Late last month, the Carpenter Contract Trust — a multistate labor-management cooperative — posted the first in a series of online videos called “Mastering the Craft.” It focused on pile drivers, a specialty trade that sinks piles — typically made of timber, steel, or concrete — deep into the ground to support…

Late last month, the Carpenter Contract Trust — a multistate labor-management cooperative — posted the first in a series of online videos called “Mastering the Craft.”  It focused on pile drivers, a specialty trade that sinks piles — typically made of timber, steel, or concrete — deep into the ground to support buildings, roadways, bridges and other structures.

The video generated a lot of interest, and the organization is now doing “pre-roll advertising,” said Kevin McCabe, president of the CCT, referring to a short promotional video message that plays before content rolls across a user’s computer screen. “We also utilize geofencing to precisely deliver content outside of military bases, one-stop career centers and other locations that enable us to reach an audience that is likely to consider a nontraditional career.” Geofencing technology can trigger a video or other broadcast when a mobile device enters a predefined area.

“We’ve had very good penetration,” he added. “Our click-through rates (the percentage of people visiting a web page who access a hypertext link on the page) are relatively high.” These days, McCabe is as likely to sprinkle a conversation with these and other social media terms as he is to focus on traditional carpentry terminology.

That’s because when it comes to getting his organization’s message out, “we are at a unique moment in time,” according to McCabe. “Organizations that adapt will benefit. So carpenters and union contractors must continue to be well-positioned to continue to provide the right message to our audience, in order to ensure the long-term growth of our organization.”

To put it another way, organized labor, like most businesses, has to be where its target market is. “It’s been an evolution,” he said. “About five years ago we began to rebrand CCT. We had a website and updated it, but we wanted to get our message out there more effectively.”

McCabe said he realized publications were investing heavily in their websites and incorporating more video. “At the time, we were still heavily reliant on hard-copy material, but we saw the need to move to web-based and social media,” he said.

In the last few years, the CCT embraced social media, “delivering the right message to the right audience, utilizing the right vehicles, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram,” according to McCabe. “Carpentry is a craft with many different elements, and we try to highlight each one. We used to have hard copy for each branch of carpentry, but that’s very rare now. We hired a full-time marketing assistant to oversee all of our social media capabilities, and CCT is now totally immersed in it.”

The number of “hits, reaches and engagements on our sites have increased exponentially,” he added, referring to the number of visitors to a site and how often they clicked on a link, posted a comment or otherwise interacted with the web page.

“The idea is identify and connect with multiple audiences,” McCabe noted, “your members, the public, your stakeholders and others. We recognize that the next generation of carpenters will be millennials and beyond, and we have to be where they are in order to connect with them.”

As part of that effort, the union had to modify its messaging, he said. “Today, less is more. We use shorter videos, teaser trailers, and apps to get people’s attention. We have to initially connect with an audience via trailers and other programs that spark their curiosity, then let them know who we are and what’s involved in our trades in 30 seconds or less. The messaging has to be short, simple and to the point.”

But before he could roll out this next-generation approach, McCabe had to get approval from a traditional source: the CCT’s board of directors. Fortunately, “the union carpenters and union contractor members were all very open to the shift.”

The Communications Workers of America’s New Jersey branch has also modified its messaging. The CWA NJ — which represents more than 30,000 state workers, 15,000 county and municipal workers and others in the telecommunications and direct-care industries — “has focused a lot more on social media and other digital tools,” according to Antoinette Miles, a digital media associate in District 1.

Just about all demographics are embracing mobile and other social media to some extent, she added, but her union’s digital outreach can differ by age group. “In New Jersey we’re primarily focusing on Facebook and Twitter, while national CWA is also on platforms like Snapchat and Instagram.”

Why the divergence? “Snapchat and Instagram appeal to a demographic that’s often age 35 and younger,” she said. “Many of our New Jersey members are public-sector employees, who tend to be older. But we are considering expanding into Snapchat and Instagram as people retire and our workforce trends younger.”

Younger members are concerned about stagnating wages “and not doing as well as our parents,” added Miles, 28. “So more millennials are looking to unions as an economic path.”

She said the traditional union messaging about offering a voice in the workplace, economic security and other issues hasn’t changed much. “But the platform is moving to more social media. There’s also a lot of activity around identifying what’s relevant and what kinds of messages are going vital, what has buzz.”

Short-form videos are effective, noted Miles, and so are memes and emojis, images that may be superimposed with brief text to leverage emotions and ideas. One such approach, aimed at retail workers, showed a frown with text reading, “that feeling you get when your boss tells you to work a second shift,” she said. “Most unions use emojis and other short-cut imaging to make messaging effective. When I’m thinking about messaging, it’s not only what the message is, but how to deliver it in a way to amplify what we stand for.”