Inside LabourStart

Here are today’s totals with the change since the end of November in brackets.

UnionBook has not actually lost members; what’s happened is that I’ve deleted hundreds of banned members.  The current number is almost entirely real trade unionists using the site.  Our mailing lists have hardly grown at all, due both to the holiday season and the lack of new, inspiring campaigns.  The Facebook group continues to grow fairly dramatically, as does the number of followers on Twitter.  Our new LinkedIn group has quintupled in size over the last month, though I can’t say we’ve yet found a real use for it.

• Mailing lists – subscribers: 60,535 [+217]
• UnionBook – members: 4,328 [-608]
• Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 2,604 [+90]
• Twitter – followers: 1,940 [+70]
• Correspondents: 722 [+8]
• Union group on Flickr: 526 [+4]
• LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 79 [+65]

Within minutes of launch our Twitter petition in support of the Vale Inco workers became the most popular petition of the day on act.ly; 24 hours after launch we have just under 400 supporters.  At present, we’re the 7th most popular Twitter petition ever — and within a couple of hours, we should be the 4th.

Of course this is not success — success would be getting the company to back down and negotiate with the workers.

Nevertheless, we’ve obviously caught the imagination of some activists and stirred up some excitement.  Oh, and unlike some other campaigning tools, we’ve been able to use this to increase our campaigning capacity.  We’ve managed to recruit a not-inconsiderable number of new Twitter followers (now up to 1,819).

Vale Inco, the global mining giant at war with its employees, has not responded — yet — to the more than 6,200 people who’ve sent them email protest messages through LabourStart.

I’ve just learned that the company is using Twitter to recruit new employees — including this lovely Tweet:

“Many jobs available in our Manitoba Operations! Visit www.valeinco.com/careers to check them out!”

So I’ve just launched the first-ever global union Twitter petition which we will now begin promoting far and wide, hoping that it goes viral.

This tactic was used very effectively last week by American Rights at Work, which got over 1,000 Twitterers to challenge the US Chamber of Commerce — and a lot of free publicity.

Now let’s see what we can to Vale Inco on a global scale using this new tool.  Please promote this URL:

http://act.ly/1es

I’ll soon be sending this out to our list. Here they are.

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.)

I read a book recently called Twitter Power and it is basically a guide to businesses on how to use Twitter for marketing.  It had several interesting ideas some of which I’ve implemented, and over the last few days (and the next few), I’m trying out a number of third party features they recommended.  Yesterday, for example, I tested Twitpic — a way to publish photos via Twitter.  I’ve shared details of how to do that with Derek Blackadder, who does our daily photo for LabourStart.  Today I tested TwitterCounter This shows that while we are growing, and LabourStart has more followers than 99% of Twitter users, we could grow much faster.  As of this morning, we’re at 1,585 followers.  While this isn’t even close to being as large as our mailing lists, it’s nothing to be sneered at either.  Let’s grow the number of followers.

On 23 August, just after our conference in Washington, I posted a report here with some numbers and I’d like to update this about once a month.  Here are today’s totals with the change since August (always increases) in brackets.  Most notable are the very large gains to our number of Twitter followers and our mailing lists (and this is a net gain, as we loose many subscribers each month due to bouncing email addresses):

• Mailing lists – subscribers: 59,000 [+394]
• UnionBook – members: 4,539 [+522]
• Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 2,013 [+21]
• Twitter – followers: 1,571 [+378]
• Correspondents: 687 [+16]
• Union group on Flickr: 491 [+32]

Kudos to Oskar and Andy for taking the initiative to set up Twitter feeds for LabourStart in Dutch and French.  You can see them here:

• LabourStart NL – 85 followers – nearly 600 Tweets posted
• LabourStart FR – 8 followers (just re-launched yesterday)

Our English language Twitter feed continues to grow — we picked up 14 new followers in the last 24 hours, and now stand at 1,526 followers.  Other correspondents are welcome to create their own feeds in other languages — let us know if you need any help.