Riding the Radia Tapes

Open--the Magazine burst into collective public conscious with their expose of the Radia tapes. The magazine that exposed the unholy nexus between PR, journalists and politicians turned to social media when its servers could not handle the load of too much traffic, to get outs it message. This is their story.

Name of Business: OPEN Magazine

Website URL: http://www.openthemagazine.com/

Industry: Media

Target Audience: Indians and NRIs.

Category of Business

Open is a weekly current affairs and features magazine. It is the flagship brand of Open Media Network, which is the media venture of RPG Enterprises. Other popular brands of the RPG group are Ceat Tyres, SareGaMa and Spencer’s. Launched on April 2, 2009, Open has distribution across 12 cities, including Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Kochi, Chennai and Hyderabad. Open has positioned itself as a magazine for the cosmopolitan Indian. Open has three distinct sections – the first is Small World, a 10-page news selection, the second is detailed stories and features on a wide range of domains, including politics, sports, entertainment, science, technology, health and culture, and the third section is called Mindspace, which has literary essays and write-ups on art, gadgets and celebrity gossip.

The website focuses on well informed and well travelled Indians and NRIs. In fact, a significant portion of the new and returning visitors to their website are from North America. Open aims at getting “quality content” to their readers.

Marketing Efforts and Results

Open has a number of blogs, which include posts on a variety of topics from politics to sports. They have a presence on Facebook with 5,556 fans. On their Facebook Fan Page, Open publishes updates on stories featured on their website. Many of these fans are very active, which can be seen from the number of “likes” that each update receives. Several fans are very vocal about their opinions on the stories and comment openly. On Twitter, Open has 3,642 followers. Here, too, links are shared to the stories uploaded on their website.

Open makes active use of convenient widgets on their website that allows readers to share, commend and critique content via other social media platforms.

“The best example of the effectiveness of social media for us was when we broke the X-TAPES/Radia tapes story. The shock of the revelations created such a huge spike in web traffic that the Open website kept crashing in the first few days after the story broke. Even as we were desperately ramping up our servers, it was important that we do not black out, and we were able to do this by staying proactive on our Facebook and Twitter pages,” says R. Rajmohan, Publisher, Open Magazine.

Marketing Investment

All social media interactions are handled by the in-house team. No extra resources are deployed.