In this series, we’re interviewing several people who do social media on behalf of their associations (including two who work for association management companies, and one who works for a technology vendor to associations).  In this interview, Kristi Donovan of the Association of University Programs in Health Administration gives us the scoop on how this small staff association manages their social media efforts. Rockin!

1) First things first: Tell us a bit about where your social media management role “lives” within your association. How is it integrated within the structure of the organization? Is it a full time position, or part of another role? What department are you in, if any? How large is your organization?

I’m a department of one in a staff of eight. This was a new, full-time position created out of the board’s belief that the intellectual capital of the association resided in our special interest groups – and that we needed to figure out how to support their growth. I work closely with meetings, membership, and marketing to integrate their work with mine and vice versa. Being such a small staff, I think it took substantial foresight to take the organization in this direction – a big commitment on a limited budget. However, being a new function of the organization, it is taking time to integrate, figure out where social media fits and what it means for business processes. I came to AUPHA with a wide variety of experience in associations, the CAE, and a master’s in organizational development, which I think is very useful in this capacity.

2) The work of social media often cuts across lots of different traditional silos. Describe the process of how you communicate and work with other departments. How supportive is the association as a whole about your social media role?

With our small staff, it’s pretty easy to communicate with one another, especially as we are big users of Google Talk. It is a challenge to educate staff on how current business practices could change to better support our communities – although I think it is a common challenge within every organization to have to rethink and reevaluate “the way we have always done it.” There is desire to be supportive of the social media role, but a definite need for education in social media. Fortunately, education is something I enjoy. I’m developing a series of brief programs to bring staff up to speed now, starting with foundations of web communications through listening techniques. While I make it a point to monitor Web activity, I think it is important for all staff to do this in some capacity.

3) Everyone is dying to know how you manage the listening and monitoring process. Do you use a dashboard? Do you use any paid services? Any tips to share?

I manage the listening process primarily through Google Alerts and Twitter searches. Of course, I receive real time updates on all of our community activity so that I can respond promptly if needed. So far, the level of activity is manageable through these means. I recently wrote an article for the association’s e-newsletter that showcased members’ social media outposts with hopes of eliciting that competitive spirit that compels members to share their own experiences. And I’ve heard from a couple of members who weren’t on the list, which gives me additional listening outposts. And as we promote our use of outposts, like Twitter, I am seeing some members show up as followers. This sets up the opportunity for me to get to know them a little better, and to establish a new form of dialogue. In addition, in this example with Twitter, we can set up Twitter Lists that capture feeds useful to nonmembers, especially potential students and peer faculty. I see that opportunity for increased capacity for interconnectedness as the real value in social media.

4) Let’s talk about the “big three” – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. Of course, it largely depends on where your members are – but have any of these proved especially useful for achieving particular goals?

While they are certainly aware of social media tools, thanks in part to their daily work with students, our members do not appear to be creators, and to some extent, just now seem to be adopting these tools for their personal use. There is a lot of information on the Web on the use of social media tools in education, but for instance, I’ve only found a handful of individual members on Twitter to date. That’s not to say there isn’t interest, though. The greatest penetration is in LinkedIn, which I’m using primarily as a branding opportunity (members get to be part of the group, displaying the logo on their profile page) and later, I hope, as a tool to encourage them to participate in our Higher Logic community site. In just two months, we have managed to recruit several new members with the LinkedIn group, and reinstate a few lapsed members, which is great. I am consumed sometimes with thought on how we will retain these newcomers.

I see all three as an opportunity to reach out, engage members where they are, and hopefully, bring them home to AUPHA for everything they need to do their jobs better.

5) How do you measure the success of any particular projects? I don’t mean specific numbers, but do you have a “system” for how to decide what to keep track of, and how to report progress?

We recently moved to Google Analytics to track data, along with the tools provided by our community vendor, Higher Logic. I’ve been tracking different engagement indicators, such as how many documents have been uploaded, how many comments have been made, how many discussions have been initiated, search text, document downloads, how many documents were “favorited” and/or shared by users, etc. There are 12 total that I’m tracking.

Using Google Analytics, I hope to be able to start identifying how users track through the site, how they get there, what keywords they are using. It seems like a really powerful tool, but we’ve barely had it a month, so I’m not sure what I’ll be able to learn yet.

I think about this topic a lot. Because the profile of each audience is so different, I’m not sure you can measure success until you have established benchmarks and really started testing different things to see what your members will respond to. This is one of the association and community management conversations I listen for. I think we are all trying to figure it out, because you can’t just track the number of people logging in to your site and use that to define success or failure. I think you have to look at it in the totality of how it is impacting your business processes. In most cases, I don’t believe that social media is going to generate significant direct revenue; it’s either going to indirectly generate revenue or indirectly cut expenses – because social media isn’t free either. Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and do it. I think associations need to be able to make room for new ideas and initiatives to improve their member value – and I think social media fits into that category (though I worry that social media might be viewed as a new idea at this point…).

6) How do you bring stakeholders up to speed on what social media activities are going on (whether it’s members, other staff, the board…) – is it part of your role to teach people about social media? What kinds of things do you do (if anything) to help bridge the digital divide?

I really believe I have seen it all in technology education. In a prior job, about a dozen years ago, I was teaching members at the Annual Meeting what a mouse was so they could learn how to use that association’s Web site. The advent of social media is another iteration of the learning curve that is presented by the internet. There are innovators, early adopters, mainstream and laggards, and you have to realize that 80% of your “training time” is probably going to be consumed by the latter two. I absolutely embrace the educational aspect of my job, even though it comes with occasional frustration! I really enjoy seeing members take off once they get the hang of the tools.

There are a few specific audiences I need to keep in the loop – staff, membership, volunteer leadership and the board. With staff, I try to focus on educating formally and informally in staff meetings, and maximizing teachable moments wherever possible. With members, we’re focused on using broadcast email, e-newsletters, Twitter and Facebook to share what we are doing. I also just finished subscribing all of our members to their respective interest groups in an effort to engage more members in social media activity, so I expect the emphasis on broadcast email to start to dwindle. We have a member advisory group that oversees our community efforts, a function that was delegated out by the board. This group meets monthly by conference call and helps us sort out strategic issues. And the chair is the liaison to the board, and therefore responsible for keeping them informed.

As far as teaching, I’ve tried writing, conference calls and YouTube videos to help members understand how to use our community site. I also do a good number of one-on-one individual calls in response to member inquiries – in most cases it’s not due to difficulty of the site, but a lack of desire and/or time to figure it out on their own. I anticipate live webinars and onsite meeting instruction in my future.

7) Finally, tell us about a specific social media project you are particularly excited about, whether it’s in the planning stages or something you’ve had success with.

I really enjoyed putting together the video tutorials on YouTube – those were just fun to make. Because I know some of our members are avid users of podcasting already to deliver lectures, I’m looking forward to developing podcasts to help them share knowledge. I’m actually more excited about the prospect of modifying some of our current business practices to incorporate our communities – things like crowdsourcing conference sessions, or creating libraries for meeting materials, or expanding member engagement beyond the annual meeting. For me, it’s not necessarily the specific project that is exciting, but what it can and will mean for the organization over time. The opportunity to be on the forefront of this business revolution is incredibly exciting. It makes me think of this post by Seth Godin.