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Social media and political news reporting

Social media and political news reporting

If you haven’t heard about Mitt Romney’s $10,000 bet, chances are you weren’t on Twitter during the Iowa GOP Candidates Debate on 10 December and the days following. Mitt’s bet is a good example of how social media is changing political news reporting. Since the dawn of time, political reports have listened hard for good [...]

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Five reasons your union should fix its website before getting onto social media

Five reasons your union should fix its website before getting onto social media

More and more unions are starting up Facebook and Twitter accounts, but the fact is that your union’s website is much more important than all your social media combined. In Australia, there are more people using social media than ever, but when it comes to actually interacting with your union in a meaningful way (such [...]

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Nuts and Bolts: Creating a social media schedule

Nuts and Bolts: Creating a social media schedule

Why has your union joined the social media world? Some unions may be there because of the motivations of a single person — the secretary, or an eager organiser or communications officer. They join because they feel they must. Some unions may be there to broadcast their activities – they don’t want a conversation, just [...]

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The new Facebook changes

The new changes to Facebook

At the end of September, Facebook announced massive changes to pages, profiles and its “social graph”. For union communicators just getting the hang of setting up a Facebook page for their union or their campaign, what do these changes mean? Thankfully, Wildfire, a social media marketing company, has produced a good summary of the changes [...]

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New free e-book: Online Campaigning for Unions

New free e-book: Online Campaigning for Unions

I am releasing my third free e-book, which compiles my articles on campaign websites, online design and effective Internet campaigining. This e-book, Online Campaigning: A primer for unions shows you how to get the most from Web-based communication and campaings for your union. By campaigning online, you can speak directly to your members, supporters and [...]

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landingpage

Anatomy of a great landing page

Today, Create Jobs for USA was launched by Starbucks and the Opportunity Finance Network – aimed at attracting donations from the general public to fund job creation programs run by OFN. Whatever your views about US-style philanthropy programs run by large corporations, their JobsforUSA website is an almost pitch-perfect example of a campaign landing page. 1. [...]

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The four “must haves” for campaign websites

With more and more unions relying on Internet campaigning to support their campaigns, it’s essential that we do everything we can to make them effective and successful. Indeed, a campaign website is increasingly essential to the success of campaigns that traditionally would have only included posters, leaflets and stickers. A union’s website can be the [...]

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Retweeting for fun and advocacy

There’s an interesting debate over at the New Organizing Insititute about the use of the Retweet feature on Twitter. Matt Stempeck, the new media manager at NOI recommends that advocacy and progressive organisations use the official Retweet feature. He cites four reasons: You don’t have to edit or abbreviate the original tweet. With the official Retweet [...]

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Top social media tips for unions – UNI Global Union Communications talk

These are my notes for the Skype presentation that I gave this evening to the UNI Global Union Communicator Conference. I was asked to talk about “top social media tips for unions”. Top Social Media Tips for Unions Basis of my views are the Creative Unions manifesto. For too long, unions have been slow in [...]

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Harnessing your email list for change: great advice from Movements.org

Susannah Vila (@susannahvila) from Movement.org has some fantastic advice on how to gain success in using email to for social good. The advice is written for progressive organisations of all kinds – and unions can certainly use the guidelines from Vila. Collecting email addresses and using them to mobilize your supporters is one of the [...]

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Go where the members are

Over at Cyber Unions (a website promoting new technology adoption by unions), there’s a post questioning whether unions should use Facebook. Author Walton Pantland has several reasons for suggesting that unions avoid Facebook, including (paraphrasing) “Facebook is not union friendly”, there are “privacy issues”, and “it encourages clicktivism”. He finishes by suggesting that unions promote [...]

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Essential reading: 10 Lessons From Barack Obama’s Online Marketing Strategy

There’s no doubt that Obama’s online and grassroots campaigning infrastructure is second to none, but what can the rest of us without hundreds of millions in funding do to learn from his campaign achievements? Over at the “Web Profits” site, Alex Cleanthous has gone through “10 Lessons from Barack Obama’s Online Marketing Strategy“. This detailed [...]

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