Inside LabourStart

Here are the totals with the last month in brackets (large gains – 100+ – in bold face):

Mailing lists (greater than 100)

English: 66,226 [65,425]
French: 3,333 [3,291]
Norwegian: 2,337 [2,342]
Spanish: 2,082 [2,051]
German: 1,485 [1,058]
Turkish: 758 [708]
Russian: 617 [609]
Italian: 560 [552]
Polish: 304 [303]
Chinese: 249 [249]
Portuguese: 245 [244]
Dutch: 235 [235]
Swedish: 182 [188]
Finnish: 182 [181]
Japanese: 133 [124]
Danish: 112 [115]

And just below the radar:

Hebrew 97
Korean 93
Farsi 93
Arabic 84

Social networks

UnionBook 2.0 – members: 4,706 [4,599]

Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,738 [4,703]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 3,192 [2,855]
Like LabourStart page (French): 89 [83]

Twitter –
English – followers: 4,964 [4,699]
French – followers: 82 [80]

Union group on Flickr: 661 [658]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 503 [485]

Website

Correspondents: 935 [930]

Unique visits to the site this month : 576,905 [573,525]
Peak day: 25,482 – 2.11.11
Page views this month: 1,371,687 [1,402,386]

Some highlights:

* Nearly all the mailing lists are growing – some quite dramatically (the German and Spanish lists, for example, over the last couple of months).
* As for social networks, there’s now a virtual tie between the number of users of UnionBook, the members of LabourStart’s Facebook group, and our followers on Twitter. At the moment, the Facebook group is the largest – by 4 people. But it suffered a net loss in members this month, while UnionBook picked up about 100 new ones.  My guess is the UnionBook or Twitter will lead next month.
* We continue to pick up several members each week for our LinkedIn group, which we barely use and never promote. We’re now up to just under 500 members. If any of you are very active users of LinkedIn and are keen to take charge of this, let me know.
* At our current rate of growth, we’ll be at 1,000 LabourStart correspondents by the end of February. At that point – or sooner – we might want to begin to purge the list of inactive ones.
* There was a massive increase in traffic to the site in October – page views alone were up about 30% compared to September. And on a peak day, we’re now getting over 24,000 unique visitors.

Here are the totals with the last month in brackets (large gains are in bold face):

Mailing lists (with over 100 members)

English: 65,425 [65,139]
French: 3,291 [3,199]
Norwegian: 2,342 [2,318]
Spanish: 2,051 [2,021]
German: 1,058 [908]
Turkish: 708 [700]
Russian: 609 [597]
Italian: 552 [539]
Polish: 303 [302]
Portuguese: 244 [252]
Chinese: 249 [249]
Dutch: 235 [231]
Swedish: 188 [190]
Japanese: 124
Finnish: 181 [179]
Danish: 115 [117]

Social networks

UnionBook 2.0 – members: 4,599 [4,498]
Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,703 [4,714]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 2,855 [2,705]
Like LabourStart page (French): 83 [79]
Twitter –
English – followers: 4,699 [4,541]
French – followers: 80 [78]
Union group on Flickr: 658 [652]
LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 485 [464]

Website

Correspondents: 930 [916]
Unique visits to the site this month : 573,525 [503,250]
Peak day: 24,154 – 18.10.11
Page views this month: 1,402,386 [1,120,845]

Thanks to the help of Mac Urata at the ITF, we finally have campaigns – and a 122-strong mailing list – in Japanese.

We will begin outreach this week to Japanese trade unionists.

I don’t have to tell you all how important this is and how much we appreciate Mac’s help.

It’s been a busy day …

• All recent supporters of our campaigns have now been added to our mailing lists on MailChimp – we’re seeing signficant growth for the German list, which indicates that our campaigns are now being promoted there by at least one union.
• The mass mailing regarding our Egypt campaign has gone out for translation and we’ve gotten translations back already in at least two languages.
• I’ve done further work on our Wikipedia entry, including trying to create an entry for UnionBook but am encountering some resistance there.
• I’ve written to comrades in Georgia about getting a Georgian language version of our campaigns up – particularly the current Georgian one.  Am awaiting their reply.
• Mac Urata at the ITF has agreed to help us get a Japanese version of the campaigns up and running.
• On UnionBook, I’ve managed to sort comments in Groups in reverse date order – something which people have asked for.
• I’ve begun the process of creating a secure directory (URLs would begin with https://) on our site – this is needed if we use Facebook for some pages, which has been done for our French version.
• It’s been suggested that we could get an article about LabourStart published in a left-wing Esperanto magazine; I’ve asked one of our correspondents who speaks the language to take care of this.
• Using a service called Conduit Mobile I’ve been doing further work on a small, simple UnionBook app for mobile devices.
• I did extensive work on our newswires today, including getting the French RSS feed to work properly, reviewing the ActNOW RSS feed in French and Norwegian (now fixed), the Health and Safety wire in French (seems OK), and tweaking our new French language newswire for North Africa.  In addition I completed work on migrating all the regional newswires over to our new database – finally.

• We’ve resumed the book of the month. The next mass mailing will feature it. Today, social media was used to publicize. This month, it’s Joe Hill.
• ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow has agreed to open our conference with a video message. She can’t be there, but this is the next best thing. We hope to get the message in time to allow us to subtitle it in Turkish (and Arabic?)
• Our first app for a smartphone is nearly ready (within 24 hours). If you have a Nokia smartphone, let me know. We have submitted something to their app store. (The iOS and Adroid versions are in the works.)
• We’ve sent a long message to PSI about their Korea campaign with suggestions about how to revive it after two months online. Some 3,000 of the 3,200 messages were sent in the first week.
• At the request of our Russian comrades, we’ve now closed down the Valentin Urusov campaign. We may need to revive it later this year, as he is still in jail.
• We will almost certainly have a campaign focussed on India next week (in support of Suzuki workers).  We’re waiting for final approval from the IMF.
• Work on the upcoming Global Solidarity Conference is going well, if a bit behind the scenes at the moment. I have weekly phone conferences with our staffer in Istanbul, Eyup. This Monday, we’ll begin the process of approving who gets subsidies. I have made special efforts in the last week to encourage participation from Jordan, Palestine, Iraq and Georgia.
• We have a much more prominent signup form on our home page now for our mailing list (in English only at the moment). This will be an important feature of our site redesign, which will begin probably just after our conference ends.
• We have a new newswire for Fiji – created at the request of the Australian unions, who are using it.
• I’ve upgraded our Facebook group – not sure exactly what that means, but people now need to be approved to join and there’s a lot more activity there than before.
• UnionBook has reverted to much more staid colors after a pink and purple phase. No one seems to have noticed …

Here are the totals with the last month in brackets:

In the last four days, in addition to watching our Palestine campaign grow, showing off our new conference poster, and and thinking about Cafe Press (see earlier posts), here are a few of the things that have been on the agenda at LabourStart this week …

1. Have been holding an email conversation with our internet service provider (1&1) about the possible listing of their IP address in the SORBS spam database – some people sending off protest messages to Georgia have received reports that indicate this. Still investigating what’s going on.
2. Attended a meeting at the Trades Union Congress to discuss Egypt and expressed a willingness to do more – including a possible campaign in support of labour law reform in that country.
3. Fixed the newswire which is now featured on LabourStart’s French page on Facebook to open links in a new window (as is the case for the campaigns newswire).
4. Received another nice donation from a Canadian union, processed it and had Derek thank them.
5. Spoke with the International Metalworkers Federation about a possible campaign on Malawi – but after consulting with the ITUC, this has been placed on hold.
6. Provided advice on social networking to UNI, which is campaigning against Deutsche Telekom – a union-buster in the USA.
7. Mailed all members of UnionBook about our conference, the campaigns, and the need to recruit some 900 new members in 40 days.
8. Improved daily campaign stats program to show only the current month; could not get it to show in reverse order.
9. Backed up mailing lists, MySQL databases, and all files on the website.
10. Added campaign supporters to MailChimp lists.
11. Removed spam signups to the conference database.
12. Updated conference website with the Turkish version of the ‘respect’ form.
13. Sorted out tickets for travel to Istanbul in September for a meeting with our conference committee.
14. Sent out the weekly mailing in German.
15. Sent out a mailing to over 600 Francophone Canadians.
16. And answered dozens and dozens of emails.