People sometimes ask me “John, why should trades unions get involved with Twitter?” No, honest, they really do, my life is *that* exciting at times…

My standard response is that it all depends. The microblogging service Twitter is potentially attractive to unions as it's something of a liberal and Labour ghetto, and it gets a lot of column inches for being flavour of the moment and making people look modern. However, Twitter is almost a platform in search of a utility, and different people/unions might get very different things out of it, or of course nothing at all, depending on how they naturally want to communicate.

Before deciding how you might use Twitter in your union, it's worth thinking a bit about how your members and other people that you want to connect with will be using it themselves. Have a look at the profiles of some key people you’d want to communicate with - who they follow and who follows them. You can see patterns emerge that suggest the way they use Twitter, and how that might link in with you.

Skim-readers

Some people view Twitter as a reading list for whatever’s happening absolutely right this very moment. They follow people or organisations that interest them and when they log in, they see the latest updates - be they from Twitter celebrities, media outlets, or thought leaders in their sphere of interest.

It's not comprehensive - they'll never see more than a fraction of this 24/7 river of information that fits their interests, but that's not the point. They're more interested in the chance to get the very latest news, or tiny insights - updates too small or niche for normal news channels, but in a world of throwaway publishing, still of value to a specialist group.

The new Twitter lists feature has been really valuable to this group. They can split the people they follow into different topics – friends, profession, industry, etc – and follow just the relevant people when they want to be up to date on a particular topic.

Tweets will always be better received if you’re writing them manually, but for skim-readers, there’s also the possibility of automating your tweets, if you’ve something that you regularly produce in a standard format. Press releases might be an example here. Use a tool like Twitterfeed.com to take your website’s RSS feed of press releases (You do have one don’t you? Try open.dapper.net if you don’t), and send new items every hour to your Twitter account. You’ll get less readers than a properly managed feed, but at least some people who want to use Twitter for news alerts and who want your news will be interested in keeping tabs on you this way. If it takes off, then look at investing more time in writing original content for Twitter, but this is a fairly painless way to dip a toe in the water and see what happens.

If you’re publishing for skim-readers, try it out yourself first to see what others are getting out of it. If you’re maintaining a press room on Twitter for example, follow the journalists you’re interested in. If you’re publishing from a blog, follow other bloggers in your area. You’ll get a way of seeing the buzz amongst the people you’re interested in, and at the same time they’ll notice you in their follower lists and might be interested in checking out what you have to say too.

Beware. Being plugged into everything like this is stupidly addictive, and not always good news for nature’s procrastinators like me.

Networkers

Networkers build targeted lists like skim readers, but aim to use them to their professional advantage. They’ll follow people that they already know from their industry or interests, or influential people that they want to communicate with. They’ll use Twitter’s two-way features to follow up on other people’s tweets, making useful connections or contributing their own opinions.

Union officers with a particular specialism might like to work more in this way. An H&S practitioner could connect with other safety bodies, HR and medical sources and safety campaign groups, using retweets (where you forward on someone else’s tweet, with or without comment) to filter out interesting news from the wider community for your own readers.

It’s easy to get noticed if you’re bringing something useful to Twitter for those people who share your interests, and you may make useful new contacts you’d never normally come across, or be able to get useful responses from people who mightn’t answer (or even see) a cold email.

Chatterers

Some people prefer to use Twitter as a sort of time delay version of instant messaging, similar to Facebook status, but in a more extrovert series of interwoven conversations held in public. Chatterers will make much heavier use of replies (typing @ before someone’s username in a tweet draws their attention to it, whilst still keeping it public) and direct messages (DM - similar but hidden from anyone other than the sender and recipient).

Union branches might find this more useful, where the rep is more likely to be plugged in to members’ address books for regular conversation. Twitter gives you the ability to be contacted privately by members with concerns (if you and they already follow each other), or possibly a means for you to quickly solicit feedback on an issue.

It’s always good to make yourself open to members to communicate in the ways in which they’re most comfortable communicating – and for many this is now Twitter. The downside is that people might expect DM responses even more quickly than they’d get from email, and you’d end up putting in a lot of effort for only a smallish group of members who want to communicate that way.

Another issue to bear in mind is that anyone (such as an employer) could see all the people following the union, which some people might be reluctant to reveal, or worse might end up getting people into trouble.

Social searchers

Some people like to use Twitter to find out what the buzz is about a topic at any point, without necessarily building their own lists or followerships. They watch for and follow trending topics (Twitter lists the most popular topics at any one point for different countries) and hashtags (a convention in Twitter where you add a # in front of a word as a way of standardising keywords, so people can more easily find your tweet in searches – eg #trafigura).

Or they might use ‘social search’ engines like Topsy.com to find not the most relevant pages overall for a subject (as a traditional engine would provide) but the most relevant right now. Even the mainstream search engines like Google are moving towards factoring in this kind of social search (see Google's "latest results" box).

A union can make use of this technique by tweeting about topical news they may have, but first searching to see if other people talking about the issue are using a hashtag, and including that too. This will bring extra people to your tweets – only a few, but they’re guaranteed to be interested in the issue you’re talking about, which counts for a lot.

If you’re engaged in a campaign or dispute and will be sending a stream of tweets on it, invent your own hashtag for it. That way you can monitor more easily what others are saying about the issue (if the hashtag spreads), and find potential allies, as well as making sure your own tweets are all front and centre for anyone following the tag.

If you can co-ordinate supporters to all use the same hashtag, you might notice your issue trending, and you’ll get a lot of interest. Try to make clear how people can translate that interest into some kind of action. The flip side to trending of course is that it lasts for hardly any time at all before some celebrity does something funny, or someone invents a new 140 chars meme to spread, and that displaces you from the charts.

Hecklers

Twitter’s wide-open nature makes it an ideal space for people who want to say something publicly. Addressing a message @ someone – be they a union, individual or campaign target – lets everyone else see what was said. If you start an organisational Twitter account, you’ll get people who disapprove of particular decisions/personalities/whatever sending you slightly narky messages that they don’t really want you to respond to – It’s more like a form of cyber-heckling.

Don’t lose sleep about engaging with anything you find offensive – it’s very easy to get wound up about criticism appearing on the web, as it’s there for ever, but in Twitter’s case, people move on after about fifteen minutes. Most people aren’t expecting a reply, they’re just venting, but will be happy to get one. The handy thing about being so restricted in what you can write is that people don’t expect you to reply with volumes. It doesn’t take a long time for any organisation that issues press releases to find a web link to a statement that shows you do care about their issue (or gives an honest reasoning for why you disagree), and whilst it’s unlikely to sway them on the issue, many will appreciate that you at least took the time to respond.

Of course, all this applies to messages you yourself send out to public targets too. You can tie a union’s message to a target’s Twitter account by sending it @ them, but for more popular companies, it will be tomorrow’s chip paper within minutes.

An interesting Twitter application for unions is the Twitter petition – Act.ly has a great tool that lets you petition Twitter users. You write a short demand (actually pretty tricky!) and it sends from your account, tracking a page of people who retweet it. This results in lots of @ messages to the target, making sure they notice it. They have the opportunity to reply, and have that reply appended to the petition on Act.ly. Numbers taking these petitions are low so far, but given the low number of @ messages that most companies will be receiving compared to emails, it may be noticed more than a low volume email action, and has the benefit of every signature bringing a viral effect.

You can reflect on-side heckler activity in other ways too. A Twitterfall is a stream of content published in real time by other users about your issue – it can be a nice web feature to show just how often people are interacting with your ideas. Just make sure you’re not opening yourself up to a spot of griefing. There are Tweet moderating services out there – betas of Tweetriver and Tidytweet are both nice tools – which might sacrifice speed, but will spare your blushes.

Obsessives

And of course there are a large number of people who want to use Twitter for things precisely because they can. The kind of people who will wrestle with an iPhone app for 30 minutes to order a pizza, because it's more fun than ringing up in 2 minutes. These people love Twitter's extensibility, and are the reason there are so many thousands of lovingly coded apps out there that actually do very little other than make you think "that's pretty neat". When you're doing something clever with Twitter - run it past the "pretty neat" test to see if anyone in the real world might use it.

Some parting thoughts. In practical terms, I’d also recommend you use a Twitter client rather than the Twitter website itself. I like Hootsuite.com myself. And of course If you’re posting URLs to Twitter, do so with a URL shortener (otherwise they take a lot out of 140 chars) – ideally one like bit.ly that tracks clickthroughs so you can see if your tweets are being picked up and acted upon, or if you’re just talking to an empty room.

Twitter is low risk. If it doesn’t work out for you, just scrap it. You didn’t pay anything for it or need to drastically alter your comms strategy to make use of it, and most of your followers don’t really expect anything of you – they’re used to new people coming every day, and just as many old people leaving. Experiment with it – there are probably many other types of Twitter users out there amongst your membership or stakeholders, and actually putting a toe in the water may show you for the first time how you could be go about communicating with them.

We’ve seen a whole bunch more union related blogs over the last year, at all levels of the movement (check out the lists at TIGMOO.co.uk for many of them). But one thing I’ve noticed has impressed me in particular, and that’s the first attempts at cleverly using other people’s blogs to talk to members. I’m not talking about the Gen Sec or President posts that pop up on Comment Is Free or Huffington Post every now and then, or the more mainstream political blogs, but something much closer to unions’ membership – the online trade press.

The first I saw was Unite AGS Tony Burke, who has started adding regular guest posts to the Print Week blog, as a sub-blog called Unite Viewpoint. Tony is in charge of the Unite print workers’ section, and this is a great fit – getting the union’s comment right into a paper which will be closely followed by Tony’s members, and much more importantly by workers in the industry who aren’t yet members of the union.

And thanks to a helpful comment she left on ToUChstone blog, I recently noticed UNISON head of local government Heather Wakefield’s own blog as part of Public Finance magazine’s group blog. She has written some great articles that will be of a lot of interest to local government administration, positioning her as a recognisable expert with many potential members and other key people around her sector. UCU officer Stephen Court has also joined her on PF blog with a monthly article which gets combined into the wider blog.

The trade press are busily trying to build their online presence, and for many publications, this means instituting a blog as a way of adding more topical content and getting more direct contact with their readership through commenting. Offering help with this by contributing  regular articles from the union’s unique perspective should be pretty attractive prospect to them as well as to you (don’t worry it’s not taking union journalists’ jobs. There’s no column inch limit to a blog, and in the current miserable climate for the media, helping boost the publication’s revenue very slightly through online ads is doing them a favour!).

Unions have written bylines for the trade press for many years, and it could be seen as a bit of a climb down to write specifically for a blog, which will (at least for the moment) have a smaller readership than the print magazine itself. I think you need to try both though. You can get more regular content in a blog format – you’ll only be allowed a magazine byline every now and then, and certainly not more often than the magazine is published – plus you’ll be stored on the site and searchable for much much longer. The implicit endorsement of the union as a serious player through inclusion on the magazine’s site could be valuable in impressing potential members that the union is a good step to professional development.

The same might hold for local media, where a Trades Council or union regional official might be a great addition to the blog team of that paper’s own blog – getting the union better known in the community.

If the group blog you write for has an individual feed for just your articles (as both these examples do), you could even integrate it onto the union’s site, Twitter feed or other channels in some way – building even more positive links with that publication, and a better working relationship for the other ways they cover your union.

So for those who don’t know whether they should set up a blog for their union at the moment, why not consider borrowing one instead?

Hey, did I ever mention I'm a big screen film director? :)

Well, after making a little lunchbreak video with our office photocopier a couple of months back, it's now been picked up to feature this month at the Washington DC Labor Film Festival, at the TUC/Philosophy Football's Rhyme Rhythm & Reason event this Wednesday, and at the Canadian Labour Film Festival next month.

So if you want to check out the Director's Cut version on the big screen (Disclosure to avoid disappointment: Screen size aside, you may find it hard to spot the difference from this YouTube version, and when I say "feature", I mean "feature as a sideshow probably whilst people are finding their seats"...), then get your tickets now for London, DC or Toronto.

Now off to practice my acceptance speech for Cannes...

Looking over this year’s TIGMOO.co.uk league table of UK union bloggers, it’s clear that the last year has seen a lot of new activity. Now over a third of the top 25 union blogs are new entries for 2009.

Union and political blogs in the USA continue to point the way, with insider commentary from LaborNerd, effective online campaigning from SEIU blog, or comprehensive and timely labour movement coverage from AFL-CIOnow. But things are growing over here too.

René Lavanchy’s blog offers unique insights into the UK labour movement, and more official national union blogs have been launched, with sites like PCS Comment or Stronger Unions trying to engage more closely with the membership. Policy blogs ToUChstone and Connected Research have joined more established ones like Labour and Capital to reach out beyond the movement and represent union ideas to the wider policy blogging community.

2009 has also seen blogs used to co-ordinate campaigns and disputes, with the excellent work done by the Keep Burberry British blog last year being continued by activists involved in the Vestas dispute on the Isle of Wight, and the Save 600 Jobs at Vestas blog has been the most heavily updated on the whole network.

More blogs are also being used to help network local union organisations. Port of Felixstowe Unite, PCS Euston Branch and Barnet UNISON, amongst others are becoming established and useful presences online for their respective branches.

Blogs have also helped give an extra dimension to union election campaigns, with all the candidates in the recent Unite Amicus JGS election fielding commentable online communications for the first time.

And the range of tools used has increased too. The international volunteer network LabourStart have launched UnionBook.org, a union specific social network, offering powerful networking tools free to union organisers (a safer option for many than the major networks like Facebook, which have banned individual union activists or terminated campaigns in recent years). UnionBook has a blogging tool, integrated within their supportive community, and already two of its bloggers are represented on TIGMOO.co.uk.

Twitter has also burst onto the blogging scene in a bigger way, with UK politicians keenly taking up the opportunities to report back to constituents or to crowdsource opinion with this fashionable microblogging service. Unions are now starting to make use of Twitter to make contact with members too.

@NUSuk, @WorkersUniting, @EquityUK, @UnitetheUnion, @UNISONtweets, @LabourStart and others have already amassed creditable levels of followers. And an international union Twibe at twibes.com/union collates trade union Twitter accounts in a similar way to TIGMOO.co.uk.

We’ve also seen the TIGMOO.co.uk union blog aggregator model extended to Canada with the launch of the new site UnionBlogs.ca, and word is that a US version is now in the pipeline. Who knows, next year could see us go international – Bloggers of the world, unite!

Note: Article republished from TIGMOO.co.uk guide to union blogging 2009

Just arrived in Liverpool, ready for this year’s TUC Congress (www.tuc.org.uk/congress2009), which is worryingly my eighth one (I hope there’s some kind of medal). I’m pretty chuffed with some work I’ve been doing on a separate site Congress Voices, which aims to collate social media coverage of Congress, linking people here at the event with the millions of UK trade unionists that this parliament of unions represents.

You can find it at www.congressvoices.org , but if you are blogging, Tweeting or Flickring about Congress, it will hopefully find you! I’ve already noticed a few Tweets coming in on the hashtag #TUC09, and any flickr photos shared with user tuc.org.uk will also come to our attention. The site also provides a commentable agenda, where users can have their say on the motions under debate, which is another first.

It’s built (on next to no cash) around the Open Source platform WordPress (including some great work on using it as a consultation tool by the BIS Social Media Team), with links in to a number of fantastically useful free web services, such as Feedburner, Yahoo! Pipes and TidyTweet.

A couple of thousand people will be coming through Congress at some point over the next week, and hopefully this site will help the social media users amongst them (2008 saw half a dozen blogging delegates, hopefully a number that will only grow once you add the mobile-ready Twitterers into the mix) link up with interested web users outside the event, providing more insights, broader perspectives and new ideas on the big issues facing working people at this crucial Congress.

Here's a pic from today's NUJ/IFJ/TUC/Amnesty protest outside the Gambian Embassy, where Gambian and UK unionists handed in a letter protesting at the arrest and scheduled trial for sedition of seven Gambia Press Union officials and Gambian unionised journalists.

General Secretary of the National Union of Journalists Jeremy Dear, who took part in the protest, said: 'These seven journalists have been locked up and put on trial for writing stories and press releases that would be part of normal democratic debate in most countries of the world. The NUJ calls for their immediate and unconditional release and for the Government of Gambia to change their media laws to allow genuine freedom of expression.'

You can take an urgent Amnesty letter/fax action to help this case here.

UK Labour Party bigwig Peter Mandelson once famously said "we are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich". Many don't know though that he was only partially quoted, and also said "...as long as they pay their taxes".

The problem here is that most of those getting 'filthy rich' don’t. Many of them manage to avoid paying the taxes that Parliament has said they should pay. In 2006, 54 billionaires in Britain paid £14.7m tax on earnings from a combined £126bn fortune, somewhat less than the current highest rate tax level of 45%.

Tax avoidance is a big industry, and whilst there are legitimate tax breaks for a wide range of situations, avoidance in many cases blurs into outright tax evasion. Trades Union Congress (TUC) research suggests that tax avoidance by the super rich, the city and UK plc is costing the Exchequer around £25 billion every year.

The TUC are proposing not a higher rate for the richest, but instead a minimum tax rate to help stop the bigger abuses of tax avoidance. Our idea is to introduce a minimum tax rate of 32% for those earning over £100,000, rising to 40% for those earning over £200,000. This is really a pretty modest proposal, leaving room for genuine tax breaks, but suggesting people pay at least a fairer proportion of the tax they are due to pay.

It could have huge benefits. By rebalancing the tax system so that those most likely to squirrel it away off-shore pay a minimum rate of tax on their income, we can put a bit more money into the pockets of those people who are more likely to spend it - in other words the poor, whether working or not. Getting the money spent where people need it will really help us to counter the recession.

The polls say it would be massively popular. Those who have done well out of the asset bubble that has proved so disastrous for the rest of us can well afford it. This issue could be a good test of whether the Government has truly read the changed mood in the country, and started the process of ensuring that we do emerge from this recession a fairer, better balanced economy.

We've a campaign up at LabourSpace - the Labour Party's new network for new policy ideas - where people can submit ideas and have them voted on. It's a good chance to bend the ear of some senior people in the Government, at a crucial time as the G20 meet to discuss the financial crisis.

Vote for the TUC's Minimum Tax Rates Campaign if you get a minute please, and help make UK taxation fairer for everyone.

Everyone wants a bit of Obama at the moment, and the contractors behind his fantastic online campaign network, Blue State Digital, are very much flavour of the IT month. If you're based in London (and given the international crowd on Unionbook, that's a big if!), you're cordially invited to come and listen to BSD’s Matthew McGreggor on how he/they did it, and what it might mean for unions at an evening event in London this month, and as a bonus you can also catch me, bringing up the foot of the bill.

After Obama’s Internet Campaign: What Now for E-Collectivism?

What are the lessons for UK unions from the Obama campaign? How are unions already using the internet? Are there opportunities for improved recruitment/retention/participation?

Speakers: Matthew McGreggor (Blue State Digital), Eric Lee (Labourstart.org), John Wood (TUC), Simon Parry (Prospect), Anne-Marie Greene (Warwick Business School), Sue Ferns (Prospect) (Chair)

6pm-8pm, Tuesday 17 February 2009

Location: NASUWT Greater London Regional Centre. 65 St John Street, Farringdon, London EC1M 4AN

The event is hosted by Unions21, and you can pop over to their site if you’d like to register to come along, or want to know any more. Sign up on upcoming.com if you use it.

There are actually two Blue State Digital Obama insider events in Central London that evening, so wildly popular are they at the moment, and should you have an aversion to talking to me, you can also catch BSD’s Thomas Gensemer at City University.

Love the Work, Hate The Job: Why America’s best workers are more unhappy than ever - David Kusnet, 2008

It’s taken me a couple of months of procrastination and other things to get around to writing about David Kusnet’s latest book, but I wanted to recommend it to UK unionists as well as those in the US who’ve probably heard about it already.

The book is a series of four case studies, all from employers in different sectors and types of work, but all located in and around the city of Seattle. Disputes between workers and managment at Kaiser Aluminium, Northwest Hospital, Microsoft and Boeing each show different ways in which the employment relationship is changing, and the friction that is being generated when employees’ ideals clash with changing businesses.

He uncovers one thread over and over though. The social contract between employee and employer has changed. No longer are the workers wanting just to trade loyalty for security. They now also expect to exchange commitment for respect. Respect for their opinion and professionalism, and for the quality of their work.

Concerns about the quality matter very much, and they resist attempts to reduce the professionalism or quality of what they produce or the care they give. Kusnet predicts that the quality gap, between what staff see they are capable of and what employers are willing to pay for, will be a major cause of industrial friction in coming years.

At the turn of the last century, the pioneering labor leader Samuel Gompers summed up his demands with one word: “More.” At the turn of the twenty-first century, an increasingly skilled but frustrated workforce would add one more word: “Better.”

Behavioural scientist Frederic Herzberg came up with a theory in the 70’s, which fits the situation: extrinsic factors and intrinsic ones. The extrinsic part is the security people get from work - wages, safety, conditions and so on. Inadequate provision of these causes discontent, and this traditionally has been worked out by disputes and negotiation to restore the factor that wasn’t being provided properly - it’s easy to bargain over things that can easily have a number put on them. For workers who have this at least partly sorted though, as has happened as bad work conditions have been improved in recent decades, people aspire to the intrinsic factors that make that actively happy at work, rather than just not unhappy - things like achievement, responsibility and challenging work.

In two of the disputes, these factors can be plainly seen, where the bone of contention between groups of professional staff and management would have been far less significant twenty years ago: the large numbers of temps at Microsoft, who relished the chance to work on exciting projects, but who resented the sneaky ways Microsoft used to avoid paying them directly or including them in social and professional activities regarded as normal by permanent staff; and the engineers at Boeing, who were concerned that short-termist management was robbing the company of it’s traditional vision as market leaders through engineering excellence.

A corollary of this is that, with the increases in knowledge-working and in long hours, people now put so much of themselves into their jobs, that many rely increasingly on those jobs to be the primary source of their identity - providing the fulfillment they used to get from friends, family and religion. When people are feeling they’re not respected for the work they do, it’s easy to see how disillusionment sets takes hold.

In all of these case studies, varying degrees of positive change came about only thanks to the presence of unions, and the willingness of those unions to change and to reflect the changing agenda of their members. Kusnet acknowledges that for most workers, the union is no longer an option that would even occur to them. Indeed the popular perception of a typical workers’ champion (handily documented in the medium of eponymous movies) has shifted from union organiser Norma Rae in the 1979 movie, to 2000’s campaigning trial lawyer Erin Brockovich. The Microsoft temps turned first to a class action law firm, five years before deciding to contact a union.

The book’s well worth a flick if you can find a copy - not sure how widely it’s available in the UK. Kusnet writes very accessibly, like a series of extended magazine articles, full of well-drawn personalities and interesting anecdotes as well as more academic insight. Unions will face a lot of challenges in helping workers to articulate these new agendas (presuming that is that the recession clears up any time in the next couple of years), and this book is a good starting point for us to do this.