Category: social media

BloggerCon and BloggerUnCon

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 4 Comments on BloggerCon and BloggerUnCon

This year was my first BloggerCon. It was also the first year that BloggerCon was part of the official program. So it was kind of a mixed group: long time bloggers about associations like Jeff, Mads, BMart, and JNott (aka McLovin), new bloggers about associations like, well, your truly, and lots of people whose organizations are blogging or thinking about starting blogs about the profession, industry, or issue they represent. So it was a pretty mixed bag.

A few thoughts:

  • This session really demonstrated to me the importance of the social aspects of social media.
  • The typical question about moderating came up. Andy couldn’t be there, since he was giving his own session at that time, so I represented and brought up his/RIMS‘s practice of allowing members to self–moderate through “mark as inappropriate.” The truth about moderating is that pretty much any level of control from absolute to wild west free-for-all can be appropriate, as long as you’re consistent and have a reason for choosing what you choose. (But personally, I’m in favor of writing a strong disclaimer and then letting the chips fall where they may.)
  • I kind of feel like we should be past the “what is all this stuff?” questions at this point. But as was demonstrated in all the social media sessions (including many of the Social Media Labs), we’re not. Educate yourselves people!
  • Participants also asked if an organizational blog won’t result in diluting attention and interest in the organization’s other properties. And the answer is really no. Different audiences are going to want to get information in different formats. If you, as you should, think of at least 3 ways to use anything you write/produce, this is just one more method to get the word out. And it can provide nice cross-promotional opportunities.
  • Voice is key. (This came up in my Social Media Lab session, too.) Your CEO/ED doesn’t need a blog just to have a blog. Only start one if you can make the commitment to write frequently and authentically. Having your PR firm write pieces “from your CEO” is going to come off as fake. Sometimes it’s more useful to see what’s already out there – like maybe some fab member blogs on your profession or industry – and link to them rather than trying to force the creation of community where it doesn’t naturally exist.
  • And it’s OK to mix up format of your posts. It’s not the same as writing articles. Some posts can be be long, some can be short, some can be links, whatevs. They key is QUALITY CONTENT. If you can make it good, everything else is icing.

BloggerUnCon was a completely different experience. It wasn’t part of the official program, and it took place in the out-of-the-way CAE Lounge at the end of the program day on Monday. The information was only in the association blogosphere, too, so it was mostly the people doing the heavy lifting of association blogging. I definitely got the sense that this session was more like previous years’ BloggerCons.

Bob Wolfe kicked us off with a really great question: Why do we blog?

The answers were fascinating.

  • Ben talked about starting his blog to help him when he was studying for the CAE in 2004. Then he realized that he was helping other people, too, and just kept going. And helping people.
  • Matt spoke about how much he enjoyed hearing about other young association execs’ experiences and wanting to contribute to the conversation.
  • Jeff launched his blog as the original Principled Innovation website, after he’d been running the business for over a year, in order to “initiate the converation I wanted to have with the association community about innovation.”
  • Jamie indicated that blogs are better than resumes for getting a sense of who a person really is, as the cleverly named Get Me Jamie Notter would attest.
  • Bob himself pointed out that “thought leaders blog.”

In fact, several people mentioned the importance of blogging in creating a personal brand as an association professional and as a source of professional opportunity. It’s about creating a personal body of work.

Shifting employment patterns means that there are increasing opportunities for those thought leaders who work in or with associations to create and market personal expertise and a personal brand while still keeping their day jobs.

That was a huge driver for me in starting T4P. When I found out with 3 weeks notice that I was going to be laid off this spring, I considered – briefly – kicking off my own consulting firm. And I realized that I wasn’t known in the association community, at least not well enough to start consulting on my own without having to KILL myself to get clients. It was a real eye opener. (Also, I really, really love to write. And have for a long time.)

The conversation then shifted to the idea of voice, audience, and focus. What are you writing about and for whom? The participants had a variety of focuses (focii?) within the association space, but the common theme was the idea of the conversation, and participating in it.

We then drifted into a discussion of some of the technical details of the newly-launched A List Bloggers, in preparation for our plans for (association) world domination, before talking about what role we can – and should – play in convincing The Powers That Be of the power of social media.

The problem is, we aren’t where they are, and we’re not speaking with them in ways they understand. Which I think is a really valuable lesson in member engagement. You can’t expect people (CEOs/EDs or members) to come to you, and you can’t expect them to speak your language.

We have to learn to use terms that are meaningful to the people we want to convince – things like “engagement,” “community,” “collaboration,” and “attracting younger members.”

Even the medium of a Social Media Lab or socnet sessions may be the wrong way to go about this. What we need is to get social media experts on panel sessions about board relations and advocacy and creating vital educational experiences and recruiting and engaging members. Which is why every social media session ends up being a 101 session on “this is a blog, this a wiki, this is a social network” and it’s really, REALLY hard to focus the conversation on the “so what?” We have to get out of the social media ghetto and into the executive suites, the membership departments, the publications areas, the meetings teams.

As Ben put it, “It’s a simple calculation: engagement increases the likelihood of renewal. Renewal increases the likelihood of creating organizational evangelists. And virtual communities are an increasingly popular form of engagement.”

So I leave you with a question: what would your organization look like if your individual staff members didn’t focus specifically and exclusively on your journal, or getting out the renewal notices on time, or managing the membership database, or creating press releases, or your legislative fly in day, but instead worked as fluid team of engagement specialists on increasing engagement in your organization, your industry, your profession, for your entire universe of constituents? What would that world be like?

 

Law of Unintended Consequences

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 4 Comments on Law of Unintended Consequences

In common with most attendees, I began my San Diego odyssey on a plane: a US Air flight from DC. I’m a platinum elite muckity-muck member (or whatever it is), so I’ve mercifully been shielded from much of the current unpleasantness in travel. I check in first class even when I’m not flying first class, so my lines are never long, I never pay overweight charges, and I never pay for extra bags.

My high muckity-muck status could not, however, protect me from the latest indignity: no free beverages. Not even a glass of water. Isn’t that illegal, given that the water in the bathrooms is not potable?

So of course one of the topics of conversation at the Membership Section Council dinner Friday night at the lovely Canela’s restaurant in San Diego was everyone’s travel horrors. Outgoing chair Greg Fine of the Association Forum of Chicagoland and I got talking about the second level consequences.

It’s no shock to say that airline travel is becoming increasingly unpleasant. It’s also becoming increasingly unsustainable. Just look at what your annual flight total does to your carbon footprint. It’s not pretty.

So Greg and I got chatting about what that might mean for the association industry. How much longer is a big meeting of 6000+ people coming in from all over the country – and the world – going to possible? If the era of cheap air travel ends (as it seems likely to), does it also mean the end of the era of annual meetings? And what does that mean for our organizations?

Greg postulated that it would result in a return to the era of smaller, regional meetings. And he’s probably right. But the association execs who are still resisting social media technology might want to start thinking about what they’re going to do if their members can no longer gather face to face. Sure, Cisco offers telepresence (and from what I hear, it’s frappin’ amazing), but can your organization really afford MULTIPLE telepresence studios at $300K EACH? Isn’t it time to embrace the change?

What Comes After Web 2.0?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

A prescient question posted by one of my colleagues this morning.

My answer, of course, was Web 3.0!

From whatis.com:

The idea of the Semantic Web was created by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee’s concept is that the web as a whole can be made more intelligent and perhaps even intuitive about how to serve a user’s needs. Although search engines index much of the web’s content, they have little ability to select the pages that a user really wants or needs. Berners-Lee foresees a number of ways in which developers and authors, singly or in collaboration, can use self-descriptions and other techniques so that context-sensitive programs can intuit what users want.

From Wikipedia:

Web 3.0, a phrase coined by John Markoff of the New York Times in 2006, refers to a supposed third generation of Internet-based services that collectively comprise what might be called ‘the intelligent Web’—such as those using semantic web, microformats, natural language search, data-mining, machine learning, recommendation agents, and artificial intelligence technologies—which emphasize machine-facilitated understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience.

From my colleague:

I ran across something interesting this afternoon that might be heading in that direction. Actually, it’s not all that different from 2.0 because it still builds on information sharing and collaboration – but it is cool and it is down the road.

So what do you think? What comes next?

Social Networking the Not-for-Profit World

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

In ASAE’s recent Decision to Join study, the following four items ranked consistently as the top member benefits in membership associations across nearly all demographic categories:

  • Providing networking opportunities
  • Providing professional development opportunities
  • Supplying industry news
  • Producing industry standards, research, policies, and other information

One of the most important functions associations fulfill is to connect members to each other. New Internet technologies can go a long way towards facilitating these connections, with or without the involvement of the parent organization. With the explosion of social networking technologies, people with like interests and goals have a variety of ways to find each other. Membership organizations need to consider their use of Web 2.0/social networking capabilities, not just to stay relevant but also to fulfill their historic mission of serving their member communities.

The Haefer Group recently compiled Internet use data as reported in Business Week. The information was broken down by typical generational categories (Millennials, Generation Y, Generation X, Baby Boomers, etc.) and by types of Internet use:

  • Creators: Originate content (write blogs, create podcasts)
  • Critics: Comment on content ( write reviews, post ratings)
  • Collectors: Gather information (via RSS, social bookmarking)
  • Joiners: Use social networking sites
  • Spectators: Consume content (look things up on Wikipedia, watch videos on YouTube)
  • Inactives: Online, but don’t participate in that newfangled Web 2.0 stuff

(Obviously, these categories are not mutually exclusive.)

The full report is available by following the link above, but the key point is that Baby Boomers and Seniors largely fall in the Spectator and Inactive groups, while there is an explosion of Creators, Critics, and Joiners among younger groups, particularly teens and young adults. In other words, among your youngest members and newly hired staff.

Fast Company recently published an article, “Retaining Younger Workers,” that addresses this exact point. It’s important to remember that something is only “technology” if it was created after you were born. Most of us don’t think of the television or the plain Ma Bell, landline, plug-into-the-wall telephone as “technology.” Younger workers feel the same about blogs, wikis, podcasts, and social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.

So let’s take a closer look at one of these Web 2.0 technologies, social networking, and how your organization can use it to help your members and staff connect.

Social networking, according to whatis.com:

…is the practice of expanding the number of one’s business and/or social contacts by making connections through individuals…Based on the six degrees of separation concept (the idea that any two people on the planet could make contact through a chain of no more than five intermediaries), social networking establishes interconnected Internet communities (sometimes known as personal networks) that help people make contacts that would be good for them to know, but that they would be unlikely to have met otherwise.

When most of us think of social networking, we tend to think of sites like Linkedin. And you can send your members there to find each other. But you’ll lose your organizational branding, your ability to promote this as a member benefit, control over who finds each other and by what criteria, and the positive mental association, among your constituents, of this capability with your organization.

There are a variety of social networking software options available (Web Scribble, Sparta, Higher Logic, Small World Labs, ONEsite, etc.), and they are mostly relatively inexpensive and easy to install. But before purchasing and installing new software, you might want to talk to your Association Management System vendor.

Social networking sites are basically turbo-charged member profiles. A typical online membership directory allows members to search by name, location, possibly employer, and maybe even interest areas, as selected from a pre-defined list of options. Social networking sites expand that to include full-text profiles (and full-text searching), where people can locate each other based on shared interests, areas of expertise, responses to questions, topics they’d like to learn about, and a wide variety of other options. Moreover, most social networking software packages include other Web 2.0 technologies like blogging, collaborative workspaces, the ability to upload and share media files (audio, video, photos, etc.), the ability to form ad hoc groups, and event scheduling.

Social networking allows your members to make connections. “So what?” you think. “That’s why we have an annual meeting.” That’s true – annual conferences are excellent places for members to connect with each other. However, early-career people are less likely to enjoy company support for the time and expense involved in professional development travel, and they are less likely to be able to afford it on their own if their organizations will not pay or allow them the time off work. Even if they can attend your face-to-face events, they are far less likely to know others in the profession. And no one likes to walk into a room of 200 people and feel like the only one with no friends. It is far less intimidating for those young Creators/Critics/Joiners to approach someone virtually around an expressed shared interest or with a question about an expressed area of expertise than it is for them to walk up to a complete stranger and attempt to strike up a conversation in the hallway between breakout sessions at your conference.

A few things to bear in mind as you contemplate this brave new world of collaborative technologies:

  1. DON’T panic. Back in the mid-1990’s, Generation X and that fad, the Internet, were going to destroy the not-for-profit world as we knew it. All information would be available freely to everyone all the time, and those kids just coming out of college weren’t joining associations anyway. Didn’t happen. Now, Millennials and that fad, social networking, are going to put us all out of business. Everyone can connect with each other all the time without needing associations, and those kids just coming out of college aren’t joining associations anyway. Another piece of information revealed in Decision to Join is that association membership is a factor of stage of career. People don’t join straight out of college because they’re not sure where their career paths are going to take them. Once they settle in, they join. Generation X did, and so will today’s young people, provided your organization stays relevant to their lives and careers.
  2. DO create a plan for deploying new technologies to your members. The good news is that Web 2.0 technologies are relatively cheap and easy to set up. This is also the bad news. Your constituents are inundated with information, and they’re not going to show up at your cool, new, empty organizational wiki just because you launched it. You may, and in fact probably will, have to pre-seed content and participation in order to make your new resource worth the investment of their time. So how do you do that? Tap your volunteer leaders to write, to respond, to interact, to proselytize – they are your most valuable allies in this effort. Tap your younger members, and ask them to do something specific: post the question they emailed you to your online discussion forum, share that insightful comment they just made during your webinar on your President’s blog. They’ll be flattered and will begin to feel a sense of ownership of your organization. And before you even consider any of this, think about your content and your audience, and which technology provides a natural fit. Ask your members: “What Web 2.0 technologies are you already using as part of your normal, daily life? What additional information or capabilities would you like us, your professional organization, to offer?”
  3. DO write good internal policies. Even though all this stuff offers a lot of exciting potential, you still need to make sure you protect your organization from liability. Just as with any official organizational communication, you need to think about who’s allowed to say what and in what forums. Work with your IT staff and your organization’s legal counsel to make sure you’re protected. But you also need to think about what you can reasonably control. Setting up policies you can’t, and maybe don’t even intend to, enforce just encourages disrespect for all your policies. And while it’s risky to make categorical statements in this area, I can definitively say that “ban everything” is not the right policy.
  4. Pursuant to that, DON’T make technology the scapegoat for management problems. If “Bob” is wasting time on Instant Messaging and not getting his work done, instructing your IT people to lock down IM is not the answer, particularly if you adhered to point 2 above and had a good reason for launching it in the first place. “Bob” will just find an alternate time waster – computer Solitaire, surfing the ‘Net, personal phone calls, water cooler breaks every 10 minutes – or even worse, circumvent your IT controls to keep IMing his buddies, in the process creating a back door into your network for viruses and hackers. The right answer is for Bob’s manager to do her job and actually manage him.

The bar for entry on most of these communitarian technologies is very low. The software is free or very low cost, and easy to install. Hosting companies abound. That’s the good news, but it’s also the bad news. Many organizations are jumping in without a clear plan. And this is not a case where building it (whether “it” is a blog, a wiki, or a storefront in Second Life) will result in traffic. Technology is not the issue. Content is. Participation is. But with proper planning, organizational and volunteer support, and a little behind the scenes work to generate buzz, your association can deploy new technologies in ways that benefit staff and members and generate increased loyalty from both.