Inside LabourStart

It’s been more than a week because I spent all of last week in Geneva, attending the IUF’s 26th congress.

At the request of the North West Playfair group in the UK, I answered a half dozen interview questions about LabourStart for their new publication.

And it’s been a busy time for campaigns:

1. One campaign launched (by Derek) in support of the USW.
2. One on its way (Mexico) – launching very soon.
3. One rejected (Pakistan) – following discussion among senior correspondents.
4. One more to decide on (Kenya) – waiting for the views of a GUF.
5. One still waiting for the partner union to be confirmed (Iraq).
6. One waiting for better texts (Korea).

Lots of emails answered, more work done on the Iceland project (see below), new correspondents added, etc.

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

Today I did a mail blitz to all the above lists –

• Correspondents were given 10 tips and tricks to encourage them to be more active and involved
• UnionBook members were urged to help us recruit the next 28 members to bring the social network up to 3,000 members
• Supporters of our three most recent campaigns on Facebook were encouraged to check out our regular news pages regarding those countries – Vietnam, India and Colombia

• 531 people have already answered our survey on trade union use of the net, with the number rising all the time.  You can track the results in real time here.
• The Education International has agreed for us to close down the campaign we launched 3 months ago today.  It has gotten over 2,000 responses but has had little impact on the Colombian government.
• I’ll be attending NetRoots UK tomorrow – a major conference about activist (not specifically trade union) use of the new technology, hosted by the Trades Union Congress in London.
• I’ve been invited to speak in New Orleans in March at the annual conference of UALE, the labor educators organization.
• Our Global Solidarity Conference scheduled to take place in Sydney later this year is going to have to be postponed to 2012 or later; we’re currently exploring whether we can do a 2011 conference somewhere else.
• I’ve stopped podcasting; interest levels were far too low.
• UnionBook picked up more than 20 new members in the last 24 hours and is getting interesting publicity — a great article in Spanish from a Peruvian trade unionist which you can read on the site, plus I’ve been interviewed at length by a reporter from Hurriyet, Turkey’s largest newspaper.

Google gave us some credit to lure us back to using their keyword-based advertising, so we took them up on it.

I ran an ad for UnionBook which was shown 2,363,293 times – though only a tiny fraction of that was searches.  Google also shows ads when people view their emails, etc.

The ad was clicked on 626 times.  The total cost (covered by Google’s credit) was US$137.55.  The keywords which attracted the most interest in our ad were elgg (2.75% of those searching for elgg were interested in UnionBook) and trade union (1.35% of those clicked through).

UnionBook has picked up 95 new members since the beginning of July.

The ad read:

Union member?

Check out UnionBook, the social network for trade unionists.

www.unionbook.org

Almost by accident I connected with Marc Belanger (ex-CUPE, ex-ACTRAV/ILO, long-time LabourStart supporter) and the subject of a LabourStart podcast came up, as discussed at the Washington conference. It turns out that Marc has something rather sophisticated (technically and content-wise) in the works with a 2010 start date. Rather than compete we’re going to see if we can’t co-operate.

The show, which will be hosted by Marc, will feature news about union activities around the globe. The 20 minute audiocast, called Solidarity News, will be presented on www.radiolabour.net every Monday.

We should try and put the word out about the show, though at this point Marc is just looking for volunteer correspondents. I’ve volunteered to do a regular segment on our Top Stories. This could mean a whole new audience for us.

Volunteer reporters would provide one or two minute English-language audio reports about union activities in their region of the world. The reporters would be expected to provide their audio-report (as an MP3 file) and a written script of the report. To volunteer, or find out more about the project, email Marc at: m.belanger@radiolabour.org.

I’m heading off to Frankfurt today for this where I’ll be presenting this.  The IMF is very involved in the Vale campaign, so this should be a great opportunity to deepen our connections with many key unions in this sector.

As you may know, many people are getting error messages when trying to send off messages to Iran.

In the most recent quarter-hour period, I see that just under 100 messages were successfully sent off — so at the rate of 400 messages per hour, this is probably our biggest campaign ever.

There are many things going on here that can be slowing things down, so here are the steps I’ve taken to speed things up:

• When sending off a message, it no longer writes to our old flat ASCII database.  This was certainly slowing things down and I believe this is no longer necessary now that we have a much faster MySQL database.
• When displaying a campaign, we no longer show how many people have signed up (in real time) – but this will be restored later.

I’ve gotten a number of messages from people complaining – here is what I’ve replied to each one:

Thanks for writing – it appears that a very large number of people trying to access the page at the same time is causing this problem.  Please try again later.  Thanks for your patience.

Here’s the text of my latest column for Labour Research:

For more than a decade, LabourStart has provided online news for trade unionists. This summer the website underwent a major overhaul most of which was not visible to the casual visitor. But the changes have allowed British trade unionists to see things they could never see before.

A visit to http://www.labourstart.org/uk/ reveals a number of changes which we think you’ll find useful.

First of all, many of the news stories previously labelled as being from the “UK” are now also labelled if they are from England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.

If you click on any of those terms (which are highlighted in green), you’re taken to a news page featuring news only from that region.

Second, on the main UK news page, where previously you were shown the most recent 100 news stories and had to use the search box to find any others, you can now click on a “more” button on the bottom of each page and scroll through.

This is useful because LabourStart features on average 100 UK trade union news stories every week.

Those news stories are collected from all over the web — from trade union websites, the BBC, and newspaper sites, including many local newspapers. Those doing the collecting are LabourStart’s volunteer correspondents. Over 140 of them have posted 31,000 UK union news stories in the last several years to our database. All 31,000 of those stories remain accessible — making this an invaluable tool for researchers.

Some people may not realise this, but you don’t need to visit the LabourStart website to see the latest UK labour news stories we’re linking to. Our syndication tool allows any union website to freely use the stories — it’s a simple copy and paste to do this. One hundred and twenty UK trade union websites use LabourStart’s newswire today.

You and your union can be more involved. You can signup to become a volunteer correspondent and make sure we cover your union’s news. And you can learn more about how to put a live union news feed on your website. Visit our front page at http://www.labourstart.org

Activate is the magazine (print and web) for activists in the public sector union PCS (300,000 members). Here is their website.   I’ve been asked to prepare a 500 word article for their December issue about LabourStart.