Skip to main content

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.  
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Iranian elections, so what?

There has been so much press coverage on the fallout after the Iranian elections, and most of it coming from social media sources, YouTube, twitter, facebook, Blogs etc. What I don't understand is that: Did people in Iran just woke up to their reality? They are living in a totalitarian state, under the dictatorship of a religious figure (Ali Khamenei), citizens are afraid to talk openly, and always need to be anonymous in case someone from the state comes knocking at their door. So, did some people in Iran just woke up? Why did they have to wait for an election to protest and express their concerns? If the system is corrupt and biased towards the population now, then it must have been like this before the elections! I did also manage to watch some of the press conferences by the Iranian State representative, but I have not seen anything from the Mousavi campaign. Why doesn't the Mousavi campaign have a daily press briefing? Why doesn't Mousavi go on an Interview with a ...
1 comment
Read more

Become a Member of the Conservatives and get free wine!

In a recent email to supporters, the UK Conservative Party asks people to become full members of the party in order to help shape party policies, attend party Conferences and select the Party's candidates. Also worth mentioning.. members get a free Membership card. That's all good, but then the email also offers a £40 wine voucher if you register now! WTF? As an added bonus, new Members will also get £40 off at Naked Wines . After joining online, you'll be directed to the Naked Wines website - where you'll get £40 off any case of wine worth £59.99 or more. (You must be 18 years old to take advantage. Terms and conditions apply More info about the free wine at the Conservative website here .  I believe this offer from the UK conservatives is hilarious!  There are so many ways to rip on this move! But as they say in their email (after ordering the free wine):  join today and help shape the future of your Party and your country .  I wonder if the deci...
Post a Comment
Read more

EU - Greece - hammer and sickle

So, I traveled to Thessaloniki for the Greek Easter, and you can imagine my surprise when at the tolls just outside Athens I saw these flags by the Greek Communist Party please note the hammer and sickle symbol at the top of the flags. Now, my first reaction was total surprise! I asked myself whether this photo would be possible on any other European highway; I am now back in Vienna, Austria and it really strikes me as impossible. Also, along with the flags, there were volunteers covering all lanes, with fryers explaining the values of the communist party with the slogan "Trust the KKE in the upcoming EU elections". I must say that this is one of the first campaign moves from a Greek Political party for the upcoming European elections, scheduled between 4 and 7 of June 2009. The message was clear enough: even if you don't agree with the Communists, vote for them in the European elections to send a "message"... whatever that means... Also in the same fryers the...
2 comments
Read more