johninnit

Nice little video roundup of some IBEW locals in the States, who are using MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter in their campaigns.

Hat tip AFLCIOnow

Friday is the unions’ global protest day in solidarity with our colleagues in Iran. Free trades unionists there have been harshly repressed in recent years, with many in prison for organising unions outside the approved ‘puppet union’ structures, or for daring to hold May Day celebrations.

I’ll be outside the Iranian embassy on Friday with colleagues from the TUC, ITF and UK unions. There’s more information on the demo at the TUC site,  if you’re able to come along (12:30-13:30 at SW7 1PT). (more…)

Found this old link “13 reasons your Facebook account will be deleted” by accident, after stumbling across a post by social marketing trainer Mari Smith, who is finding Facebook is rather unsurprisingly mistaking (?) marketers for spammers and kicking them out even faster than they do with activists.

Anyway, Thor Mullen has identified the 13 top reasons why Facebook’s customer service robots would be alerted to your (entirely genuine) networking activities on the service, and either serve you a warning or a faceban. Pretty much what you’d expect in terms of ToS violations and power user traffic peaks, but worth reading before you set foot in a third party social network to spread an activist message. (more…)

An interesting request from Derek in Canada. They have a dispute going on at Toronto’s York University that looks to be shaping up as a bunch of milestones in online union activism – all of them ++ungood. (more…)

Another Facebook exile, but a whole different problem.

Pippa Wagstaff runs a critical blog on Welsh politics – Miss Wagstaff Presents. She recently found herself on the receiving end of an email from Facebook customer services, just like booted-out unionist Derek Blackadder. The charge though was that Pippa wasn’t really Pippa at all, and as such was in violation of the terms of service, which require you to give your real name. (more…)

Anne All at IT Business Edge has a post about a recent(ish) survey, which suggested39% of US 18-24 year-olds would consider quitting their job if their employer banned Facebook (with another 21% who would be ‘annoyed’). Worth a read – as are the comments.

Anne’s response is a common one in the media, helpfully suggesting such people might like to consider growing up a little. She draws her evidence from the fact that Faceban-outrage drops sharply from the youngest staff upwards. I think she’s half way there. This is a generational thing true, but it’s not a problem for the kids, it’s a problem for us. (more…)

Remember Derek? 3,000 Facebook unionists came together to get our Canadian pal reinstated in the good book, after he was banned for making friends too quickly, whilst trying to evaluate Facebook for unions and campaigners.

Well, now he’s out on his cyber-ear again. He was kicked this time, apparently with no hope of reinstatement as his account has been totally deleted, because he’d answered too many messages of support (not sent messages, just answered ones he’d been sent by friends). And it opens up a whole can of worms for unionists and campaigners. (more…)

Two months back now, I was lucky enough to get an invite to a big French conference on Web2.0, society and business, called Netxplorateur, and very slackly I’m only just getting round to blogging about it. (more…)

Okay, okay, I promised you this was the last word on the Blackadder affair. But since then, other last words worth reading are here (Tales from the Net) and here (MyDD). (more…)

Last word on the Blackadder Affair must go to Allison Fine of ‘A. Fine Blog‘, with a great in-depth look at what happened in this and similar cases, and how they highlight an important difference between those Web2.0 sites which are genuine communities and those which are commercial community platforms:

Who’s the Customer on Facebook?  Facebook is no Wikipedia, and not just because their functions are so different, but because their ethnology, the very essence of their being, is so different.  Facebook is a commercial site, meaning it serves advertisers and users in equal measure.  Its users are its customers only to the extent that their eyeballs on ads serve as their commerce.  Wikipedia is a community of users that largely monitors itself for the benefit of all.

Unfortunately, Facebook seems to have taken the opposite tack … Wall Street isn’t interested in customer service per se, only in profits and, more importantly, future profits.  While users on Facebook may have a community, or belong to many mini-communities, they don’t have a clear relationship with the company.