Review of The Sensational Hashtag:
#Pray_For_Nesamani
#Pray_for_Nesamani went trending worldwide in Social Media. Nesamani, a character from a 2001 Tamil film ‘Friends’, starring Vadivelu, Vijay and Suriya. In this movie, Vadivelu’s character Contractor Nesamani is one of the noteworthy characters in his career.
Recently Tamil netizens in FaceBook commented on a post and made a fictional character from a movie to go viral after 18 years of its release. The post was from a Pakistani page in which it asked what is a hammer called in your language. For which a Tamil FB user commented that hammer is called ‘Suthiyal’ in Tamil and Contractor Nesamani was hit by it, referring to the scene from the movie ‘Friends’. And then others started replying knowing the reference.
This hashtag started trending nationwide on Twitter. And this happened during the ceremony of the Prime Minister after its election in India. #Pray_for_Nesamani took down the hashtag #ModiSarkar2 which was trending top in India. This brought in the attention from the rest of India. Non-tamilans were so confused about why everybody was tweeting about this hashtag. Many of them thought Nesamani was a real person and everything that happened to that character was for real.
After trending in India, #Pray_for_Nesamani went worldwide trending and gained attention from international news organisations. BBC News covered this news with an article titled ‘Who is Nesamani and why Twitter is praying for him?’. After BBC’s coverage this hashtag got more attention than before.
As the whole world talks about Nesamani, advertisers made use of this character and had an optimum reach and impressions with the help of Vadivelu. Thus the hashtag not only was an entertainment but also profitable for many.
