Inside LabourStart

On the subject of content management systems.  Listen here.

The ad campaign on Facebook has given UnionBook the kind of exposure you can only pay for  … and we are paying for it.  In the last day and a half or so, since our ads went live, they’ve been shown over 300,000 times.  A small number of people have clicked through (87 so far) and we only pay for those.  One result of all this is that we’ve seen a significant increase in the number of new users of UnionBook.  We now have over 1,500 users of the site, 127 of whom joined in the last day and a half.

Today we switched the domain name so that http://www.unionbook.org points to the new site.  The old site can be found at http://www.unionbook.org.uk — but this is causing problems and people cannot access the old site.  We’ll try to have that fixed by the weekend.

I wonder how long they’re going to let this one run …

We’re getting ready to shut down the old UnionBook and replace it with the new one.  In anticipation of this, I ran a survey — and will publish full results later this week.  But the headline is this: 427 people have responded so far.  An overwhelming majority – 83% – want to continue with the new, Ning-based version of UnionBook.  Only 7% would want to go back to the old, Elgg-based version.

I’ve just set up an online form here that allows us to easily translate our news interface into new languages.  I’ll be testing it out today with the trade unions in Georgia.  If this works, I’ll do the same for our campaigns.

My weekly podcast this week is about ‘software design and proletarian internationalism’ and is all about our experience using Ning.  Listen to it here.

This month we’re promoting Paul Mason’s Live Working or Die Fighting: The Global Working Class.  Please spread the word in your unions.

We’ve gotten the green light to shut down two of our campaigns after more than three months online.

The Algeria campaign with 2,735 messages sent produced no results in the field (we are told).  The union is looking to get a new headquarters somewhere else.

The Foxconn campaign, with 5,484 supporters (yes, double the number of the Algeria campaign), contributed to a lot of publicity about the case and probably helped pressure Foxconn to raise wages.

Later today, we’ll have only 6 active campaigns.

I wonder if we shouldn’t begin to make as one of the criteria for our campaigns that there be some reasonable expectation that the campaign produce a result.  Not a guarantee, of course, but sometimes I think unions ask us to do campaigns because it’s just something on their to-do list to publicize a dispute, but the effort produces no result at all and no one ever expected it to do so.

This sounds harsh, but I wonder if we shouldn’t be thinking about it.

August is supposed to be a quiet month.  In Europe and elsewhere, schools are closed, trade union headquarters shut down, people go off on vacation.  I was even away for the first two weeks of the month.  And still LabourStart grew — with big gains for our mailing lists, increased traffic to the website, and the very rapid growth over just two weeks of the new version of UnionBook.

Here are the totals with the changes since the end of July in brackets:

• Mailing lists – subscribers: 68,857 [+1,023]
• LabourStart’s English language mailing list: 57,950 [+167]
• Absolute unique visitors according to Google: 30,153 [+2,055]
• UnionBook – members: 4,959 [+180]
• UnionBook 2.0 – members: 1,192 [+1,192]
• Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 3,612 [+100]
• Twitter – followers: 2,414 [+125]
• Correspondents: 803 [+6]
• Union group on Flickr: 564 [+2]
• LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 199 [+9]

Some highlights from the mailing lists — the other large groups are:

• Norwegian 2,716 [+17]
• French 2,162 [+54]
• Spanish 1,209  [+21]
• German 798 [+3]
• Italian 518 [+3]
• Russian 441 [+12]
• Turkish 435 [+60]
• Polish 304 [+1]
• Portuguese 238 [+1]
• Dutch 230 [+5]
• Swedish 229 [+1]
• Chinese 181 [+12]
• Danish 162 [no change]

• My lastest podcast on labour and technology is now online, here.
• UnionBook 2.0 has 910 members as of this morning.
• I’ve asked about closing down our Algeria campaign and am waiting to hear from the comrades there.
• We’ve got a sponsor for our Canada page – ad to appear later today.
• Our book of the month for September will be this one (but don’t order it just yet – not using that link).
• Derek, Andrew and I have scheduled our first Skype conference call for next week to discuss the 2011 LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference.  Details coming soon.