PETA2

The Solution

In early 2004, PETA's Youth Division created an account on MySpace, an online community dedicated to facilitating social networking. The following year, PETA registered an account on Facebook, a site with similar orientation.

Three employees in PETA's Youth Division maintain peta2's profiles on both social networking sites, updating them regularly with fresh content such as links to interviews with musicians, celebrities and athletes; daily blog entries with campaign updates, insight into life at PETA, and exclusive photos and videos; messages to all of peta2's friends highlighting advocacy, celebrity interviews, and contests related to the cause; streaming videos and Web banners for users to put on their own pages; and a calendar of future events that peta2 will be organizing and attending.

Peta2 uses MySpace's "Events" functionality to invite its friends to local demonstrations and member events. It uses the "Groups" section to target new users by their music, movie and lifestyle interests and, occasionally, to create groups for specific campaigns. For example, in 2006, peta2 invented a holiday called "Hug a Vegetarian Day" and created a group so that users could post their plans to hug vegetarians as well as pictures of their hugging on the group message boards.

Since MySpace is community-driven, peta2's staffers also research influential MySpace users, bands and sympathetic organizations in the hopes of finding ways to encourage them to help promote peta2 and its profile.

Finally, in addition to maintaining the presence on MySpace and Facebook, peta2 staffers also post updates on the blogging sites LiveJournal and Xanga and create projects for new Web 2.0 initiatives including Flickr, YouTube, and deviantART.