Inside LabourStart

The most successful ads on Facebook, apparently, are the ones that promote an organization’s Facebook page – getting people to ‘like’ your page is easier than getting them to do just about anything else.  And if they ‘like’ you, they will see your posts on their own news feeds, as will their friends.

Facebook now allows for a very interesting kind of targetting – you can choose to show ads only to Facebook members who are friends with people who already ‘like’ LabourStart — in other words, people who are themselves likely to be trade unionists (or sympathetic to the trade union movement).

The ad campaign we’ll be running starting tomorrow targets 282,680 Facebook users in these 22 countries: United States, India, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Canada, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, Israel, Finland, Denmark, Australia, Russia, Brazil, China, France and Germany.  The users are all over the age of 18 and list English as one of their languages.  None of them are currently LabourStart fans.  The ad reads:

If you’re a trade union member, you’re going to love (not ‘like’) LabourStart. Check out our Facebook page and website

At the moment, we have 1,710 people who ‘like’ our page on Facebook.  Our page is a very new one, launched on 1 April.  Over the last 114 days, we’ve grown by exactly 15 per day since then.  We should reach 2,000 ‘likes’ by 11 August (and 10,000 in 18 months), even without this ad campaign.

By way of comparison, here are some other FB pages and how many ‘like’ them:

1. Global – Avaaz 231,994
2. USA – Moveon.org 152,151
3. Global – Human Rights Watch 139,571
4. Global – Amnesty International 49,171
5. UK – 38 Degrees 31,002
6. USA – AFL-CIO 28,918
7. Australia – GetUp! 18,299
8. UK – False Economy 10,400
9. USA/Canada – SEIU 8,989
10. USA/Canada – USW 5,955
11. USA – Labor Notes 5,419
12. Germany – IG Metall 5,258
13. Germany – ver.di 3,457
14. USA – Young Trade Unionists 2,769
15. USA – IWW Starbucks Workers Union  2,624
16. Global – UNI Global Union 2,511
17. Israel – Histadrut 2,448
18. UK – TUC 2,048
19. UK – Unite 1,897
20. UK – UNISON 1,892
21. Global – ITUC 1,860
22. Global – Clean Clothes Campaign 1,828
23. Australia – AWU 1,777
24. Global – LabourStart 1,710
25. Global – International Labor Rights Forum 1,536
26. Ireland – ICTU 1,386
27. USA – Student Labor Action Project 1,318
28. Israel – Kav LaOved 1,297
29. Global – IWW – 1,202
30. Canada – CLC 709
31. UK – GMB 583
32. Palestine – PGFTU 441
33. South Africa – COSATU 434
34. Canada – CUPW 423
35. Global – International Metalworkers Federation 366
36. Global – ICEM 232
37. Israel/Palestine – WAC Ma’an 226
38. Global – Global Labour University 224
39. Palestine – DWRC 202
40. USA – ILCA 115
41. Global – Fair Labor Association 93
42. UK – Banana Link 70
43. New Zealand – NZCTU 66
44. Europe – ETUC 64
45. Australia – ACTU 63
46. Global – Education International 46
47. Global – WFTU 46
48. USA – Labour Behind the Label 35
49. Iran – IASWI 23
50. Global – Global Unions 11

The new face of Radio LabourStart, R.I.P.

As Marc Belanger has correctly pointed out, Radio LabourStart has for some time now served to direct traffic to Radio Labour – and nothing else.

Our volunteer correspondents have not been posting links to other MP3 files – even though some of those correspondents are themselves the owners of radio labour stations and should have been using our facility to publicize their programs.

(Search this page for the word ‘radio’ to see what I mean.)

As a result, I’ve suspended Radio LabourStart and it now redirects all traffic to Radio Labour.

There’s also now a good-sized graphical link to Radio Labour on our front page.

New country - new possibilities.

There’s a new country in the world – South Sudan (this is their flag).

At the moment we don’t have any correspondents there, and no readers (that we know of), and a quick scan showed no current labour news.

But we’re ready for all of the above, as ‘South Sudan’ is now one of the choices for news stories in our database, and for participants in our online campaigns.

If there are any other countries you know of that we’ve missed, let me know and we’ll fix it.

Meanwhile, we have successfully launched our first campaign in Hebrew — here.  You should see something like this in your browser:

We hope this will also be our first campaign to appear in Hebrew – to reach out to Israeli workers.

The Swaziland campaign was suspended today after 3 months online – and a disappointing 2,357 messages sent. (We’re waiting to hear from the ITUC what effect, if any, it had on the ground.)

This leaves us with six active campaigns, listed in order of popularity:

• Georgia 3,596
• Iraq 3,406
• Botswana 3,357
• Colombia 2,807
• Korea 2,683
• Russia 1,690

This means that the Georgia campaign, launched only 3 weeks ago, is the one most likely to reach 5,000, making it one of our larger campaigns.

This only makes sense if you read the article.

.net Magazine, the world’s best-selling magazine for web designers and developers, has devoted two pages of the Summer 2011 issue (which went on sale today) to a make-over of LabourStart.  The makeover was done by one of the UK’s top design firms – twentysixdigital.  (Their clients include the Royal Marines and the manufacturers of Durex condoms.  Don’t ask.)

Unfortunately, at the moment, the article is not available for free online – though I’ve written to the editor asking him to make it available.

If that happens, I’ll share the URL with our English language mailing list and we can use their comments facility to have a discussion.  The only thing available online right now is a JPG image of the page – but without the explanation in the article, it doesn’t make much sense.

If you’re dying to read it, buy a copy of .net Magazine in a shop or online.  (The digital version costs £4.16; the UK the print version costs £5.99.)

We just received this from the United Steelworkers –

Movement at Vale in Colombia

After intervention by unions from around the world, there has been some positive movement in the struggle by Vale workers at the El Hatillo mine in Colombia who have organizied with the union Sintramienergetica. The Vice Minister of Labour called a meeting with the union and Vale.  In the meeting Vale agreed to negotiate with the union. The union is now waiting for Vale to name its bargaining committee.

In the meeting, Vale also took note of receiving over two thousand letters of protest from workers around the world concerned about Vale’s behavior in Colombia. Sintramienergetica is thankful for the LabourStart campaign run on its behalf.

After three months, I’ve closed down the Bahrain campaign – which came in with 4,693 messages sent and which appeared in 10 languages. I’ve asked the ITUC to tell us what effect, if any, the campaign had.

This is a good beginning – and today we’ll be launching a Korean language version of this campaign which will hopefully begin to build a Korean language mailing list as well.