OK, so not weekly. \u00a0But I was in Copenhagen for three days last week attending the founding congress of IndustriALL global union, so that’s why I’m late with this roundup of some recent news.<\/p>\n
Social Media:<\/span><\/strong> I began using SocialBro<\/a> to increase our visibility on Twitter<\/a> (see note below). \u00a0We’ve gone up from 6,414 to 6,642<\/strong> followers since the beginning of this month – a growth of about 10 per day. \u00a0(We picked up 44 in one day thanks to a mention in one of our mailings.) \u00a0At this rate, we’ll reach 8,500 followers by the end of this year. \u00a0On Facebook, our Page – www.facebook.com\/labourstart.org<\/a> –\u00a0\u00a0is rapidly approaching the size of our Group, as we had hoped. \u00a0The Page has 4,627<\/strong> ‘likes’ while the Group has 4,771 ‘members’. \u00a0As you may recall, there are certain advantages to the Page, which we built long after the Group was launched. \u00a0At the very end of March last year, we started our Page (with zero followers) and we had 4,332 members of the LabourStart Group. \u00a0So you can see that all the growth is taking place in recruiting new fans or followers for the Page, which has been growing at the rate of about 10 per day, just like Twitter.<\/p>\n Campaigns:<\/span><\/strong> I posted something about campaigns that have zero followers earlier this month and had several interesting responses (see below). \u00a0Two new campaigns were launched this week, one for the ITF<\/a> and one for IndustriALL<\/a>; ten days ago we launched our Li Wangyang campaign<\/a> which is now over 5,700<\/strong> messages sent. Two campaigns are closing this weekend – Mexico and Colombia. \u00a0I fixed character encoding issues in the news iframe that appears on campaign pages. \u00a0I also fixed the script that shows supporters for a campaign so that it doesn’t update the overall numbers (this made it look like campaign numbers went up and down throughout the day). I fixed the mycampaigns script (which shows you which campaigns you have participated in) so it works with the new system and with different languages, again. \u00a0I’ve been having a discussion with our volunteer translators for Turkish; we now may have a solution that ensures timely translations of both campaigns and mailings, which is very important now that we have 1,244 Turkish addresses (up from 778 since the beginning of the year – a gain of 466, up more than 37%).<\/p>\n Mailing lists:<\/span><\/strong> There’s now a prominent link<\/a> on our home page in English to sign up to the mailing list (this had disappeared for a while, though we have it for other languages) – and I removed all traces I could find of links to join any of our earlier mailing lists. \u00a0The total size of the lists is 98,356<\/strong>.<\/p>\n