Inside LabourStart

This looks interesting.  I’m testing it now.  We currently have 6,504 followers on Twitter, but we’re not maximizing the power of this network.

Here’s what I did today:

Stopped following hundreds of Twitter accounts who don’t follow us.

Started following popular Tweeters who do follow us – everyone with more than 1,000 followers, we now follow.

Sent Direct Messages to 20 Tweeters with over 8,800 followers each asking them to re-tweet our message:

Who killed Li Wangyang? http://bit.ly/KUpfiS

Headline news –

• Turkish list grows by nearly 50% following the campaign in support of aviation workers union Hava-Is
• All mailing lists now just a month away from breaking through the 100,000 barrier (only 2,462 to go)
• Social networks – FB page growing (up 134), group stagnating; 215 more Twitter followers in English; another 144 join UnionBook; LinkedIn group to reach 1,000 by mid-summer – with no effort by us …
• We are a month or two away from having 1,000 correspondents

Mailing lists (greater than 100)

Total for all lists: 97,538 [95,921]

English: 72,726 [71,816]
French: 5,627 [5,387]
Italian: 3,883 [3,877]
Spanish: 3,775 [3,707]
Norwegian: 2,424 [2,433]
German: 2,195 [2,160]
Russian: 1,768 [1,767]
Turkish: 1,161 [801]
Dutch: 736 [734]
Chinese: 357 [357]
Polish: 306 [305]
Portuguese: 246 [246]
Japanese: 205 [ 205]
Farsi 188 [193]
Finnish: 184 [184]
Swedish: 170 [171]
Arabic: 114 [114]
Hebrew 106 [100]
Danish: 106 [106]

And just below the radar:

Korean 93 [93]

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,144 [5,100]

Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,775 [4,766]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 4,495 [4,361]
Like LabourStart page (French): 195 [180]

Twitter followers –
English: 6,414 [6,199]

The following numbers will be updated next month, unless someone wants to do this now …
French: 110 [104]
Japanese: 25 [24]
Spanish: 20 [18]
Norwegian: 9 [8]
Italian: 8 [6]
German: 7 [8]
Turkish: 6 [5]
Portuguese: 4 [5]
Russian: 4 [5]
Dutch: 2 [2]

Union group on Flickr: 687 [682]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 890 [842]

Website

Correspondents: 978 [972] – 4 pending

Unique visits to the site this month : 630,351 [590,196]
Peak day: 24,828 – 21.5.12
Page views this month: 1,271,874 [1,289,430]

Mailing lists (greater than 100)

Total for all lists: 95,921 [95,403]

English: 71,816 [71,466]
French: 5,387 [5,070]
Italian: 3,877 [3,850]
Spanish: 3,707 [3,674]
Norwegian: 2,433 [2,430]
German: 2,160 [2,097]
Russian: 1,767 [1,761]
Turkish: 801 [796]
Dutch: 734 [725]
Chinese: 357 [344]
Polish: 305 [305]
Portuguese: 246 [246]
Japanese:205 [ 206]
Finnish: 184 [184]
Farsi 193 [173]
Swedish: 171 [173]
Arabic: 114 [113]
Danish: 106 [107]
Hebrew 100 [99]

And just below the radar:

Korean 93 [93]

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,100 [5,050]

Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,766 [4,721]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 4,361 [4,217]
Like LabourStart page (French): 180 [146]

Twitter followers –
English: 6,199 [6,019]
French: 110 [104]
Japanese: 25 [24]
Spanish: 20 [18]
Norwegian: 9 [8]
Italian: 8 [6]
German: 7 [8]
Turkish: 6 [5]
Portuguese: 4 [5]
Russian: 4 [5]
Dutch: 2 [2]

Union group on Flickr: 682 [680]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 842 [792]

Website

Correspondents: 972 [966] – 7 pending

Unique visits to the site this month : 590,196 [677,769]
Peak day: 25,708 – 17.4.12
Page views this month: 1,289,430 [1,521,870]

Here are the totals with the last month in brackets:

Mailing lists (greater than 100)

Total for all lists: 95,403

English: 71,466 [68,656]
French: 5,070 [4,046]
Italian: 3,850 [3,522]
Spanish: 3,674 [3,389]
Norwegian: 2,430 [2,373]
German: 2,097 [2,035]
Russian: 1,761 [1,630]
Turkish: 796 [788]
Dutch: 725 [686]
Chinese: 344 [304]
Polish: 305 [305]
Portuguese: 246 [246]
Japanese: 206 [156]
Finnish: 184 [184]
Farsi 173 [93]
Swedish: 173 [178]
Arabic: 113 [100]
Danish: 107 [107]

And just below the radar:

Hebrew 99 [96]
Korean 93 [93]

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,050 [4,981]

Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,721 [4,719]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 4,217 [3,953]
Like LabourStart page (French): 146 [137]

Twitter followers –
English: 6,019 [5,782]
French: 104 [101]
Japanese: 24 [15]
Spanish: 18 [14]
German: 8 [5]
Norwegian: 8 [5]
Italian: 6 [5]
Portuguese: 5 [4]
Russian: 5 [3]
Turkish: 5 [3]
Dutch: 2 [1]

Union group on Flickr: 680 [676]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 792 [710]

Website

Correspondents: 966 [957]

Unique visits to the site this month : 677,769 [609,164]
Peak day: 26,836 – 9.3.12
Page views this month: 1,521,870 [1,381,128]

As I was travelling in the USA for part of this time, I have an excuse. Anyway, here are some of the things I’ve been up to these past 3 weeks.

Campaigns: I’ve closed a number of those that reached the 3 month limit, and launched three others. Our biggest campaign ever was launched during this period. I began work on a new system to allow others – senior correspondents, for example – to launch campaigns while I am travelling. I also did a full review of the last two campaigns and what’s been translated and what not; as a result, we now have campaigns and mailings done for Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish and Hebrew. I’m still waiting for responses from our translators for Korean, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish and Vietnamese. Ideally, all campaigns will appear in 18 languages, and we’ll mail to 18 lists.  As a result of these campaigns, we now have over 93,000 names on our mailing lists.

Social media: I dealt with problems that arose from repeated attacks on our Twitter account (now solved). UnionBook grew to more than 5,000 members for the first time.

Partners: I set up a meeting at the ITUC, to take place in Brussels next week. I continued fundraising efforts with GUFs and British unions. So far this year, nine GUFs have given money and seven British unions have either pledged or donated.

Conference 2012: Work continues in Sydney; our organizing committee there is growing and meeting regularly and we’re sharing information on Basecamp.

Some headlines:

• Six of the mailing lists grew quite quickly – the Dutch list, for example, nearly tripled in size.  Lists that grew by 100 or more include the English (+1,242), German (+501), Italian (+476), Dutch (+449), Spanish (+338),  and French (+265).  The net gain on the non-English lists far exceeds the growth of the English list.  The total size of all the lists now exceeds 90,000.
• UnionBook picked up another 106 members while the LabourStart group on Facebook grew by only 8.  This means that UnionBook has 262 more members than our Facebook group.
• Our Facebook page continues to pick up ‘likes’ – we gained 338 new ones in February, a growth of nearly 10%.  (Last month we picked up only 150, so it more than doubled.)
• Our presence on Twitter, despite spam attacks, continues to grow quite dramatically: in recent months the English feed picked up 200 new followers each month.  In February, we picked up double that number – 399 new followers.  And our other Twitter feeds are beginning to slowly pick up followers.
• The group on LinkedIn continues to grow every day.  It was previously growing at the rate of 10% a month, but this last month it grew by considerably more than that and now exceeds 700.

Here are the totals with the last month (January 2012) in brackets:

Mailing lists (greater than 100)

English: 68,656 [67,414]
French: 4,046 [3,781]
Italian: 3,522 [3,076]
Spanish: 3,389 [3,051]
Norwegian: 2,373 [2,357]
German: 2,035 [1,534]
Russian: 1,630 [1,600]
Turkish: 788 [787]
Dutch: 686 [237]
Polish: 305 [304]
Chinese: 304 [276]
Portuguese: 246 [245]
Finnish: 184 [183]
Swedish: 178 [180]
Japanese: 156 [137]
Danish: 107 [107]
Arabic 100 [97]

And just below the radar:

Hebrew 96 [96]
Korean 93 [93]
Farsi 93 [93]

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 4,981 [4,875]

Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,719 [4,711]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 3,953 [3,615]
Like LabourStart page (French): 137 [108]

Twitter followers –
English: 5,782 [5,383]
French: 101 [90]
Japanese: 15 [15]
Spanish: 14 [0]
Norwegian: 5 [0]
Italian: 5 [0]
German: 5 [1]
Portuguese: 4 [0]
Russian: 3 [0]
Turkish: 3[0]
Dutch: 1 [0]

Union group on Flickr: 676 [674]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 710 [607]

Website
Correspondents: 957 [948]
Unique visits to the site this month : 609,164 [638,240] – n.b., only counting first 28 days of February
Peak day: 27,716 – 21.2.12
Page views this month: 1,319,332 [1,301,326]

Three spam adverts were recently sent out as LabourStart tweets.

This follows on the heels of a previous attack, though last time direct messages were being sent; this time it is tweets.

Twitter quickly grasped that we were under attack and disabled the account until I changed the password.

Here is what I think happened: Immediately following the previous attack, I changed the password.  After this, we heard from Twitter that the account had been compromised.  Then I changed the password again.  I think this password was in fact the old one which had been compromised.  We are no longer using it.

I have deleted all the spam tweets and fingers crossed that this doesn’t happen again.

Some of the things that have been keeping me busy in the last 8 days …

Canada – Acadia campaign. This has been launched, appears in 4 languages, responses coming in very slowly.  I’m prodding the union to do more to promote it and not to rely solely on the LabourStart mass mailing which will go out next week.

Twitter. Following the issues we had with Twitter, I suspended use of Twitterfeed and have just set up an alternative in HootSuite.  We’ll see how well this works.

MyCampaigns. This little script has been very effective in getting people to sign on to campaigns they may have missed.  We’re seeing good results in some of our older campaigns.  I’m tweaking the campaigns system slowly to make it more visible, and have arranged for its translation into other languages.

App. Our app is nearly ready, but there’s a problem with Conduit Mobile – we can’t change any details about our account.  I’ve asked for some help from them and am awaiting an answer before we submit the Apple App Store (and Android and others).

New website. I’ve resumed work on this, and have converted what I was doing into a Perl script — I’m more familiar with Perl than PHP and it will allow to have a dynamically generated home page with lots of interactivity and personalization.

Just as our Twitter feed was starting to grow …

A large number of accounts seem to have been compromised in the last 24 hours and I’ve gotten a very large number of identical direct messages from people.  Or apparently coming from people.

The form of the message is identical:

i cant believe this but there are some real nasty things being said about you here [link]

When I got the first one, I assumed it was real — it came from someone I knew, and sometimes (I know this hard to believe), “real nasty things” are said about me on the web.

But it wasn’t real, and he warned me off.

Since then, I’ve gotten a considerable number of email messages from people saying they’ve gotten this same message from us — from the labourstart account on Twitter.

I’m not sure what is causing this, but it’s not resulting in false tweets being sent out in our name.  But direct messages are going out, possibly to all 5,672 supporters of LabourStart on Twitter.  Shit.

So to put a stop to it, I’ve done the following things:

• I’ve changed our password.
• I’ve revoked access to Twitter to all apps that aren’t Apple or Twitter owned.  (These included one app recently installed precisely to prevent this sort of thing – Bitdefender Safego — which at the very least didn’t do its job and may itself have been compromised.)

The latter means that Twitterfeed no longer has access to our account and our feed will not be updated.  As a result of this, I will be looking into resuming use of Twitterfeed on Monday or an alternative – which we were looking for anyway.

Some odds and ends – things that have kept me busy these last few days …

Twitter: We now have Canadian English and French feeds (thanks to Derek) and they’re quite popular. Today we mailed to over 9,000 Canadians on our list in the hope of making them even better known.  At the moment, the English feed has 364 followers; the French one has 20.

App: As I reported below, we’re pretty much ready to launch the iPad version and will probably do this in the next day or two.  It will, however, take Apple a couple of weeks to approve this and make it available in the App Store. Versions will quickly follow for other platforms including the iPhone, Android, etc, and other languages.

Campaigns: We discovered that there was a bug in our software that allowed people to sign up twice from the same email address – this has now been fixed.  This may also help speed up the system — and we’ll be making several other small tweaks to the code to make it work faster and more efficiently.  We launched a new campaign on Peru; publicity and translations begin today. A new campaign, just over the horizon, deals with Italy.  We have several more in the pipeline.  I’ve followed up about three campaigns that this week have reached the two-month mark (Turkey, Kazakhstan and Italy), asking our partners if they should be closed or if we can somehow reawaken interest in them.  We now have a way to show supporters which campaigns they’ve signed up to and which ones they’ve missed – this is now highlighted in the email they receive when they send off a campaign message and will be included elsewhere in our system.  The goal is to get our supporters to sign up to even more campaigns. I’ve given our Korean translator direct access to input campaigns, and have asked for a translation of the news as well.  There have been a couple of small tweaks to the campaign design – there is now a required field for the photo (and no longer a need to code in the HTML to display it); also, it’s now easier to input partner information as the HTML is now displayed.

News: While we set up the Dutch platform successfully, the Norwegian one caused problems.  I’ve now made the changes which I think will allow our Norwegian correspondents to see an interface in their language – we’ll test this tomorrow.  This already works in English, Russian and French.

Fundraising: I’ve been doing a lot of work on global and British unions; we’ve gotten some good commitments to donations this year but have a lot more work to do.  I’ll give a full report later on.

Survey: We completed the second annual survey of trade union use of the net and began publicity of the results.  I’ll be making the full survey results public later this week.  This was our largest and most successful survey ever, and we learned a lot.   We also added several hundred new people to our mailing list.

Conference 2012: An organizing committee has been formed in Sydney and they are due to meet soon. We are all using Basecamp to share a calendar, to-do lists, messages and documents (writeboards).  All the members of the committee as well as Derek and myself have logged in and used the system.