Social Bookmarking » Blog Archive » Labour and social media: resources and cases from the CALM workshop

Labour and social media: resources and cases from the CALM workshop

May 27, 2008 4:55 pm Tagging

CALM logo Last Thursday, through the kind offices of the Canadian Association of Labour Media, I spent the day with a gaggle of communications professionals from a wide assortment of Canadian labour unions, sharing what I know about the social web and learning about an array of initiatives that various unions have launched in the last while.

So how many of the challenges labour communicators face are the same as those faced by anyone else trying to communicate on behalf of an organization, whether it's a commercial enterprise, a non-profit or a government agency. You have to convince traditional communication types that it's okay to hand some control over web content to the public; traditional budgetary gatekeepers need to learn that you have to staff the community as well as the technology; and we all have to come to grips with the legitimate concerns of open collaboration and conversation in an often-adversarial environment.

Incidentally, I asked my LinkedIn network to suggest their favourite labour-related Web 2.0 initiatives, and they came through with some great ideas. I've credited them below; a big thanks to Gordon Mayer, Mike Old, Martin Roell, Beth Kanter and Mike Gifford.

And a big thanks, too, to Rosemarie Bahr and Sally Leitch who pulled it all together, while at the same time organizing the massive 2008 CALM Conference. I don't know how they do it… I'm just glad they do.

I promised the participants I'd share a slew of links to the resources and cases we looked at, so here they are (it's an anything-but-exhaustive list):

. . .

Hola, folks, and thanks again for a great day.

As promised, here are some links to some of the resources and examples we covered, including:

If you have any you'd like to add, just mention them in the comments and I'll be happy to drop them in.

Thanks again for coming!