Working with SocialFish

We work with associations large and small, trade and professional, at all different stages of the social media adoption curve. These organizations have a variety of different goals and objectives for their social media efforts, but all want to align their social activities with their mission and under an overall strategy which makes sense for their staff and stakeholders.

Here are some examples of association strategic objectives:

• To build community for membership recruitment and retention by building relationships on outposts like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and linking them back to the association’s homebase website or private white label social network.
• To establish the association’s thought leadership in its particular industry through a well-conceived blogging and engagement strategy.
• To enable all stakeholders, staff and volunteers to operate safely in social spaces on behalf of the organization through the development of clear social media guidelines.
• To build buzz around the association’s annual conference, by leveraging social media tools to provide educational content, word of mouth and promotion before, engagement and learning during, and the long tail of resources after the event and leading into the following year.

These are just four examples of many organizational goals achievable though social media. All of our work is about quick wins combined with long term growth; and we can help your organization find those “sweet spots” which will have maximum impact and have measurable success while using internal resources effectively.  We also help develop your social media policy framework so your staff and members can operate safely and transparently.

Maddie and Lindy have an incredible understanding of both social media and the inner workings of associations – so they are creative and member-focused, but never lose site of the structures, buy-in and policies that an organization might need in order to implement a social media strategy. They are responsive and enthusiastic, and great people to work with.
- Maureen Petron, Executive Director of Communications, The National Association for the Self-Employed

Our Public Projects

We’d also love you to have a dig around our pet projects.  The concept of “designing in public” – always beta testing, continuously asking for feedback, measuring and seeing what works and what doesn’t and why – is something we write about a lot.   Everything listed here is fully open and we encourage you to join and participate.

Young Association Professionals (YAP) - YAP is our own community of friends and colleagues, as well as our sandbox and testing ground. Here is our homebase, as well as Facebook Page,  LinkedIN and Twitter outposts.   We built it from scratch and it’s continuously growing and evolving.  We call ourselves YAP Hostesses, but we’re actually more like proud parents.  This is the place we’ve truly tested the practical implications of harnessing a group’s most important social objects (the things people come to a site to do), as well as tying online community to offline community.

Buzz2009 – our massively successful one-day Advanced Social Media for Associations conference, featuring Guy Kawasaki and Andy Sernovitz, which focused on how to create and energize stakeholders using word of mouth (WOM) and social media.  In keeping with this theme, we used WOM techniques for the conference itself, and kept a living case study of everything we did to plan, promote and build buzz around the conference.

Association Social Media Wiki – our wiki was featured on the IIG Social Media Case Studies Superlist with this nice description:

“The Association Social Media Wiki has a growing “A to Z” list of some 100+ associations using social media with links to the association’s social media web pages. Ranges from the American Library Association’s Second Life intiative to the Urban Land Institute’s blog.”  We also feature one association case study each month, and an Association Professionals on Twitter page.  Not in the wiki yet?  Feel free to add your association’s activities.  Help us continue to make this THE resource for finding out what associations are up to in the social media space.

Engage365 – we’re community managers for this exciting new online community for people specifically interested in social media for events.  The community is a great mix of skilled event planners, conference organizers, tradeshow managers, education people and more.   Do check it out and have a look around.