1. Social Media Marketing Case Study: The President is coming
Social media marketing suits the film makers pretty well, especially for low budget films. Social
media marketing works for numerous reasons including wide reach (sans borders) and better
ROI owing to lower costs. While Ghajini saw a slew of online marketing activities, bollywood is
yet to see an extensive online marketing campaign. Let’s see how the guys behind "The
President is coming" have used social media tools for marketing.
Facebook
It was an ad on Facebook that caught my attention. On being clicked the ad leads to the group
"The President is Coming- The Movie"
Given the fact that this group is advertised (someone is paying for it) it’s safe to assume that it’s
an official one. It has about 850 members, one discussion and 45 wall posts. There are a few
pictures from the film and some videos (trailers, interviews etc) added by the group owners.
Facebook is slowly picking up as a platform for marketing Indian films but there seems to be a
lack of clear strategy (or focus) on how to leverage the platform better. The film's facebook
campaign is top down, like in most cases and has been used just to push content, not to interact
or anything else.
The least that could have been done was talking to interested people instead of just
broadcasting the content. The content and the information that's shared could have been a bit
more interesting and a fan page would have been nice too.

2. Website: Apparently there isn't a website built for the film, or if there is one, its not at all
discoverable, which is equivalent to it not being there.
A website though simple, is a must have to share content, build a community and
involve/engage the audience.
Blog: No blog either.
MySpace: MySpace has also been used to spread the word. In place of a website, the main
placeholder is the films MySpace page
Few things worth noticing about the MySpace part of the campaign.
1) "Friend us and write a comment about why you should be a part of the film. If we like it, we'll
contact you directly. Good Luck" reads the profile. This means for one that they started this
profile a decent while before the film was expected to hit the screens and secondly it shows an
attempt to involve audience.
2) Since the profile's main page still shows November 28th as the release date, its easy to make
out that nobody is really looking after the profile.
3) Content wise the profile is decent, it has a few stills, an audio clip and a video trailer of the
film.
4) The profile has been befriended by 175 people so far (though there's nothing more to it) and
the public wall has managed some 14 comments. Once again no involvement from any team
member or cast.
Just like it was with Facebook, the attempts at MySpace are either half-baked or poorly
executed.

3. The least that could have been done was to keep the profile regularly updated, interact with
audience and share some more information about the film. If this page is used as the main
web property for the site, it should have links to other web properties like facebook etc
YouTube:
There are around a dozen different videos on YouTube for the film, ranging from "film trailers"
to "behind the scenes" to "press launch" to even "post production problems". Once again some
work has been done in creating and uploading these videos but not much thinking seems to
have been done to get the most out of it. Chances of you bumping into these videos are as rare
as chances of you bumping into their MySpace page, which are to be honest, quite bleak.
The least that could have been done was to make a channel, upload all videos from that
account and cross link the channels URL to other web properties.
Imdb: Un-official page without much information and the default poster picture.
The least that could have been done was to create an official page, upload the movie poster
and fill in more details.
All in all it seems like a volunteer(and informal) effort by the team members involved with the
project, especially the more net savvy ones and thus you can find their imprints across various
platforms discussed.
Only if there was a sound strategy in place, things could have been better and effective.
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This Case Study was compiled by Mayank Dhingra.
Mayank writes about marketing, business and social media at http://mayank.name/
Have a question/suggestion? Feel free to drop an email at dhingra.mayank@gmail.com