Fails, the Center of the Universe, Automating, and Tracking Traffic from Social: 6 MUST READ Posts This Week

Just another quick roundup of MUST READ posts you may have missed:

1.  What Does a Washington Post Blogger Resigning Say About the State of Digital Publishing? (Maggie McGary) – Maggie has that knack of pushing through to the harder questions when everyone else (including me) just buys what we’re told.

All I can think when I read stories like this or hear of similar experiences from my professional peers is “I don’t get it.” Everyone knows that the traditional publications model is dying. Print ad revenue is down and continuing to diminish, while online ad spend is up and projected to continue to rise. But the investment of time, resources and talent is still focused on the traditional model. Digital publications and staff with talents to support and grow those publications are not optional if an organization wants to be able to accommodate the digital ad spend their advertisers are budgeting for. People talk about flipping the publishing model all the time–when are people going to start looking at flipping the publishing STAFFING model to reward digital journalists instead of marginalizing them?

3.  #NTCFail: When Things Don’t Go as Planned (or Your Plan Stinks) (NTEN blog) – We always talk about embracing failure.  This awesome post is a perfect example of that and why I love NTEN so fracking much.  Would your association post a public list of conference fails?

We’re big on values around here. We like to live by ours, which include being accountable to you, and being open and transparent. We also believe that talking about failure openly is the only way to learn and move forward. So in that spirit, I want to share some of just a few of our #NTCFail moments, and what we think we learned.

4. Who Revolves Around Who? (Eric Lanke) – THIS, to me, is the million dollar question associations are in deep denial over.

And they’ve all left me with a this thought. I am a member of several associations. ASAE, WSAE, CMA. I get value out of my membership in each of them. I wouldn’t belong to them if I didn’t. But, emphatically, I am NOT a satellite that revolves around any of them. Quite the reverse, in fact. In my solar system, they are satellites that revolve around me.

Do any of them know this? I’m not sure, but I am sure that none of them act as if they do. And frankly, neither does the association I currently manage when it comes to interacting with our members. We all still act as if we are the center of the universe and our members revolve around us.

5. Automate to Success (Christopher S. Penn) – a little techy, but a GREAT reminder that the more we automate the mindless stuff, the more space we have to do the meaningful human stuff.

Here’s your homework. Keep a list of the digital marketing tasks that you do today and over the next few days and determine if they are repeatable tasks with predictable outcomes. Put aside your ability to do technical things for the moment and just identify how many things you do on a daily basis that are repeatable and predictable. Then figure out how much time each of those tasks consumes. If at the end of this week you find that you’re spending 10% or more of your time each day on repeatable, predictable tasks, then that’s the place to start thinking about whether automating those tasks (or even just a part of them) is possible and practical.

6. How to Measure Social Media Traffic on Your Website with Google Analytics (Video) (John Haydon) – this is so awesome I’m just going to embed it right here for you.

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