Last week Gordon Brown was under fire again, but this time being mocked for his most recent, and slightly uncomfortable post on YouTube.

His direct addresses on the Number 10 channel answer current public concerns and questions put to him from YouTube users. This provides a great opportunity for him to show a more human side, and is an excellent tactic for communicating with hard-to-reach groups such as young, up-and-coming voters.

Social media use in politics has recently become a major success story for Obama’s online campaign for the US presidency. His online presence was everywhere – YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook. Social media enabled Obama to have direct engagement with the American public, and was a channel for him to present himself as an ‘ordinary’ person; having dinner with people in the community who have sponsored his campaign.

His use of social media encouraged the public to sign up to receive live election news, through their social media profiles and mobile phones - a clever promise to engage with voters on a personal level.

And hats off to Number 10 for also embracing social media as an instant portal to the British public, but some considerations do need to be made when using it.

After negative public comments on the Number 10 YouTube channel, the option to comment on posts was disabled. Taking a few tactics from Obama’s book, such as better message delivery by Gordon Brown and welcoming comment and debates, could be more successful in encouraging wider public engagement.

With social media, YouTube especially, being used mainly for entertainment purposes, it’s inevitable that the number of unfavourable videos of Gordon; picking his nose and ‘running like a big girl’, will outnumber those posted by Number 10, and will receive thousands more views.

With the rise in social media interest from British politics and such a growing political online forum, could Obama’s winning online campaign be a taste of what’s to come in the next general election? Here’s hoping.

Posted by Sally Barr

Facebookers are perhaps unaware that when they upload to the site, according to new terms of service technically they transfer all rights to their content over to facebook.

Facebook made it clear that they had never claimed ownership of material that users upload and the terms were intended to protect content on other users pages should a user delete their own, e.g. in wall to wall conversations.

However this does raise a real question about the ownership of material uploaded to the internet.  Creative Commons licences only go so far in protecting the copyright of uploaders such as bloggers or facebookers and the terms of use of many social networking sites may override any efforts to protect ownership of content. 

In addition, it turns out that the whole thing can still be subject to Human Error as Sweetney found out when a ‘low level production assistant’ at Fox TV, ‘borrowed’ a photo of her dog Truman from her blog and used it in their NFL holiday broadcasts.

Even brands and businesses who chose to upload content to sites such as flickr and facebook need to be aware that they may be technically relinquishing their ownership of this content. 

More importantly, lack of understanding, misinterpretation, ignorance or blatant disregard of licensing by internet users will inevitably result in branded content turning up in entirely unexpected ways and places…

posted by gemmaT

Update, 20/02/09: 

Following a lot of fuss and upset across both online and offline media (including a facebook protest group that gained 121,000 members in just a few days), facebook have returned to their old terms of use.

So (at least for now), the company’s right to your original content expires when you delete your account.