PR behind Tharoor Support
By Bala Shah

Despite Shashi Tharoor’s office contacting Twitter to get my colleague and satirist Techgirl ejected from the micro blogging platform, the general consensus in Techgoss is that he was an intelligent and capable minister good for our country. 

But the recent Lalit Modi Versus Shashi Tharoor battle raised a number of questions about the proper course of action for a Minister if his lobbying also benefits a girl friend.  Shashi insists he did no wrong but the Congress Party felt he had to go.

After lying low for 4 days without a single update on Twitter, Shashi Tharoor finally emerged this morning to Tweet: “Thank you for all the kind words on SupportTharoor.org. Means a great deal that so many have reached out to me at this time of trial. “

On the face of it,  this support website ‘SupportTharoor’ has been set up as a spontaneous act by one of Shashi’s many friends and admirers.  In reality, it is the work of a Singapore Based public relations firm.

A background check of Supporttharoor.org shows it has been set up by Sebastian Fuhrmann from Europe.  But all other details are scarce.  Why hide your background if you start a site supporting such a well known, popular politician? 

Support Tharoor was registered on April 17 and has its share of positive messages.  Many seem to be genuine fans while others seem to be planted messages.  Indian media lapped up the story of this support site and presented it to their readers as if it was a spontaneous act of a fan.

When Mani Karthik, a blogger originally from Cochin, India, investigated, he found that this support site was a public relations exercise

“
Both Shashi Tharoor and IPL hired the same Social Media agency – Does that ring a bell?

Today, some of my friends tweeted their pledge to Mr. Tharoor via a new website that was launched. http://www.supporttharoor.org

Me being a little too curious and a stupid geek, went a bit further, as my “inner voice” asked me “Why would anyone put up a support website like this? And who ?”

I tweeted about it and got some very interesting responses.

One tweet said that this website was first tweeted by one gentleman called Shiraz Gidwani, who’s also based out of Dubai. I scanned his profile and he clearly was one of the first people to pledge his support but I couldn’t find any trace that told me that he built this website. He probably came to know about it first and decided to support.

And then another friend send me the domain details which was interesting – http://twitter.com/nikhilnarayanan/status/12393721370

It said that the site was registered with http://www.coma.sg which was the digital PR team for Mr. Shashi Tharoor – http://coma.sg/articles/odds-ends/the-new-york-times-on-shashi-tharoors-twitter-success/

A Coma.sg employee was also one the first tweeters about the website (along with Shiraz) which makes me think that its most probably Coma.sg that’s behind the Support Tharoor campaign, unless some one wanted to fake here. http://twitter.com/Aen/

And now, the interesting part. Checking at the Coma.sg archives I found that they are the guys dealing with the IPL social media stuff. What? IPL ?

Proof – http://coma.sg/articles/news/we-will-be-watching-you-and-the-indian-premier-league/

That sounds a bit “Aahhhaaa” to me. Both IPL (Not Mr.Modi but IPL) and Shashi Tharoor are with the same PR agency!
“

Good detective work, Mani.