Marxism Today?

Even after Googling for ten minutes or so, I was unable to work out whether it was Groucho Marx or George Burns who said, “The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” 

That may be true for actors, but one of the hardest lessons that brands, politicians and marketers are learning at the moment.

In a highly preceptive networked society, faking sincerity is a fool’s errand. 

Looking at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s Ethics Code (via Kathryn’s very informative slideshow), I see this:

4. Word of mouth cannot be faked. 
Deception, infiltration, dishonesty, shilling, and other attempts to manipulate consumers or the conversation are bad. Honest marketers do not do this, will not do this, and will get caught if they try. Sleazy behavior will be exposed by the public and backfire horribly on anyone who attempts it. 

This observation presents a huge opportunity for Trades Unions. They have all of the properties that enable an organisation to prosper in a networked world – not only in terms of recruitment, but in terms of improving the way that they leverage their membership as an agency of mutual support.

Where organisations that don’t have the willing mutuality of trades unions (and I’d suggest that this is stronger among the smaller unions), they are obliged to attempt astroturfing. Which – as the WOMMA code tells them, is ultimately doomed to failure. I could add more to this, but if you have a look at Anne McCrossan’s post on reciprocity, you’ll see what an advantage Trades Unions could enjoy here without really having to work too hard at it.

Of course, in order to do the recruitment, Unions need to get the basics right (as I outlined in this post a while ago). But once that’s done, active moves to encourage members to use social media tools to relay the message can have a huge impact.

However, the devil is in the detail of that last paragraph. If you are….

a) A trades unionist

b) One that has read this far

… let me offer you a wager:

I bet that you are a social media user who wishes that your TU colleagues could just start to get the potential that social media offers, and to start using it themselves?

If I’m right, you may find it useful to have a look at this.

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Here’s what I said (roughly):I’ve already added one post here today about the ‘cornerstone’ technologies for membership organistions. But the main thing I spoke about was….

Crowdsourcing evidence: The one area where unions could have a huge influence is in providing the tools to people in work to offer evidence about their lives. Have a look at http://www.accesscity.co.uk/ – showing how hard it is to get around London with a buggy or in a wheelchair. Unions could be facilitating and co-ordinating projects whereby people are encourged to load up their own evidence about workplace issues.

It doesn’t all need to be grievances either – get people to load up data about their working lives. Single mothers daily routine, people moving from benefit into work talking about their taxation and benefits and their negative pay rates. It would be worth considering getting activists out interviewing people and generating content – add to the noise.

Getting value out of content: Unions have researchers, and they have the ability to generate a bit of data, and access a lot more. Most of it resides in silos and isn’t being shared properly. It is all controlled by people. This has often been seen as a bad thing that needs to be fixed with a clever document management system. Document management sysems are – in my view – over-rated. They are usually clunky, inconsistantly maintained and they don’t always improve the flow of information around an organisation that much.

I’d argue that having information controlled by people is a good thing – as long as those people are behaving in an interactive way.

If those people make their information available easily, then others can blog it. It is worth encouraging Union researchers, subject-area specialists and campaigns / comms people to go to some lengths to make sure that they are in the peripheral vision of as wide a group as possible. By making it easier for people to find other people with relevant information, the value of that information multiplies. Unions could run a pro-active programme to encourage their research and campaigns people to use social media energetically.

Blogs, Facebook, and Twitter are must-haves at the moment. You can follow my own Twitter feed – here.

• Interactive individuals multiply the value of their work.
• The best search engine is still a carbon-based life-form.

Unions could run a Twitter-feed from their key people on their website homepage – simply by using RSS. If you are unfamiliar with RSS, have a look at this video:

And here’s a quick guide to Twitter:

Recruit unpaid campaigners: If Unions can make their evidence and their evidence-holders easily available, thousands of volunteers will pick up their evidence, mash it around and use it.

The Norwegian government did a report on Web2.0 and it’s potential. Translated into English, it’s title was ‘the ordinary citizen as a supplier of public sector information.‘ Similarly, the research and the campaigning messages of trade unions – pushed out properly – could be being distributed and adapted to thousands of different causes.

Treat bloggers with the courtesy that you would treat journalists: The logic of the long-tail means that bloggers collectively have influence that is – in some ways – comparable to large media organisations.

Crowdsource criticism of journalists and anti-union pressure groups: Anti-union pressure groups do this very effectively in return. Target journalists that are persistently anti-union. Fisk them. Develop free-to-use tools: Show marginal tax rates – build a site that will calculate when everyone’s tax-freedom day is. They have the potential to go viral. Don’t try to own them. Find good geeks and pay them to do this for you – see Clifford Singer’s ‘Other Taxpayers Alliance’.

Ignore politics and politicians: Focus on policy. Share it. Aim to get more people within your union talking about policy and less time talking about politics. I have a scheme to help with this – let me know if you’d be interested in getting involved?

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Between 2000 and 2007, I had a hand in helping most of the UK’s major trades unions develop their websites and web-strategies. During that time, I always argued that the website should – at least in part – be geared towards getting the members to visit it regularly and provide information about their status and their preferences. Done properly, the members wouldn’t mind doing it (there’d be a benefit in for them – personalised content) and the union would be able to capture that data and feed it into their membership database in a two-way transaction.

There was a very straightforward way of illustrating this: Whenever I was discussing this with the unions, I would sketch something like this on the back of an envelope.

How a personalised website could work with a member database.

The visitor (member / non-member) comes in at the top of the picture – arriving at the website, seeing attractive content that is in the member-only area, and logging into the site (if they are a member) or joining (if they aren’t). Once they join online (using a direct debt system that I’ve left of of the sketch to keep it reasonably tidy), the go around the private personalised area indicating preferences and visiting pages that capture information about their interests. This information is fed into the membership database that then, in turn, drives more personalisation. The red bit on the right is secure information for officers or staff – using the site as an extranet.

It’s very simplified , I know. It’s not that cheap and it’s quite hard work to develop that content and think through the personalisation, and I know that organisations that have tried it have found a great many icebergs on the way. But I just thought I’d leave this image here – using it in a talk last night reminded me just how often I’d used this sketch, and I suspect that – somewhere in the world – people who are developing member-organisation websites are sketching broadly the same picture, making the same case to their colleagues….

… and their colleagues are probably sucking their teeth and saying: “I don’t know… it’s a big job….”

A big job it may be, but I think it’s worth doing. Being able to sift through membership systems and find members with particular preferences is an incredibly valuable thing for the purposes of campaigning and representation.

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