>Is All Publicity Good Publicity on Social Media? (w.r.t. Chetan Bhagat)

>After the #chetanblocks debacle (which is quite a hilarious exchange of tweets and sentiments flying high), Chetan Bhagat the Indian author of many books has again started a controversy. He claims that his book ‘5 point Someone’ has not gotten enough credit in the Aamir Khan bollywood block buster 3 Idiots. I personally cannot really say much on this cause I have not read the book, but the movie is pretty damn good!

Even other celebrities have given their views about Chetan’s claim including media person Vir Sanghavi. You can read his views on this controversy here.

What I find is that controversies can be magnified on Social media. People, maybe celebrities or maybe not, pitch in to take sides. Seeing their views a lot of people who otherwise might have ignored the issue will also think on it and maybe speak up, thus increasing the controversy’s scale.

Also the medium allows people to directly address the person/institution concerned. Its not giving views to a journalist about an issue and hope the politician reads that paper but to directly address a tweet, makes a whole lot of difference.

With all the attention maybe the issue gets resolved.

Is All Publicity Good Publicity?

#Chetanblocks was trending on Twitter for quite some time. Without doubt it drew a lot of attention world over, but surprisingly when I looked at @chetan_bhagat’s twitter follower count there wasn’t much difference. A slight wobble in the follower count is all there is around 7th Dec when this incident happened. I got this graph from Twitter Counter.

Around 1st Jan when Chetan’s credit controversy was raging there has been quite a jump as you can see in the second boxed region in the above pic.

So maybe all publicity is not good publicity on social media! Definitely bad publicity would lead to brand recognition albeit negatively, it apparently hasn’t led to more brand followers in Chetan’s case.

The second incident interests people and now they want to know Chetan’s side I think that is why there is a jump in the followers. This follower increase could also be due to the interest generated in 3 Idiots movie.

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