AwakInd — One of my several failures
In early 2013, I was asked to head AwakInd, a political social web platform. Networking for politics.
The first version had already been created in 2011 and was on its way to become successful with having received some good press coverage, before there being a lack of funds and development stopped. My job was to revamp and get it on ground again. Heading this product, it later became one of my biggest professional failures in various aspects (‘product lessons learnt’ would be another post about it.). We spent 8 months on creating the entire product from scratch again and then spent weeks and months on pimping it on social media. By the time I left we had around 30000 users on the platform. However, we never were able to retain them.
One of the biggest marketing mistakes which I presumably did was to use a controversial topic or a current trend. It was easy. Pick up a trending topic; get your bots to fire tweets with a hashtag with a simple line at the end — “Join Awakind for more — www.awakind.com". Bang! — impressions. We peaked at almost 300 signups and not just visits in a single day once. This worked well for quite some time. I sent out tweets favouring BJP at times and AAP at times — them being the more online active parties on social media. I sent out posts about Salman Khan to Khurshid, Modi to Kejri — anything controversial. Then one day a member of AAP caught our bots and posted a screenshot. Fortunately they assumed it to be a BJP bot. The post went viral. We were happy; it would make us go viral. What it did, was escalate the online slandering between BJP-AAP and had no effect on our stats.
While this was on, I happened to come across another social network — Wishberg. (Different domain, but much I learnt from them.) I saw unrelated people wishing them and talking about them. There was this positive energy around anyone who talked about Wishberg. There were no bots. And though not sure about the numbers, they were definitely strong with the following and the aura they had.
The users never came back on AwakInd. Overtime, the team size at AwakIND was reduced and we were shifted to different roles due to the cost involved. Online, people bad mouthed us at different times online because I picked up sensitive topics for quick publicity.
And then two days back “Zomato Tech Capital” happened. And then this post.
Picking up a topic of controversy for promotion of your product or service is short term. It works well, really well. But overtime people see through. They read and analyse. No matter how good the idea, how good the intention; one wrong idea you use for quick publicity and it will get back to you.
The current team right now at AwakInd seems to be doing a good job with their small clean campaigns, which it is doing at a steady pace. I see no bot posts. There is just one account @awakind_news still left whose password and email I believe everyone at the erstwhile team (including me) has forgotten — bot remaining as the reminiscent of a past life. The platform seems to be slowly growing again one step at a time.
Do good. Talk good. Karma has its way.
