is ‘creating thin content is bad SEO’ and it would not be able to take you too far. For individuals, it is a matter of personal freedom to write and express their feelings whether right or wrong. They may write it for themselves, for a company, incident, or even on any individual which makes a separate issue to regulate the personal space but for brands it is very important to realize the long term goals rather than bring the success in short term goals without planning & strategy. Making  a viral is in the hand of customer and not in the brains of agency but creating unique, innovative and authentic content is definitely their responsibility which should be regulated as a practice.