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6 best practices: Engaging in social networking for social change

By Ari | Aug 9, 08 03:56 PM

I'm a Flickr addict. I have nearly 450 contacts and am in over 280 groups; I admin or moderate an additional 8 groups, two of which I started. Sometimes I worry I'm spending too much time on the site, but I get so much out of it I think the effort is more than worth the return - I've gotten feedback on my drawings that's been a huge motivator and inspiration for future work; I've had dialogues with activists and others that have gone on for days and changed minds all around (including my own, many times); folks have found my work and used in their own projects or published it with their articles - and even an upcoming book - while I've found images to use in pieces for our clients, in lieu of stock photography. All in all it's been a very positive experience, and I've picked up a lot about how to be more effective as an activist and as a member of the Flickr community. I thought I'd share a few of the things I've learned.

1. I put an image called peace.jpg on my web server (you could also upload a photo to your blog or a service like PhotoBucket), and then I placed that image link in all of my social networking profiles. At any time I can swap my old image for a new one, and the link just loads up the new image. This way, you can update all of your profiles at once with a new big peace-oriented message, quote, or drawing. View my Flickr profile to see my peace.jpg in action.
2. When we couldn't find a good place to post animal rights photos on Flickr, we started a group. Today it has over 350 members, a pool of over 3000 photos, and Flickr is full of animal rights and vegan groups. If you don't find what you want, make it!
3. A photo has more potential to generate dialogue and create change if you write a really good description and provide links so folks can take action or find out more. See this photo, "siddhartha, vegan cat in a vegetarian box", to see what I mean. The photo without an interesting title and a useful description and link would be very confusing to people - and I probably wouldn't have had as good a dialogue on it, either.
4. Also on Flickr, I have my own sets that pertain to social change ( love + struggle, vegan food, sid, zora, and snow, vegan cats, and other people's street art) but my photos go a lot farther and get more dialogue going when I give them a ton of tags and post them in groups strategically. For instance, I got a broader audience and a deeper, more challenging dialogue going around my photo "teaching oppression" by posting it in a variety of groups, some more political than others: All Animals brought in animal lovers, Animal Rights and Animal Exploitation brought in my crowd to help support the animal rights side of the dialogue, and !Social Issues and Documentary Photography of Labour brought in folks from other social movements who might not ordinarily think about the rights of animals. In addition, a wide variety of tags (kid, child, education, labor, carriage, horse, animal, central park, nyc, spring) allow the photo to come up more readily in a wide range of image searches, and a nice open Creative Commons license encourages folks to use the image in their own work.
5. Much earlier on in my experimenting, I tried generating dialogue in more confrontational ways (like commenting "Gross - I could never eat a dead animal!" on people's meat photos...) and found that I ended up in arguments with irritated people who didn't feel any better about veganism or worse about their actions after talking to me. Not so useful - so I switched gears, through trial and error. Now I don't seek out conflict, I act as a peacemaker. When I encounter oppression, I try to call folks on it, but with compassion and humor. I try to let folks reach their own conclusions instead of shoving my ideology down their throats. As a result I have more fun, less conflict, and more positive responses from the folks I'm engaging with.
6. The single most important lesson I've learned from Flickr is that you get back what you put in. I realized early on that the only way to get folks to come see my photos and talk with me about them, to discuss things with me in the discussion boards, is to go out there and talk to them about their photos, and weigh in on the discussions they've started. Flickr isn't a tool to be used by activists - it's a community you can join with respect for the others in it. (Big thanks to Tricia Wang for helping me understand this - your online work is an inspiration.) If I go into it thinking only of self-promotion, I won't get my desired traffic and comments, because no one will care enough about me to come see my new stuff. The more I comment on others' photos, mark others' photos faves, respond in community dialogues, and promote folks' blogs and websites and photostreams, the more reciprocal love I get back - and the more I feel like I'm part of something. (Flickr friends, I love you, thank you!)

Now if only Flickr was open-source, free, and for the people rather than for profit - I do worry sometimes knowing that I've put so much work into something that Yahoo! could take down at will because it's no longer profitable - with no way to export my photostream and its detailed writing and comments, for posterity. But social interactions are like that - you put yourself out there, you engage, and maybe you can't take it home with you. So I keep going, for now.

Anyone else out there into social networking for social change? What have your experiences taught you?

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