everyone wants to be another myspace
http://www.ipdi.org/
Sounds like an interesting report (but it
costs $20):
"Person-to-Person-to-Person: Harnessing the Political Power of Online Social Networks and User Generated Content
What's a campaign, non-profit, or advocacy group to do when the public wants individualized, interactive, on-demand content thisveryminute? The good news is that the tools for building active social networks already exist. They are surprisingly affordable, and they seem to work well for both national movements and small, local campaigns. Person-to-Person-to-Person takes what you already know about human nature and incorporates the concepts in an affordable, tangible way into strategy.
Release Date: September 15th, 2006"
You can read the executive summary for free,
tho.
Publicised by infoworld:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/09/15/HNsocialnetworkpolitics_1.html
Social Networking Success is Harder than it Seems
From what I know from initial forays into social networking software by unions it has been a difficult slog. The success of MySpace has everyone all exicited because of the possibilities of member engagement. The problem seems to be the digital divide. 1199 Ohio/West Virgnia launched a MySpace type site on August 15th. They spent seven months prepping their leadership with training and information to participate. At last count there were 150 people participating in the site at various levels of engagement a far cry from the 700 they worked with. Even for rank-and-file leaders, taking leadership in an unfamiliar medium is quite difficult. However, there are no real statistics as yet.
The membership cuts across the income range from high salaries to low salaries with varying degrees of PC ownership. What seems to be emerging is that for social networking sites to work for low-income workers you need an organizing focus on technology use. This means no quick success just by rolling out a site but rather a long term plan, steely nerves and no expectations of a free lunch.
The difficulty is that the leadership is often looking for just that after investing mucho money and time. Unless your membership is cyber-savvy already, you have to be prepared to stay-the-course. I think the effort is worth it because I don't see attractive alternatives.
bait the trap with tasty treats?
I really really don't like anything to do with marketing myself but it does seem to be something that we have to be aware of in order to play with the big sharks in the big mean pool :-( The idea of getting the customers to develop content for free is really getting the corporations excited.
Here's an interesting article on branding in social networks:
http://h20325.www2.hp.com/blogs/kintz/archive/2006/09/10/1581.html
One direct approach would be for labor to produce entertainment items that appeal to people to state the obvious. Movies, music, games, tv shows that subtly put unions in people's consciousness, at least slightly positively overall :-) If this stuff were free on the union web site it might attract some interest? I don't believe it's a technology problem. People find their way to stuff they want to get to.
"Gaming personas: Nowhere is the development of brand personas more fascinating than in Second Life, the much hyped virtual reality world built by its 300 000 “residents”. New members can create avatars that interact with a new world, enjoy new experiences and connect with other virtual reality avatars. According to a great Business Week article, residents spend a quarter of the time they're logged in, a total of nearly 23,000 hours a day, creating things that become part of the world, available to everyone else. It would take a paid 4,100-person software team to do all that, says Linden Lab. Assuming those programmers make about $100,000 a year, that would be $410 million worth of free code work over a year."
The Union Game?
Wouldn't it be great to have an online game that simulates an organizing drive - mapping out the workplace, agitating workers, holding an election/card check, negotiating a contract...
Or maybe we should send salts into Second Life?
yeah let's do it
I think it would be a very good thing to do!
I would add that I've seen complaints about the bad working conditions and treatment of the people who work in jobs creating electronic games. Could that help motivate the prounion game concept?
http://wired.com/news/games/0,2101,67707,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2
http://www.itpaa.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1885
"Clingman, who is a professor of game design and development at the Full Sail school in Winter Park, Fla., says that the average game designer throws up his hands and leaves the industry after only five years, robbing it of all their accumulated expertise."
Ok so some workers should be available to work for us!
http://news.com.com/Game+makers+see+workplace+changes/2100-1043_3-560462...
The bad news: after agreeing exploitation of game software workers is bad, they trash the union image. (Very ironic considering in unions I've been in, the unionists are mad at the unions caving in to management
"Unionization may also be part of the mix in changing workplace conditions, said Tom Buscaglia, a lawyer specializing in the game industry. Especially for publicly held companies, union rules may be the best vehicle for making expensive but necessary changes in working conditions without attracting a swarm of shareholder lawsuits, he said.
"We've all heard terrible things about unions," Buscaglia said, "but we may want to look at what happened in the animation industry when Disney was unionized in the '40s. It didn't turn out to be a monster for Disney, and it forced the bar up for the whole industry."
"Many have looked to the International Game Developers Association, the group that puts on the conference, to take on more of a union role. But Executive Director Jason Della Rocca said the group's role is to educate and advocate."
"We're not a union--we can't go in there and start breaking legs," he said shortly before the conference. "What we can do is make a big stink about this, and provide an environment where people doing things badly get called out and educated on better practices."
"I don't know if a union can solve the problems that need to be solved," Della Rocca continued. "Extreme working conditions are a problem of inexperienced management, of public companies struggling to make quarterly goals. A union would be more of a Band-Aid to deal with the current state of challenges."
Ooops, your bubble-gum is stuck in my hair!
http://www.myibew.net/
email: myibew@yahoo.com
Brought a smile to my tired old bones...not entirely off-topic, but I installed a Casino and an Arcade on my site a while back in an effort to lure younger members in hoping that while they were there that they might accidentally look around and offer up some posts. It's mostly been a flop in that regard. They tire of my amateurish efforts pretty quickly to hold their attention. The twenty and thirty-something's seem to be jaded and I can't say as I blame them. They've had little to inspire them of the goodness of union life beyond slightly better wages and benefits than their non-union counterparts. And I share in the fault of that...
dotsoul
Try out this dotsoul thing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotsoul
http://www.dotsoul.net/
It's pretty touchy feely tho. (I think I'd get kicked out of there pretty fast :-) Maybe you can start the first union in their virtual world!