PMO personally monitors social media activity of each minister

The Narendra Modi government is going all out to tutor its ministers in the "efficient" use of social media to maximise citizen engagement. The Prime Minister's Office (PMO) is personally monitoring the social media activity of each minister. The PMO has even drawn up their social media report cards, the latest and the only one compiled so far having been sent to them in April. The report also exemplifies those among the council of ministers who are rather proactive in the realm for others to emulate.

Meanwhile, MyGov - Modi government's interface with the people - has taken ministers and ministries under its tutelage to teach them to put social media platforms to better use so far as engagement with the people is concerned.

While Mail Today was the first to report that a workshop for the ministers had been organised in this respect, the second edition was held on May 16 at the same venue, the India Habitat Centre (IHC).

The PMO in its report card has taken into account the activity of the Union ministers vis--vis Twitter and Facebook. The report has been compiled for the following periods: January 11-January 25; January 25-February 8; February 8 to February 22; and February 22 to March 2.

The report card contains detailed data, along with a graph, that records the number of followers and those followed by ministers.

A section is an indepth analysis of the ministers social media activity is the 'content remarks' section of the report. It delves into the content of the tweets and Facebook posts/shares.

The social media performance review has also taken into consideration several parameters to judge the ministers.

These benchmarks include average number of tweets per day; user mentions within tweets; links within tweets; how many tweets have been retweeted; tweets favourited by Twitter denizens etc.

Apart from the analyses, the PMO has also mentioned several examples from among Modi ministers who have been proactive on social media to reach out to people and who have added a personal touch to their interaction with people via social media.

Foreign Affairs minister Sushma Swaraj and Railways minister Suresh Prabhu are the obvious ones to be mentioned.

Apart from them HRD minister Smriti Irani, Power minister Piyush Goyal, commerce minister Nirmala Sitharaman and MoS Jitendra Singh have also been exemplified via screen grabs of their accounts wherein they have replied to general public and used Twitter and Facebook to alleviate grievances.

On the other hand, at the second edition of social media workshop held at the IHC it was proposed that this interaction between MyGov officials and ministers be made a permanent monthly feature. "While the first one was a generic workshop, the second one was specifically regarding the ministers and those handling their social media handles. The handlers have been told to share and retweet not just content concerning their own ministries, but also others so as to maximize public reach," one of the participants told MAIL TODAY.

"MyGov is the interface between the government and the people and its mandate is to maximise citizen engagement; this exercise has been organised to that end. MyGov has proven to be an efficient way to interact with people as happened in the Smart City project as well as when we mediated the eliciting the views of 1.5 lakh panchayats for the New Education Policy. Our endeavour is always to take it to the next level," said a highly placed official of MyGov.

(In association with Mail Today Bureau)