Eric Lee: Twitter

[Omaha Steve]

I'm always looking into new technologies, new ways for trade unions to work more effectively, and I want your help to test one out. I also want to give away fifty LabourStart fridge magnets -- more on that below.

As you know, LabourStart has long used the web and email to publish trade union news and run online campaigns.

There are problems with both of those, especially when you're trying to get someone's attention.

We ran into this last week when we were asked to urgently get people to send in their photos in support of the jailed union leaders in Zimbabwe. (Read to the end of this email to find out what happened.)

I think we need to find new ways to break through the background noise of cluttered inboxes and millions of websites.

I want to try using a new tool that will allow us to send out extremely short
messages to you via your mobile phone, or your instant messaging service (if you use one), or the web.

Twitter is a free (and advertising-free) service that allows us to do this.

To help me try this out, could I ask you to do two things today?

1. Go to Twitter and sign up for an account: http://twitter.com/

2. Go to the LabourStart page on Twitter and sign up to 'follow' our Twitter account: http://twitter.com/labourstart

You can then configure your Twitter account to receive our short messages to your phone, to the web or to your instant messager.

I promise to use this sparingly, and will not burden you with frequent messages.

To encourage people to sign up, we're giving away fifty LabourStart fridge magnets -- but you'll have to be signed up to Twitter to get the details. We'll announce this with a 'tweet' (that's Twitter-talk for a short message) in a few days -- as soon as we have 1,000 of you signed up.

I've written a short article laying out the case for using Twitter as a campaigning tool. Please feel free to add your comments there: http://www.ericlee.info/2008/06/twitter_as_a_campaigning_tool.html

Finally, a big thanks to the more than 2,000 trade unionists who on very short notice contributed your photos in support of the jailed Zimbabwe trade union leaders. You can see one version of the resulting image with their faces made up by a mosaic of your photos, below.

See you all on Twitter!

Eric Lee