The UK Government isn't particularly lucky when it comes with dealing with social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. Last week, the Environment Agency was forced to apologize when it was caught asking amateur and student photographers to start working for the organisation without any financial compensation. BJP covered the story extensively here and here.

The Environment Agency's biggest mistake, despite the fact it announced its plans on Twitter, was how it managed the issue. Within minutes of BJP publishing its report on the Agency's actions, photographers flooded the Agency with emails, tweets and Facebook messages decrying the move. How did the Agency react? It started deleting Facebook messages and blocked access to the page. Within 24 hours, it was issuing a statement (both to the media and on Twitter) apologising for its overzealous use of the "delete" button on Facebook. Eventually, the Environment Agency scraped the plans for a database.

Now, it's time for the Labour party to learn it the hard way. As first revealed by the Photographer Not a Terrorist campaign, and as Kate Day at The Daily Telegraph writes, the party that has been in power since 1997 has launched a social media experiment using Flickr. 'Change we can see' asks for UK residents to send pictures of places that have changed over the past 13 years. Of course, and in this case this is a side point, the photographers would give an unrestricted license to Labour for use in its campaign.

The point here was that photographers seized on the occasion to pass a message to labour about the main 'change they can see': the rise of stops and searches under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which was enacted by this Labour government. "So instead of adding pretty pictures of their local hospital to the Flickr group," writes Day at the Daily Telegraph, "they have uploaded copies of the stop and search forms they were given while trying to take photos in public places."

And of course, Labour has done the one thing you shouldn't be doing in a socially connected media world: it tried to ignore the issue and started deleting images and comments it didn't agree with. The result is simple: a story that could have been dealt swiftly with is now getting a lot more press than expected (the Facebook group for "Change We Can See" is still open for comments, if you feel like having fun).

2009 has seen social media becoming one of the most important online tools for the dissemination of news and comments (whether true or false, positive or negative). 2010 should confirm this trend, and impose social networking websites as people's first source of news through, as Maria Popova puts it, curated serendipity. Isn't about time that politicians, institutions, commercial entities and government agencies learn how to use these sites?