My colleague, Liz Henry, pinged this morning asked me to take a photo of myself the above sign. It's part of a protest against Telecom Immunity. EFF and partner organizations will be bringing these photos to lawmakers, reminding them that Americans demand their privacy rights and deserve their day in court against lawbreaking telecoms. You can get more background about the issue and how to participate at the site, Stop the Spying. My photo isn't quite as creative as some of these others in the flickr stream, but wanted to do my part.
Most of the calls for action are to do something with social media. There is also a way to protest the "old fashioned" way - email your senator.
I would love to know how they will measure what was effectiveness or not with their social media strategy.
What do you think of the strategy so far? If you were responsible for the social media strategy for this campaign, what would you do?
I think that flickr groups of protest/messaging photos have received pretty good participation in the past, but I still believe that nothing is as powerful as video. A collection of 3-10 second spots of people saying why privacy is so important, even if they were all reciting the same sentence, would be very moving in my opinion. Regardless, I agree that the telecoms can't be immune to the laws.
Posted by: Amy Sample Ward | January 25, 2008 at 09:33 AM
Interesting use of a "call to action" in that most everyone can take a photo with a digital camera, cell phone, webcam (still shot), and upload it as part of a protest. With the personalized messages, you can tell that these people do in fact support that cause, and are not just photos collected online and uploaded.
Video may be a part of the future for this sort of campaign, as it can certainly but a true voice and rationale for the position in a short video clip. Not everyone has the capability to video yet, so it's probably around the corner, at the Tipping Point.
CARE uses a nice collection of videos and photos for their "I Am Powerful" campaign. Imagine what other nonprofits can do...
Posted by: Danielle Hamilton | January 26, 2008 at 02:28 PM