2011 Q2 Review: SocialFish Clients and Work

It’s time for our quarterly recap of what we’ve been working on. Here’s a review of what we’ve been up to in the second quarter of 2011. Progress!

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

• IEEE–We’ve been working with an ad-hoc social media committee, composed of both staff and member volunteers, which was created to review key components of IEEE’s social media policy and strategy. As a group we completed the first phase of the project, culminating in a presentation to the IEEE board of directors that we helped create.

INTERN PLACEMENT–Second quarter is the season for summer interns. We’ve had great success recruiting and placing college seniors and grad students in social media internships, where they help organize and execute the day-to-day work of social media monitoring, tracking, and administration. We walk each intern through a 6-week social media work plan. During those first 6 weeks, we provide the training and guidance they need to be successful.

Intern clients

• National Association of Children’s Hospitals and Related Institutions
• National Society of Accountants

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 this quarter.

• American Society of Civil Engineers–This quarter, we’ve continued working to refine how the social media team communicates the social media strategy across the organization. We’ve participated in meetings with different departments to discuss the best ways to collaborate.
• Financial Executives International–We’ve been continuing to help FEI develop their LinkedIn group. This quarter, we also submitted a detailed report comparing five different community vendors they might consider working with.
• Massachusetts Medical Society–MMS is starting a new LinkedIn group for members. We’ve assisted in defining the group strategy for membership, content, moderation, and promotion.
• National Association of Home Builders–We continued our work with NAHB. This quarter we had regular meetings, made numerous introductions, and helped NAHB think through a variety of issues. We also worked together on a social media playbook explaining approved uses of a number of different platforms, and we helped present their new social media policy to the NAHB staff most active in using social media to engage stakeholders.
• Avectra–We’ve continued our work with Avectra, teaming up to look at Social CRM concepts, how they will impact associations, and how Avectra can help streamline the work through better technology.

SPEAKING AND TRAINING
In addition to our consulting work, we do quite a bit of speaking and training.

• ASAE Marketing, Membership and Communications Conference–Maddie presented a session on the rise of the digital member with Jeff De Cagna of Principled Innovation, and Lindy presented a session on the 6-week Social Media Work Plan with Lauren Swartz and Audrey Caldwell of ASCE.
• Avectra Social CRM Roadshow–Avectra hosted 6 breakfast session–two each in DC, Alexandria, and Chicago–where we presented Social CRM concepts to association executives.
• Association Media and Publishing Annual Meeting – Maddie presented on Flipping your Publishing Model with Andrew Kantor of VAR.

THINK TANK
This quarter, we launched the Think Tank. The Think Tank is an online peer-to-peer learning hub and knowledge library of social media resources for associations and nonprofits. It’s subscription based, and provides focused learning modules and Q&A especially for the people who are responsible for social media work in their organization. As part of this resource, we’ve been hosting a Think Tank Webinar Series with the help of CommPartners. This quarter, we did webinars on Social CRM, and Social Media Risk.

WRITING
As always, we’ve been writing like crazy. These are just a few of the highlights from this quarter.

• Lindy was featured in a piece on mobile apps alongside Jeff De Cagna in the April Associations Now Interactive Extra.
• We have been working hard on the next white paper in the Social CRM series with Avectra. That will be out in Q3.
• Maddie has submitted the final chapters for Humanize, the book she is co-authoring with Jamie Notter. It will be out in hardcover in Q3.
• We were featured on the cover of Associations Now for our article, Breaking the Rules for Open Community. (Technically, that’s Q3, but we’re so excited, we couldn’t leave it out, and besides, we wrote it in Q2, right?)

So that’s it. Our second quarter of 2011 in a nutshell. We’ll be back with another update in a few months.