Here I am at 11:30 pm on Sept 6, 2019, waiting for the historic moment when Chandrayaan 2 will finally land on the moon. Of course, I must be awake to watch this happen. I feel like it’s my baby, having done a Monday Mutiny on July 22, 2019, around the launch of this prestigious mission by ISRO! I can’t imagine how they must feel down at Mission Control in Hassan and Sriharikota! It was definitely a disappointment to lose contact with the lunar vehicle at the last moment – as a tweet says: “We love you to the moon and back ISRO!”
Social Media is buzzing with the Chandrayaan 2 event! Twitter has been trending since morning with the story which has been on the rise the whole day. As I write to a candle’s light (a bit dramatic, but you get my meaning!), #ISRO is trending at 30,000 tweets.
Social Media is an interesting concept. And who knew how much it would come to matter in this decade of the 21st Century? At the end of the second decade of this young century, what can we learn about Social Media from this event?
1. THE LATEST NEWS IS AVAILABLE TO YOU AT THE TOUCH OF A BUTTON.
Not so long ago, we old-timers waited for the newspaper early in the morning. How excited we were! How excited our newspaper boy was – how do I know that? Well the newspaper was delivered before 6:00am in those days, not at 7:00am. Today, you know what’s happening, when it happens, without your TV or newspaper. Fake news, real news and everything in-between of course!
2. FACEBOOK IS CERTAINLY STILL ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR SOURCES FOR NEWS
And other Social Media platforms are catching up! Floods, natural disasters, and even when you want people to know about injustice, or something good and positive, you can use Social Media to focus on it. And it is snowballing into something we cannot even imagine today.
3. CHANDRAYAAN 2 HAS BROUGHT YOUNG PEOPLE IN INDIA TOGETHER
Children of 10 & 11 dare to dream. With a well-thought-out leadership campaign, you can get people’s opinion on your side. ISRO has used Social Media to pick up interest in Science & Technology. You now realise how much it actually takes to get a mission of this magnitude going. The best part is that the costs are one-third of what NASA is using for similar missions! (I did learn that on Social Media!)
4. HASHTAGS FOR BRAND BUILDING
You are able to narrow your search down using the hashtags. Social Media savvy people now understand what Chandrayaan 2 is all about thanks to hashtags. You are participating by making news on Social Media with what it means to YOU. In the “Dark Ages” (before smart technology) readers just sat back and read or listened while someone else was making the stories. This can be applied to your blog, business or hobby, use hashtags to show people what you care about and get them excited too.
5. USEFUL AND VALUABLE CONTENT WILL GAIN POPULARITY ON SOCIAL MEDIA.
ISRO has been able to excite a generation of young people with their Tweets and updates about the Chandrayaan 2 mission. You too can provide useful content for readers that could go viral. So, to keep your brand in the news, keep providing useful content.
As I sign off on this historic event, Twitter hashtags for #ISRO and #Chandrayaan2 are now trending at more than 300 thousand tweets. India definitely did not sleep last night!
