In this series, we’re interviewing several people who do social media on behalf of their associations. In this interview, we talked to Michael Hess of the Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute (PMMI) about his role and how this trade association handles the work of social media management. Check out this awesomesauce!

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?

Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute is a trade association that represents more than 500 companies in the packaging and processing industries and produces the annual PACK EXPO.

Before this full-time social media position existed, social media management was the responsibility of one or several people in each of the sections – marketing, industry services, education, and tradeshow services. Organizationally, the member services section serves as the primary vent through which information flows from each department onto the social web.

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?

When I set foot through the doors on that first day we moved past the Twitter jokes and hit the ground running. Most section managers already had social media planned into their communication strategies, so we took inventory and worked out a game plan. In the beginning, basic questions yielded more questions. Do we have one voice or many? Well, first where is does our audience meet and how are using each space? Etc. Etc.

Today a lot of our outgoing communication goes onto the social web thanks to fluid dialogue between sections. We work together at weekly messaging meetings where each section shares upcoming news and events. We then discuss the best dissemination avenues by discussing which audiences would benefit most from each product.

We have two audiences: members and the industry. Obviously, the former is part of the latter, so we figure it out. Having that solid messaging infrastructure has made everyone’s life much easier, and keeps us from breaching that marketer-spammer line.

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?

We don’t use any paid services because we haven’t encountered any roadblocks with the free ones yet. In social media, free is not necessarily “free for a reason” other than because it is part of the open-source culture.

The best examples of awesome free tools are on Twitter. Trying to track an entire niche on Twitter without a dashboard doesn’t really work too well, so we use Tweetdeck for day-to-day monitoring. CoTweet is really useful for multiple users using one account, but we’re not there yet, and it’s about to become a paid service. So, we’ll see.

Google Reader is at the hub of our news monitoring process, and the first tab on my favorites browser. It makes light work of the 100-something RSS feeds we monitor from industry publications, company sites, and Google News alerts. In four clicks and three sips of my morning coffee and I’ve skimmed a night’s worth of packaging news.

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?

It’s more like the “big two” – Twitter and LinkedIn. Sure, we are on Facebook, and, yes, we have meaningful interactions there. Facebook seems to be valuable for cause-driven associations and companies with household brand recognition. For PMMI, it feels like we’re traipsing into someone’s living room to have a staff meeting. More to come about this.

LinkedIn has been one of our greatest measurable fulfillments of a goal. We own a couple LinkedIn groups and monitor a few more. Fighting spammers keeps us pretty busy enough, but in this space we truly are just monitoring, which is great – and here’s why. One of our long-standing roles in the packaging industry has been to connect businesses in need of packaging machinery with businesses offering specific packaging solutions. We’ve apparently provided that service consistently enough throughout the years that without instruction businesses seek out and use our discussion boards in this manner. They bring the questions. We sometimes answer, but more frequently other users answer.

Finally, Twitter. Twitter can take over your entire workday, and perhaps life. It’s also where we engage with the most users. It’s the medium where trade publication staff, marketers, and end-users converge. The most fulfilling thing is when a relationship moves off of Twitter to the phone, e-mail, or in-person. I managed to meet a few of the faces behind the screen names at PACK EXPO last year. Goal for PACK EXPO International in November: Organized tweetups.

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?

Social media is inherently about the social aspect, though it’s hard to quantify interaction without self-reporting qualitative values. So, quantitative tracking has evolved into this: On Twitter, we put a lot of stock in mentions, retweets and bit.ly clickthroughs. On LinkedIn, we track postings, comments, and discussions. We log everything. Excel is a dear friend.

Our biggest measured Twitter success in terms of both numbers and interaction was at PACK EXPO Las Vegas. We started an event hashtag (#packexpo) and displayed the ensuing Twitter feed to passers-by in the show halls via three big plasma screens. It was both useful and fun. We had every type of content cascading down those boards. Anyone who has done one of these knows that I do mean every type – accolades, complaints, customer service questions, giveaways, impromptu tweetups, and even a couple haikus. It was great. In three days, the hashtag accrued 638 tweets from 104 contributors, and the account jumped by 125 new followers.

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?

Education is an important part of social media right now. Widespread adoption has really lit a fire under some people. So, the technological capability of our users is disparate. Social media isn’t a skill. It’s a change in culture, and ultimately, the way people communicate and gather information. It’s a big change for some people, which is why small measures can go a long way and a little extra explanation doesn’t hurt. Personally, I’m always happy to take a phone call or respond to an e-mail, tweet, or discussion board post about social media, and I put that offer out to any readers.

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.

There are a few irons in the fire for some social media magic because our program is still evolving – and will continue to evolve at the pace technologies emerge while keeping our audience in mind. Though, it doesn’t mean stagnantly waiting for the next greatest thing. We have much to do with our current program. We hit the six-month mark in February, which is when we determined that we’d pull together all of this data. Evaluate. Tweak if necessary. And keep on moving.

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