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flickr political communications | Obama Vs Romney

Having read through a lot of information on how the Obama and Romney campaigns are utilising the Internet and Social Media, I wanted to focus on their political photography campaigns. After looking at their respective flickr accounts (Barack Obama - Mitt Romney), I was really amazed with the Romney campaign... in not using flickr properly.
Dinner with Barack and Michelle—August 20th, 2012, Dinner at Mintwood Place in Washington DC, Photograph by Scout Tufankjian for Obama for America
It is really weird that the Romney campaign does not use flickr as they should in order to attract more views, spread the campaign photos across the web, and drive traffic back to MittRomney.com

The Romney campaign does not title their photos, nor do they provide a description to each photo. So each photo is "Untitled" and the campaign does not even give credit to the respective photographers. Moreover, none of the photos are even taged with keywords, and also the Romney campaign has banned people from commenting!

To top it all, the Romney campaign photos are "All Rights Reserved"! That means that they can not be downloaded or used in any way, unless you have explicit permission from the Romney campaign. To contrast this the Obama photos are "Some rights reserved" Where they give the opportunity to anyone to re-distribute them as long as they attribute the photos back to the Obama campaign.

This must be really embarrassing for the Romney online campaign. This is really a strait-forward bad practice! flickr is fairly simple in setting up, and also has a very simple uploading feature. 

So, a good advice to the Romney flickr uploader is to... fill in the blanks! A title, a description, a few tags, credit to each photographer; and also let people re-distribute the photos and comment on them.  

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