As noted yesterday, if unions are willing, young workers can lead their unions to become more tech-savvy. Another opportunity for unions is the ability to use social media to organize new members. Strategic Organizing, a site devoted to finding best practices for union organizing, will soon release a guide to using facebook for organizing that is informed by unions actually employing these tools. In the meantime, I wanted to feature a previous post from them on the topic. What is important below, and what young workers said at the Young Workers Summit, is that engaging in social media (be it facebook, youtube, foursquare, whatever) does not fundamentally change the way the union must interact with its members. It simply changes the medium. Young workers are more comfortable not having every meeting at the union hall, they can do a virtual meeting – but the still want the meeting. Unions cannot allow experiments in these new tools to distract them from the basic roots of organizing.
Organize New Members using Facebook
Quick question: How many union organizing leads have you missed because you’re not using Facebook? 
Here’s 6 proven ways to recruit members using Facebook (and 3 ways that will fail miserably)
Here’s what works:
- Fan Pages for Campaigns – Engage non-union workers in campaign for a living wage, better standards or respect.
- Targeted Advertising – Facebook allows advertising targeted to employees of your major organizing targets.
- Fan Pages for Your Union – Do workers look you up on Facebook? You bet they do – and they expect to find something.
- Participate in Conversations – Go to groups and pages where employees hang out. Give values. Build relationships.
- Get Employee Lists – Most worksites now have Facebook groups that employees join. You should be able to get a partial list for most worksites.
- Listening – What are people saying about their employers and about you?
(P.S. Listening is the most valuable thing you can be doing)
Here’s what doesn’t work:
- Spam – They hate it as much as you do.
- Setting Up a Group for Workers Who Want to Join a Union – It’s the first thing many organizers want to try on Facebook. It doesn’t work.
- Setting Up a Fan Page and Not Maintaining It – It’s better not to be on Facebook than to have a page that isn’t maintained.
Speaking about getting union organizing leads on Facebook – I’ll help out the first three people who comment on this article to start generating leads using Facebook for your labour union.
Tags: Engaging Young Workers, Facebook, Social Media and Unions, Union Technology
