EngageIndia: Engage in Democracy
EngageIndia is a user driven political web property that engages young constituents by providing real-time, accurate, non-partisan news, content, political tools that enable rankings of leaders, and political humor. The property also enables users to voice their opinion about political leaders and parties through the use of social media tools, forums, and blogs.
Challenges:
- www.EngageVoter.com was launched in March 2009, with the target of becoming one of the most relevant political sites by the end of the Indian General Election cycle (May 2009).
- Since the property is largely user content driven and relates to sensitive political issues, a need for moderating content was evident.
- The Indian Election is one of the world's biggest events, with 700 million voters. Engage Voter's ambitious target was to reach over 100 million first time voters, the target through different Social Media
- All competitor sites had a better web presence then EngageVoter
- To get listed on all major search engines and get first rank on specific keywords within 60 days window was an extremely difficult challenge that needed to be accomplished.
- The program's website ( http://www.EngageVoter.com ) performed very poorly in online searches.
- The brand lacked any true Social Media presence.
Solutions:
- Engage Brands team effectively moderated content, encouraging user participation on EngageVoter forum, blogs and other user generated sources of the property. The team also moderated content taking appropriate actions based on the property guidelines.
- Engage Brands also organized targeted campaigns, contests leveraging social media to gain active user engagement.
- Engage Brands performed a comprehensive analysis of EngageVoter.com website, delivering a thorough report detailing the usability of the property, the effectiveness of the current Social Media and Search Engine Optimization strategies of the site.
- Based on this analysis, Engage Brands team performed online branding triage for the Engage Voter. The work included moderation of the content, extensive SEO-related coding aimed at increasing the brand's visibility in search engines, extensive link building to assist in the SEO process as well as expose the site's content to new customers, and a complete, top-to-bottom social media make-over.
- Engage Brands also developed a two month online awareness and advertising campaign targeting young Indians to generate quick results for the site.
Result:
- At the end of the Indian election cycle, EngageVoter was rated as one of the most important political websites in India. The site received a Google Page Rank 4 in less than 50 days.
Main Site:
http://www.EngageIndia.com
