Inside LabourStart

One of the things that is not widely known is that unless you constantly recruit new members to your mailing lists, over time they will gradually begin to shrink.  This is because people’s email addresses change all the time, and once a message has bounced a certain number of times, our software (and any good mailing list management software) removes them from the list.  In the last two months, despite several large campaigns, we’ve seen a net fall yet again of several hundred addresses from our lists, particularly the English list which is far and away the largest.  In fact, the size our lists overall is no larger now than it was at the beginning of the year.  For the latest numbers, go here.

Last year, we got fewer than 3,000 votes for the Labour Photo of the Year competition — the first time we did it.  This year, we got 60% of that number in the first 24 hours.  There is tremendous interest in this competition, which is great — let’s hope we continue to see a large number of votes cast and the involvement of thousands of trade unionists in this process.

I’ve just sent out the mass mailing in English.  You can cast your votes here.  Tomorrow will do more publicity.  Last year we had nearly 3,000 votes cast.   Let’s hope this year is even bigger.

Ainur Kurmanov

We’ve been asked by people from both the IMF and IUF to mobilize support for Ainur Kurmanov and I’ve now taken the first steps in what I hope will be a very large campaign.  These include:

1. Setting up the campaign in English – with text I received from Moscow
2. Sending out a test mailing – to make sure the messages don’t bounce
3. Informing the group in the IMF and IUF that the campaign is live and asking for a Russian version
4. Sending it out for translation into Norwegian, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish and Polish to our volunteer translators
5. Sending out an English language mass mailing to LabourStart’s list [51,040 subscribers]
6. Posting the message to Posterous, and thereby automatically sending it out via Twitter [1,586 followers]
7. Mailing to everyone in our Facebook group [2,025 members]
8. Adding a number of news links relating to the case
9. Asking the owner of the existing Facebook group in support of Ainur to write to all its members [687]

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.

The joint ITUC-UNI-RENGO campaign for nuclear disarmament is an important initiative.  UNI has asked us to promote the online petition and we’ve done so in today’s mass mailing to our English list.  Originally we learned about this campaign back in May from the ITUC.

Everyone who signs the online petition from today will see a link at the end to sign up to LabourStart’s mailing list, so hopefully this will also help boost our own list in the process.

Best seller

24 hours after making Economics for Everyone our book of the week, we’ve seen 75 orders placed (some for multiple copies) with sales totals (including shipping) reaching US $2,662.

This may be our biggest selling title ever.

In addition to promotion of the book in a mass mailing, Derek did a mailing to his Canadian contacts which certainly helped.  The book also appears on the front page of LabourStart, in our Labour’s Online Bookstore blog, on UnionBook (in the Union Books group, the largest group there), on our Facebook group page, and was promoted via Twitter as well.

One of the nice things we are doing here is making a book that would otherwise have a very limited geographic distribution available to trade unionists everywhere. The first few sales of this book all came from the eastern hemisphere — and it’s unlikely that trade unionists in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands would have ever heard of it if we hadn’t promoted it.

We’ve also discovered that our Polish comrades are interested in publishing a Polish language version of the book — one more unintended consequence of our promotion of these books.

The great majority of new users continue to be spammers and it’s taking a daily effort to ban or delete them.  We were promised a registration plug-in for Elgg by the end of September but that hasn’t happened.  I’ve posted messages to the Elgg community offering to pay for a solution but that hasn’t happened either.  We cannot grow UnionBook until we overcome this problem — and other than trying to find a generic PHP programmer willing to learn Elgg, I don’t have any ideas.  Anyone have a concrete suggestion what to do?

The contest is closed now, we’re waiting while the judges discuss the entries and select the finalists.  That should be done by mid-week.  Then the voting begins.

In comparison with last year’s contest we have more submissions (189 vs. 118 last year).  I think we should be quite pleased by the growth in numbers as a surprising number of workers with cameras are reluctant (embarassed) to make their work too public.  Hope fully as the contest continues the numbers will grow each year.

I’ve begun work to revive editions of LabourStart that have gone dormant.

I wrote to all those who have posted to our Creole language edition in the past and got one of them to request a new password. Two new stories appeared on that site this week, so let’s hope it continues.  I have not heard from most of the Creole-speaking correspondents I wrote to.

The Danish edition also needs help — Espen in Norway has been posting all the content.  I’ve suggested that in this case, as we no recently-active correspondents to talk to, that we write to the entire Danish mailing list and encourage them to sign up as correspondents.