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).  In this interview, Steve Drake, owner of the AMC Drake & Co., tells us how he and his team manage social media for the company and their AMC clients.

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 owner/president of an accredited association management company (AMC) so I’ll respond from two perspectives:  our clients and our company.

Our 22-person staff manages 10 clients (trade associations, professional societies, charitable foundations).  We manage all headquarters functions for our clients:  membership; meetings; publications; fund-raising; Web sites; etc. As a mid-size AMC, we are structured in functional teams (Finance, Membership, Meetings) and client teams (which are responsible for content and relationships with clients.

As the company’s owner, I’ve tried to lead by example.  Thus, I have been active on Twitter and Slide Share while maintaining a presence on Facebook and LinkedIn.  My involvement in Twitter includes two accounts: @SteveDrake and @causeaholic.  I started with @SteveDrake when ASAE encouraged all 2009 Great Ideas Conference speakers to Tweet about their sessions.  It took me a couple of months to see the potential value. I’ve focused my tweets on association management, social media, content marketing and agriculture topics.  In April, I added the @causeaholic account so I could focus on cause marketing which is one of my passions and one of the core competencies of our company.

A couple of key “things” have really impacting my thinking in 2009:  Information picked up when I participated in the 2009 Great Ideas and our director of marketing attended the ASAE Technology Conference; and reading Here Comes Everybody (Clay Shirky) and Groundswell (Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff).

As a result, we’ve been taking some specific actions within our company and our clients:

• We concluded that  we would “register” all of our clients on all major social media platforms… whether they were going to get active or not.  We saw this timing as very similar to the push to register domain names on the Web back in the mid 1990s.  And, we wanted to get/protect the SM “domain” names for all our clients.
• We engaged in social media planning as part of an overall content marketing / content management strategy for our clients.  While members (and potential members) of each client are at differing stages of social media adoption, it seems clear that social media platforms offer associations a huge new potential for community building and content management.  Members and potential members may bypass associations that fail to see and adapt to this trend.  The days that the association to “lock” industry/professional knowledge behind password protected sites has passed.  Google and Social Media have opened content to the world and made it free.  We in association management need to learn how to deal with it and how to use it to benefit the missions of our associations.
• We do not have a single person designated for the SM manager.  Rather, we have tried to get multiple people from each client to engage in SM that fits their client and interests.  This cross training and cross functional assignments works for our structure.  (This is something I evaluate monthly as sometimes it is easy for “normal workload” to “get in the road” of social media activities.)

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?

For Drake & Company:  The challenge is to communicate across client teams and to ensure that we are sharing our learnings with others in the company as a means to help benefit all our clients.

For clients: Communications within each client team.  Most of our clients use anywhere from two to six of our staff so we don’t have a lot of “hard silos.”  Most client teams meet weekly and share information.

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?

No real secrets here for us.  We combine Twitter searches with Google News Alerts as the primary “monitoring and listening” tools for both our company and our clients.  This includes key word searches on issues/topics important to both.

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?

For Drake & Company:  We maintain a company presence on most social media platforms:  Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, SlideShare, YouTube and two company blogs.

Personally, I find tremendous value from Twitter.  The value and amount of information shared via Twitter surprises those who think it is limited to 140 characters.  In addition to the information and resources, Twitter has led to connections that have helped fund-raising for our clients.

I struggled with taking time to regularly write and post on our blogs (one at http://blog.drakeco.com and the other www.causeaholic.com).  At a staff meeting discussion on social media and marketing, we developed a concept of recruiting “DrakeCo bloggers” to write for the company blog.  Each blogger has a specific day to post his/her blog.  Content is up to them.  As the company’s owner, this means “giving up control” (assuming I had it in the first place!) and sharing ownership of the blog and its content with our bloggers.

For clients:  Each of our clients has a presence on most social media platforms:  Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, SlideShare, YouTube and a blog.  We view this from two perspectives:  (1) pro-active role in brand building and communications with clients, client members and client constituents and (2) research, issues management and brand protection.  From a community building and branding standpoint, each client follows its objectives and audiences in determining which social media platform(s) to use:

• One client (a college honorary fraternity) focuses on Facebook.
• One client (focused on marketing to consumers) emphasizes You Tube and Twitter.
• One client (focused on healthcare) discovered a majority of it key audiences are located on LinkedIn.
• One client (focused in agriculture) concentrates on weekly e-mail Tips combined with Webinars.

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?

For Drake & Company:  ROI of social media is the “dominant SM topic” within the association management company (AMC) community.  As the current president of the AMC Institute and a very public proponent of Social Media, I get the ROI question frequently.  Other AMC owners often ask “how do you have time for Twitter?”  Social media means a significant investment of staff time.  For standalone associations, that means diverting current resources into social media and/or finding additional staff.  For an AMC, it means getting the client to accept investing additional resources to provide the staff needed to implement an aggressive social media strategy.  This is sometimes expressed as “how can we bill for staff time spent on Twitter?”  (By the way, I heard the same questions when e-mail became a new way of communicating with members!)

For clients: Measurement varies depending on client and objectives. We are still at very basic stages focused mostly on available analytical tools. One client just launched a social media marketing strategy focused on using LinkedIn to reach target audiences (see #7 below). They plan to measure results against three key benchmarks.  Another client – National Christmas Tree Association – conducts an annual consumer tracking survey (via Harris Interactive) that measures consumer attitudes and consumer actions with regard to Christmas trees.  This permits us to measure actions.

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?

For Drake & Company:  we are focused on community social media strategies within our staff.  We use an internal blog, monthly training sessions, staff teams planning.

For clients: sessions for members on importance of social media and tips on how they can use SM in their own business or profession.  And, our staff gets great satisfaction as it sees client members who have started tweeting, blogging and otherwise using the tools to create a presence on social media.

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.

For Drake & Company:  We have just launched Holiday Central (www.holidaycentral.org; @holiday_central) as a new online community for those persons who love to celebrate all the holidays all the time. To build the community as a central resource for holidays, we are linking its Web site with Twitter and Facebook tools.  And, we’ve been using Twitter search for “holidays” as a tool to begin building community and sharing holiday-centric information.  My personal goal is to register 100,000 people on this free community. The research showed the interest and suggested the goal is realistic. So, now we start the process and see if the market research was accurate!

For clients:  Two client projects are underway that offer some case study material:

• The Christmas SPIRIT Foundation (which implements the Trees for Troops cause marketing campaign with support from FedEx Freight and the National Christmas Tree Association) dove into social media fund-raising for its 2009 program.  We invited individuals to become local hosts for what we called TweetUp4Troops.  The goal was to create 25 local events around Veterans Day to honor veterans, support Trees for Troops and have fun.  While we came close, we did not reach our goal (although six Phoenix Applebee’s locations are holding events December 6 and might put us at goal).  In the middle of the process, we discovered that the fake Christmas tree industry had grabbed a similar domain name (“for” rather than “4”) in an attempt to divert potential donors to Trees for Troops to their commercial sales site.  After trying to understand that anyone could deliberately mislead potential donors to military families, we moved to action. I wrote a causeaholic blog and privately sent to several key leaders (including @maddiegrant, @davecause, @joewaters, @johnhaydon) to crowd source options for our response.  Based on the responses,  we went public with the blog, issued a news release and spread the word via Twitter.  As I write this, the fake tree company continues to try to divert donors.
• TweetUp4Troops and Tweetsgiving will be featured case studies for my Moving from Dialing for Dollars to Tweetups & Twestivals:  How Social Media can Engage New Donors presentation at the 2010 ASAE Great Ideas Conference.
• The American Academy on Communications in Healthcare (AACH) desired a marketing campaign to engage (more) members, reach key audiences and sell more products (courses and video educational programs) designed to improve physician-patient communications.  We started the process by asking the “team” (committee) to identify target audiences and desired actions.  In follow-up research, we discovered that a larger number of the key audience (health system medical officers) were already participants in LinkedIn.  With that knowledge, AACH developed a strategy to use LinkedIn (augmented with an upgraded Web site and Twitter) to build community, share content and “sell” its health communications tools.  We are in the initial stages of implementing the strategy and eager to see the results.