Come experiment with us! A bunch of bloggers/trouble makers in the association community who could not attend ASAE’s Great Ideas Conference are meeting up by Tinychat today to talk about all the learning we’re missing out on. Here are the details:
#Ideas10 Chat for Virtual Attendees
TODAY! at 1:15 ET (11:15 MT)
Here’s what we’re planning to talk about:
- our experience as virtual attendees (or remote attendees, as @jeffhurt likes to say)
- great tweets, resources, and content we’ve seen come out of the conference
- how well TinyChat works as a tool for virtual attendees (yeah…it’ll come up.)
So far, we’ve confirmed that Leslie White (@ltwhite), KiKi L’Italien (@kikilitalien), Elizabeth Baranik (@elizabethb), and I will all be on video. There’s also a text chat feature, so you can still participate even if you’re having a bad hair day. We also hope to have a report from some of our pals who will be on-site at #ideas10. Pretty sure Maddie’s in.
Part of the reason for this experiment is an ongoing discussion that’s been filtering through our community about extending face-t0-face learning experiences to online audiences–using good eLearning fundamentals, of course. It came up in last Tuesday’s #AssnChat on Twitter and it’s a big theme in the Engage365 community. There were also some important lessons that came out of #Untech10–turns out extending the learning doesn’t have to take so long to plan, or be so expensive to implement. Heck–Tony Veroeven Ustreamed an #Untech10 breakout session from his iPhone. Other than needing to charge his phone afterward, it worked pretty well.
So come join us. This is experiential learning at its best (or worst…don’t want to over-promise here. Haha!)
So Jamie scooped me, but yes, we will be presenting our session on Truth and Authenticity in the Digital Age at ASAE’s Great Ideas conference today (Monday) at 3 pm (Colorado time).
Here’s the presentation – we’re testing out Prezi.com for this, which is a format which melds mind-mapping with presentations – in other words instead of going slide by slide in order, you set a navigation path which can go in any direction, can zoom out to show the big picture and zoom in to highlight tiny details. It was a totally awesome experience putting this together and I hope it works well when we actually present it. Lindy and I have lots of ideas for prezis for our forthcoming speaking gigs…
My other session will be tomorrow (Tuesday) at 2 pm Colorado time:
What is a Social Media Manager?
What does it take for an association to become a social media success? The first generation of association “social media managers” are starting to find out—and create their own definitions of what such success looks like in the process.
For this one, I’m going to stick Maggie McGary (from ASHA) and Todd Carpenter (form NAR) and anyone else in the room who does social media work for their associations in the fishbowl and ask them to tell us all about how they manage this work internally. Should be awesomesauce.
For both sessions, and all the other good stuff going on, please follow the #ideas10 hashtag. I will surely be tweeting from whatever sessions I am in (I never pick in advance, btw, I like to go with the flow) and I also plan to test out my new Qik video streaming account… we shall see! If I do take some videos either live or posted later you’ll know through the #ideas10 hashtag, and I’ll post here on the blog with a run-down of all the great ideas we all come up with. Watch this space!
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Please join us for our Water Cooler chats, hosted in conjunction with Engage365, on FRIDAYS at 12 pm CST/1 pm EST [NOTE NEW EARLIER TIME]. That’s today!! We’ll be talking a lot about all the various interesting issues around using social media at events… but as usual, we’ll also talk about anything else that’s on your mind. So come armed with serious questions / topics / issues / problems or just drop in to shoot the breeze on Friday afternoons. Can’t wait to chat with you!
Last week, we hosted our first chat in conjunction with Kiki L’Italien’s Delcor Social Media Sweetspot, the weekly video chat on the latest association social media news which starts at 12:30 EST – click here to watch. (Here’s last week’s recording.) I was so excited to have the chance to talk to Kiki about lessons learned from unTech. We had a great video chat, with Reggie Henry of ASAE lurking and giggling at us in the background, and continued talking on the Water Cooler afterwards.
I’ll be hanging out with Kiki on Sweetspot once a month to talk about associations, social media and events specifically. (I say “I” as opposed to “we”, only because Lindy has declared herself to be camera-shy. But that may change, I’m working on it!) I’m excited to see what scoop Kiki hears across the social web about what associations are up to in this space.
Please note that we’ll be sticking to this new time (12:30 pm for SweetSpot and 1 pm EST for the Water Cooler Chat) from now on, so that everyone knows Friday lunchtime is “awesome association social media chat” time!
Join us today!
I can’t resist posting a link to this truly awesome guest post by marketer Susan Baier on my new favorite blog Convince and Convert.
Setting aside for a minute her first sentence about relevance (natch), Susan’s post goes through various ways in which the company ThinkGeek connects with their core audience.
According to Jamie Grove, the company’s Director of Evil Schemes and Nefarious Plans (i.e. Marketing), ThinkGeek is “all about serving our community. Our social media activities live in our customer retention sphere, not customer acquisition – because the minute it’s in customer acquisition, it changes the nature of the conversation.”
Read the post and see what you think. I love her descriptions of how the company “acts human”, engages rather than sells, and “speaks their customers’ language”. Despite it being about a consumer products company, the post really resonated with me because all of our associations are made up of a membership with particular quirks. I used to work for an association for psychoanalysts – we used to joke (kindly) among staff about how the members were smart as hell and could really debate and work through issues, but man, they took forever to come to any decisions. I hear stories all the time about “my members” and what they are like. “You know, they are engineers. They like rules.” LOL! But read through Susan’s post, and see if that doesn’t make you think of ways you could use social media to speak your own members’ language.
BONUS: along similar lines, Mashable points to 5 Fantastic Facebook Fan Page Ideas to Learn From.
Here’s the regular monthly guest post from Leslie White, our Team SocialFish risk manager.
I was talking with my friend and life coach, Grace, (http://www.coachwithgrace.com/) about Twitter. Grace is a relatively new Twitter user and still figuring it out. She commented that Twitter seems to have three types of people: those who are engaging with others, those who are selling and those that are mad at the sellers. Her comment got me to think about all of the association networking events I have attended as a consultant. Very few association executives attend networking events, so they are heavily loaded with vendors. The executives seem to go to annual meetings, conferences and seminars but still strive to avoid vendors. My theory is many association folks seek to avoid vendors due to the behavior of a few. Similar to Grace’s Twitter comment, some vendors seek to engage while others just sell and the ones engaging are mad at those that are only selling. For example, often when a sales person realizes I am not an association executive he or she ends the conversation abruptly and goes trolling for an association executive.
So why should I be surprised that many vendors behave the same way in social media as in real life? These are the people still making cold calls, spamming us and talking without listening. Are your social media activities behaving the same way – sales or promotions without value? Some people think a sales approach works and it does occasionally (otherwise would we have so much spam?). Consequently they don’t know any other way to behave. Are you and your staff social media nuisances by annoying your members, donors, sponsors and others instead of engaging with them?
Since I’m a risk manager I guess it’s time to broach the subject of risk and social media. Obviously unleashing your staff onto the social web has risks. They may say something inappropriate, share information the association isn’t ready to disclose or post bad pictures or videos. Your social media guidelines address these risks. (If you still need a social media policy, see our white paper Social Media, Risks, and Policies for Associations).
Perhaps the bigger risk is your staff being too pushy, too phony and otherwise alienating people. We all complain when our association sends too many emails, reminder letters, and perhaps too many tweets or postings. You have your social media strategy (want to engage your members, recruit new members, educate people about your industry or profession or raise money) now you need your tactics for achieving it. You know your members (or you think you do) so you need to decide how many, how often and what topics to tweet, blog, post and otherwise interact with your members. Coordinate your efforts with other departments – meetings, membership, foundation, publications and any other unit that is pertinent to your members and audiences. I’ll leave the actual tactical details to the experts (like SocialFish), I just want to mention that your risk management efforts include establishing your social media tactics too. Risk management guides you through your tactical decisions as well – what to do, what not to do, how to do it safely and effectively and what to do if your plan doesn’t work. You always want to have a Plan B whether you are successful or not.
you can dress it up, but it's still spam
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