Inside LabourStart

We now have 4,306 users on UnionBook who have not been banned — this is more or less the number of actual users at the moment.  Most of them are not active.  I have begun to send weekly mailings to all of them to try to get them more active.

I spent Thursday and Friday last week as the guest of the South West TUC, which was holding a major conference (150 participants) involving the whole range of British unions.  I conducted two short workshops on online campaigning, signed up a whole bunch of people to our list, and got to hear wonderful feedback about our work — including UnionBook.

We now have a registration form which I encourage all of you to use to express interest in attending our conference.  You can see who has indicated they plan to attend here.  Publicity for the conference so far consists of this:

• When correspondents login to add news, they will see a very prominent box with links to the registration form.
• A mailing has been sent to all our correspondents.

The next stage of publicity will be to our mailing lists, and on our websites.  But for now, it’s limited to the correspondents.

Full details of the conference as they become available will appear here.

We’ll be holding our 2010 LabourStart conference in Canada and have to choose which of two dates works best for most of us.  Please use the comments to reply to this so everyone can see who can attend when and the decision making process will be more transparent.  (In other words, please do not email Eric or Derek about this – let us all know in the comments.)

The two possible dates are:

• 18 – 20 June
• 9 – 11 July

Nine days into our ad campaign on Facebook to promote interest in UnionBook, here are the results:

• Our ad was shown 1,984,996 times to Facebook users (in the UK only).
• It was clicked on 572 times.
• The cost to us was US$ 299.76.
• The number of new users picked up through this campaign – UK users who’ve joined in the last few days — is 3.  (We’ve gotten more new users signed up in Canada and Germany during the same period, with no ad campaign and no cost.)
• Price per new user US$ 100.00.

I don’t think this is a judicious use of our money at the moment, and I’ve suspended the campaign.

Stage one was the Facebook ads campaign.  We’ve now shown over a million ads (1,067,344 to be precise), bringing UnionBook over 300 new visitors, some of whom have signed up.

Stage two was to write to all current users (nearly 5,000) plus all those in our Facebook UnionBook group (614 members) to tell them to become active again, that we’ve clobbered the spammers and restored messaging — and that there’s a new UnionBook group in support of the Vale Inco strikers.

The next stage — weekly mailings to UnionBook members telling them what’s new, giving them reason to be active on the site.

A number of comrades use LinkedIn, so I thought it appropriate to launch a LabourStart group there.  Not sure how much time and effort to invest in this, but it’s worth looking into, I think.

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.