Relief for Alia Bhatt, joke's on netas in poll season

There's no need to shout from the rooftop always when you have smarter ways available to ridicule your rivals. This is the mantra most politicians are adopting to attack opponents in the run-up to the assembly elections.

Capitalising on the power of the social world, seat aspirants are commissioning cartoons and spoofs to highlight local issues that their competitors have failed to address. For instance, a ticket hopeful has asked an agency to make cartoons, focussing on infrastructure problems, particularly bad roads, in the constituency of a sitting MLA.

"Jokes are a subtle way to make sure that issues stay on voters' mind. We have several clients who want to highlight local issues through jokes. However, we as professionals do ensure that jokes are not personal or maligning in nature," said Vaibhav Chaya, a city-based social media expert, who is handling several political clients.

Experts say the trend picked up after the Lok Sabha ?elections where a series of spoofs and jokes were made on several top politicians across the country and circulated vigorously. So far in Maharashtra, maximum jokes/cartoons doing the rounds are mostly targeting MNS and its chief Raj Thackeray, followed by the seat-sharing row between Shiv Sena-BJP and Congress-NCP, they said.

Besides jokes, with internet becoming primary sources to seek information, another service that has become a hit amongst politicians is "online reputation management", wherein agencies are hired by people to manage results of search engines like Google, Bing, etc. The agencies, known as 'online marketing firms' ensure that 'all negative information' about the client is pushed down on search engine by promoting positive ones upwards.

Not just that, these firms also work round the clock to "counter" negative comments/remarks against their clients on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter by posting "aggressive positive replies".

"These days all political parties and politicians are using professional services to keep up with their social media presence and image," said Sagar Pardeshi, director of Newsmax multimedia, a Bhandup-based firm which claims to be handling several political clients.

Services do not stop here. Politicians can pay to have more followers on Twitter,increase "likes" on Facebook pages, get more views to their YouTube videos and more visitors on their websites. A few firms even provide for services give additional services like 'speech writing','public relations' and 'media strategy', etc.