Inside LabourStart

• 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.

At the LabourStart correspondents meeting last Sunday in Hamilton, someone suggested we look into BuddyPress as an alternative to Elgg.  It looks interesting, but I’m not convinced we have good reason to migrate (even if we can migrate).  So I’ve put it out there via UnionBook, Facebook, Twitter, etc and will see if someone thinks this is a great idea and can make a compelling case for it.

I closed down the Iraq oil workers campaign in all languages – it had been running for more than 3 months.

I’ve setup the Serbian edition of LabourStart, and am currently working with a comrade there to get it off the ground.

Last Friday I recorded my sixth podcast, this time on the subject of hashtags and how they were used at the LabourStart conference.  As of this afternoon, 376 people have downloaded it and listened to it.  I also wrote up an account of the conference and posted it to my blog.  Then I updated the conference page to include links to my article and the podcast relating to it.

I sent out mass mailing promoting our book of the month, my podcast, two articles about the conference and our ActNOW newswire.  As a result of this, we sold a few books and got a couple more sites to adopt our newwire.

Well, that was pretty amazing.

I’ll be publishing a lot of material about the conference in the next few days on the conference website itself – http://www.labourstart.org/2010

Meanwhile, today I’ll add some odds and ends about stuff I’m doing as I do it.

UnionBook: Just launched a $150 Google adwords campaign — this money is a gift from Google, so we should use it.  UnionBook has been growing slowly but surely over the last few weeks and this may give it a boost.  Also publicized UnionBook in my daily wire post/tweet/Facebook update.

Book of the month: We’re promoting this starting today.

Campaigns: Have asked permission to close down the Iraqi oil unions campaign, which has been running for more than three months.

Internationalization: We have a volunteer in Serbia who is keen to help us get our Serbian language edition off the ground; today I sent him the file for translation.

Conference followup: I’ve added links to articles about the conference, videos, photos and Tweets here.  Also removed the ads for the conference from the front page of LabourStart and UnionBook, and from the LabourStart correspondents sign in page.

Book sales have dramatically improved compared to where we stood a year ago.  Last April, I reported to you that our sales for the entire first quarter of 2009 in partnership with UCS totalled around $700.  This year, in the first 3 weeks of 2010, those sales total $3,238.  In other words, we might be able to achieve sales of $14,000 this quarter — 20 times the sales we had in the first quarter of 2009.  I need to keep emphasizing that this is still not a lot of money for LabourStart, as we take in only 10% of that.  But it’s great to be able to bring so many labour books to the attention of our readers and to help in any way we can.

Barely 24 hours after we promoted sales of Tom Zaniello’s book on labor films, we have a best-seller on our hands.

So far, 52 orders have been placed with a gross income of US $1,805.10.

While this only means £113 in income for LabourStart, it makes a real contribution to publishers, authors and book-sellers (such as UCS) who put union books out there.

And it’s part of a broader initiative (like the labour films database, the online list of labour film festivals, and the upcoming labour video of the year) to promote labour films as well.

In the last two days I’ve done two mass mailings to our list in English, both focussing on a single topic: labour films and videos.  (The second mailing is going out now.)

In the first, I pointed out our co-sponsorship with the Washington DC Metro Labor Council of the online database of union films plus the list of labour film festivals.  I encouraged people who had things to add to this list to contact Chris Garlock at the DC Metro Labor Council and I passed on several emails which I received to him.  The response was overwhelmingly favorable, and people want to know more.

Today’s mailing focussed on a book by Tom Zaniello — an encyclopedia of labour films.  Hopefully we’ll be able to sell a bunch of these.

The next and final step is the launch of our Labour Video of the Year competition — but that may have to wait until my return from the USA in another 10 days.

We keep getting asked to promote workers’ rights campaigns and we keep having to say yes — that’s the nature of our business.  There’s already a queue forming and even as I write these words, we’ve got another appeal coming in from 12,000 workers in Turkey.  Today’s mass mailing — the second this week — has an update about the Sun International dispute which I’ve published on UnionBook as the union (SACCAWU) doesn’t update its website; appeals from the Clean Clothes Campaign and American Rights at Work for their Triumph International and T-Mobile campaigns; and finally a plug for the book, Click Clack Moo, which is a perfect Christmas gift our supporters can buy for their kids.

Today’s mailing makes much greater use of rich text formatting, with small images next to each story, and the images themselves can be clicked on.

We launched a major new campaign yesterday. The soft launch (appearing on our home page, on the list of active campaigns on our site, via our ActNOW newswire, through our Tweets, status on UnionBook and Facebook, etc.) generated a grand total of 11 messages sent, including my own.  The difference between this and doing a mass mailing is enormous — so let’s not believe any of the hype about alternatives to email.  At the moment, there are no alternatives to email — this is the only effective way to build online campaigns.

Today I’ve sent the campaign, and a reminder to check our recent English language mailings on Posterous, to our volunteer translators, including our new Italian language translator.  I hope to have this campaign, like the previous one, translated into Russian as well.

Book sales have fallen — the sales of Economics for Everyone were a one-off.  Very few people bought either the Silkwood book or the cartoon book we promoted yesterday.  When we have a poor week, the income is really only pennies and we do have to wonder if it’s worth it for us to appear to be commercial when we’re not really making any money.  There is, of course, the educational value of promoting these books and the help we’re giving to UCS, to keep them going.

I’ll be speaking about LabourStart campaigns at a number of events in the next few weeks, including the South East Region of the Trades Union Congress in London this coming weekend, in Leeds and Manchester in the next few weeks (at TUC events), and at the International Metalworkers Federation communicators conference in Frankfurt next month.

As part of the effort to improve our capacity in other languages, I’ve been working with Andy Funnel to completely translate the interface for adding news in the French language for those correspondents who may not read English.  We’re nearly there — we’re working on the names of countries.  Once this is complete, we can do the same for other key languages, which will open the door to correspondents who do not read English.

I’ve been working on the Labour Newswire Global Network — the list of websites that use our newsfeeds — for the U.K.  I’m finding that a staggering number of sites have simply disappeared.  Unions that have merged into other unions — including some very large ones like the GPMU —  have simply given up on their domain names, which I find extraordinary.  Many local union websites have fallen into disuse, or evaporated into the ether.  In some cases, sites went through re-designs and in the process dropped our newswires.  Of the first 58 websites I’ve gone through, only 12 are active and using our newswires.  If this is true across all countries, then we don’t have 750 sites using our newswires — we are closer to having 150.  This means that we will need to seriously promote the newswires, especially the ActNOW one, to boost responses to our campaigns.

Meanwhile, the response to both our Photo of the Year competition and our Twitter survey have been great — much higher than anticipated.  2,833 votes cast so far in the competition with another 11 days to go (we’re already probably higher than we were last year) and the Twitter survey, with two more days to go, already has had 1,552 responses.  (More than two-thirds of the respondents do not use Twitter, by the way.)

Best seller

24 hours after making Economics for Everyone our book of the week, we’ve seen 75 orders placed (some for multiple copies) with sales totals (including shipping) reaching US $2,662.

This may be our biggest selling title ever.

In addition to promotion of the book in a mass mailing, Derek did a mailing to his Canadian contacts which certainly helped.  The book also appears on the front page of LabourStart, in our Labour’s Online Bookstore blog, on UnionBook (in the Union Books group, the largest group there), on our Facebook group page, and was promoted via Twitter as well.

One of the nice things we are doing here is making a book that would otherwise have a very limited geographic distribution available to trade unionists everywhere. The first few sales of this book all came from the eastern hemisphere — and it’s unlikely that trade unionists in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands would have ever heard of it if we hadn’t promoted it.

We’ve also discovered that our Polish comrades are interested in publishing a Polish language version of the book — one more unintended consequence of our promotion of these books.

Eurostar campaign: We’ve heard from the RMT union that our campaign contributed to the pressure that has brought the company to the negotiating table.  There will be a meeting on Friday after which it is likely that we will suspend the campaign.  The campaign took off very quickly, with 3,176 messages sent in English, 60 in French, 68 in Norwegian, and 2 in Spanish, for a total of 3,306.

Labour Photo of the Year: I’m putting up a notice on the site that submissions will no longer be accepted.  We’re in the hands of the judges now.

Book sales: Sales of the children’s book “Fire in the Hole” were quite good this week.  Overall, in the third quarter of 2009 we sold just under $6,000 worth of books, with 128 orders placed.  This means a net income to LabourStart of $596.65 (£374.28).