2010 Review: SocialFish clients and work

We do so much writing and teaching and learning, that we sometimes forget to share what we actually do on a day-to-day basis. Maddie and I field questions all the time about what we do, who we’re working with, and how we work. So we’re going to start writing about our consulting practice a bit more. You’ll start seeing a quarterly recap of what we’ve been up to, and what we’ve been working on. And for our first recap, we’re going to catch you up on what turned out to be a very busy, very productive year. Here are some of the highlights from 2010.

STRATEGY WORK
We have clients who come to us at a stage where they understand the tools, they see the benefits, and they need help defining a social media strategy for their organization. We work through our strategy process, starting with a social media assessment and brainstorming session. We draft a roadmap that defines social media work in a way that is tied to the organization’s strategy, and then we help work through setting up appropriate training, processes, and working teams to execute the roadmap.

Strategy clients in 2010

• Infocomm International–We worked with the team at Infocomm, a trade association serving the professional AV communications industry worldwide. We also had the pleasure of presenting at Infocomm100, an annual gathering of audiovisual industry thought leaders designed to assess and chart the course of the future of the industry.
• American Society of Civil Engineers–Having begun the strategy process in 2009, we continued working with ASCE to set up processes and teams to coordinate the social media work. We helped ASCE hire and train a summer intern, who has remained on full-time to coordinate the daily listening and responding work of ASCE. We have also helped establish processes for staff who would like to start new social media initiatives, so that they can work in a way that compliments the organization’s current, ongoing social media.
• National Association of Children’s Hospitals and Related Institutions–We kicked off a new strategy project with NACHRI just as 2010 was coming to a close. We conducted our new social media assessment, held our brainstorming session in December, and we’re now in the process of finalizing the roadmap that will guide our work together over the next year.

SOCIAL MEDIA POLICY WORK
Policies became a focal point for us in 2010. We published a whitepaper on social media policies in collaboration with Croydon Consulting in January. That whitepaper guided our work to help two organizations facilitate the process of adopting social media policies.

Policy clients in 2010

• IEEE–The team at IEEE came to us specifically for policy work. We met with their team in a small group, then facilitated two large group meetings–the first to discuss a rough draft we wrote, and the second to finalize a draft that would be sent through the proper channels for approval.
• American Society of Civil Engineers–Though ASCE had some policies related to social media in place, a policy for staff use of social media was a logical next step toward setting up their social media practice. We wrote a first draft and worked with the ASCE social media team revise it. We then presented the policy to their legal and HR teams for further revision. The outcome is a policy that clarifies much of the process and responsibilities around social media work for ASCE.

KITCHEN SINK CONSULTING WORK
Much of our consulting work is completely unique to the organization we’re working with. Often, these projects start with a weekly or monthly phone call where we offer insight and perspective. And then at some point, we jump in and get our hands dirty to help in some other way as well. Here are some of the special projects we worked on in 2010.

• National Association for the Self-Employed–We started strategy work with the NASE back in 2008, when they were pretty much starting from scratch. Since then, the team has kept us on as trusted advisors to help them focus their work. In 2010, we met regularly by phone and in person to work on optimizing their blog, Facebook page, LinkedIn group, and Twitter profile. We helped them experiment with a private whitelabel community for their members. We also helped them benchmark their work to this point so they can measure their progress going forward.
• Omnipress/Engage365–Omnipress came to us in 2009 with an idea for starting an online community for event professionals who want to talk social media. We helped them launch and build Engage365 into a thriving online community. We talked weekly through the launch phases, and stayed on to help post content, lead webinars, and host community chats on Twitter.
• ASAE–We started working with ASAE in 2008 as they were looking for better ways to enable members to connect and work. In 2010 we concentrated on the intersection between volunteers, staff, and technology. We met monthly to talk about new ways of engaging volunteers using social tools.
• Financial Executives International–FEI has a fantastic LinkedIn group that we’ve been helping to make even better. We meet weekly, and spend several hours each week moderating the FEI LinkedIn group. We set new group rules, new requirements for joining the group, and new welcome and denial templates. We also tested the viability of using LinkedIn subgroups for FEI volunteer groups.
• CommPartners–When Rich Finstein of CommPartners met with us, his first priority was to bring our expertise to his clients. And so, we’ve partnered up to offer our social media assessment to CommPartners clients. To show the value of the assessment, we ran it on the CommPartners team, and made some simple suggestions for how they can improve their social media work to drive business and educate their most important customers.
• Association of Corporate Council–When ACC began their search for a new director of social media at the end of 2010, we stepped in to help–first by reviewing the job description, and then by helping to vet the candidates.
• National Association of Home Builders–Why would an association with not one, but two social media positions work with us? Hint: it’s more than just our charm. We contracted with NAHB at the end of 2010 to have regular meetings and phone calls where we will discuss the state of social media for organizations, and what other similar-sized associations are doing. We’ll give feedback where it’s needed. Already we’ve taken a gander at their newly drafted social media policy.

SPEAKING AND TRAINING
In addition to our consulting work, we do quite a bit of speaking and training. So much, in fact, that it doesn’t make sense to list everything here, so here are just a few of the events where we presented in 2010.

• ASAE Great Ideas
• ASAE Marketing & Membership Conference
• ASAE Annual Meeting
• ASAE Technology Conference
• IAEE ExpoExpo
• AADE Leadership Conference (training for volunteer leaders)
• CALSAE Annual Conference

We also presented webinar series for both EXPO Magazine and NTEN, the nonprofit technology network.

EVENTS
Finally, we helped plan a couple of events that we’re very proud of.

• UNTECH10–Somehow, with lots of help from the association community, we managed to pull together a fabulous hybrid event in less than 48 hours during an historic blizzard that shut down Washington, DC. Read the story here, and here!
• BUZZ2010–Building on the success of Buzz2009, we teamed up one more time with SmartBrief to produce a series of breakfast events this summer. This year featured some amazing speakers, including Charlene Li, Olivier Blanchard, Alexandra Levit, Wendy Harman, and Mark Story.

WRITING
Oh yeah!we published a book, too. And our blog is pretty good, maybe you’ve seen it?

We’ve been published in several fancy magazines, including:

• Associations Now
• FORUM magazine
• EXPO Magazine
• Convene magazine
• CalSAE “The Executive” Newsletter
• The Belgian Society of Association Executives Newsletter

We’ve also been featured in Association BISNOW, and quoted on a little blog called Mashable.

So that’s it. Our 2010 in a nutshell. It’s been a fun ride, and we look forward to an even more productive year in 2011.

Tagged as: clients, consulting, speaking, writing