ghajini

Happened to see two posts on Ghajini’s online promotion – on WATBlog and Pluggd. Both stories refer to Hungama being roped as the film’s partner to create 3 websites. Aamir’s blog also sports the Ghajini look.

But, what I fail to understand is the fact that Hungama and the makers of Ghajini have completely ignored any kind of conversational marketing, online. Creating 3 websites, however good and interesting they are (with the timer that drives the user back to the home page in 15 minutes – mighty ambitious, if you take into account short attention spans on the web!), is still a top-down, talking-down to audiences approach. Its anything but conversational.

Now, dig this! Facebook has at least 33 (large and small included) groups with a total membership of about 3,800 members. Orkut is even better – it has many more groups, with more than 100,000 members amongst them.

The brief to Hungama may be clearly to create 3 interesting websites – its like a brief to a poster designer or an advertising agency. But, what about the captive audience among social media and making better use of the readers of Aamir’s blog? That is a HUGE opportunity and its staggering that the marketing of the film fails to take note of this. Imagine the cumulative WoM that could have been generated by an official group in Facebook and Orkut?

All you need to do is to just start engaging with them and give them exclusives – inform them perhaps a day in advance about the official website? How about giving them a key/ password to open a specific section of the website that is otherwise not available to non-members? Let me not get started on discounts for tickets…how about simple percentage discounts, if an Orkut member buys 10 or more tickets at one go? The opportunity – as always – is limitless and is constrained only by a social media consultant’s creativity.

While the websites are perfectly functional and look fabulous, it is just a new take on conventional advertising. The online medium allows something incredibly engaging and conversational. UTV, with Delhi 6 and Dev.D, seems to be doing something smart, to begin with. Saawariya’s makers too did something along these lines. So, its rather strange that the makers of Ghajini go about talking of their online promotion like its path breaking, while social media engagement is totally out of the picture.

If you’re still wondering if all this makes sense – the combined 103,800 (approximately) fans I referred to in the Facebook and Orkut groups have become members in unofficial groups, with no engagement or intervention by the film’s makers/ marketers – imagine the possibility if there was an official group in each of these social media platforms. And, imagine the WoM they could have generated if Aamir spoke to these groups…even a few messages a week would have worked wonders!

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