Continuing the conversation we started at Buzz2010 with Olivier Blanchard on social media ROI, I’d like you to take a look at this interesting presentation on Digital ROI by David Berkowitz, which he gave to the Promotion Marketing Association (PMA) this spring.

One of my big aha moments from Buzz was that community managers or social media managers who are tracking metrics for their social media activities need not be those who analyze that data. In other words, leave the analyzing to the analysts. Leave the financial ROI calculations to the finance department. (I do think there needs to be some way that those different roles could learn from each other specifically, about social media as a channel for achieving business objectives – but that’s a post for another day). But just as I was thinking to myself, well does that mean we should ONLY be measuring certain things (e.g. conversions) and not others (e.g. influence, engagement, sentiment)? – Olivier answered the question in his talk. He said, it’s ok – even good – to collect all kinds of data. It’s good to measure things that don’t have any demonstrable (quantitative) link to financial impact yet – because maybe some of these things will in the future. And of course there are hundreds of things we can measure with social media and lots of discussion about how and what and when and why to measure them.

So then I came across this slide deck which has a pretty interesting summary of some of these things we can measure. Like all good social strategists, Berkowitz reminds us that we must measure against objectives, of course. It is definitely NOT about measuring everything you can just because you can. But I still think it’s worth tracking some of these “woolly” qualitative things because we’re all experimenting with these channels and these new relationships. Check it out and see what you think.

While I’m at it, too, here are a few of the press clips/ blog posts analyzing Olivier’s Buzz session. I know this conversation will keep on rolling!

• Social Media R.O.I. for associations and non-profits/NFPs (The BrandBuilder Blog)
• Social Media ROI (Association Bisnow)
• Making sense of social-media ROI with Olivier Blanchard (SmartBlog on Social Media)
• Understanding social-media ROI in the nonprofit space (Smartblog on Social Media)
• Does your social-media campaign pass the FRY test? (Smartblog on Social Media)
• Rant Time: Social Media ROI (Mizz Information)

And here are some pics from the event!

Here’s a monthly selection of links to some of the most interesting posts that we’ve read and shared over the last 30 days. These kinds of posts are what inform our own writing here at SocialFishing; hope you’ll dip in and out at your leisure! The list below is for serendipity; if you prefer our “Must Read” shares about important stuff for association social media, please click here to subscribe, or click here to browse.

Blogworld-or-bust!

• You don’t need perfection to be a good blogger, but you do need passion (Mack Collier)

The Art of Social

• When should you delete a comment on your Facebook Page? (John Haydon)
• Best Buy’s Twelpforce: A Social Media Success Story? (In Progress) (Mirsky and Kong)
• Making the business case for social media & getting buy-in from the boss (Mack Collier)
• Does your org have a Facebook Page comment escalation flow-chart? (John Haydon)
• Three Steps to Make Your CEO Look More Personable with Social Media (The Buzz Bin)

Strategic Thinking

• IT & Marketing – Like Peanut Butter and Jelly? (Eric D Brown)
• 3 Reasons Why CEOs Hate Social Media (Socialnomics)
• Association chapter permaculture: Value edges (Acronym)
• “the object-idea”: the future of what used to be called advertising (Gaping Void)
• Social Media Success is More Than Skin Deep (Mizz Information) – must read!!
• Creating Tomorrow’s Organizations (Get Me Jamie Notter)
• Pulling it All Together: The 360 Degree Marketing Communications Strategy (Guilt By Association)
• Marketers: you are the software you use (Chief Marketing Technologist)

Truth

• The Ethics of Online Secrecy (Mike Arauz)
• Love: How the essence of a brand fuels its purpose. (The BrandBuilder Blog)
• People Pay For Value – Their Value, Not Yours (Six Pixels of Separation)
• Fear Sucks (Get Me Jamie Notter)

Analysis

• The Death of Facebook (Geoff Livingston)
• New Experiments Question the Power of Social Proof on the Web (Dan Zarrella)
• Influence is Bliss: The Gender Divide of Influence on Twitter (Brian Solis)
• The Age of Disposable Software (Chief Marketing Technologist)
• The Feds are Getting Younger and _________ … (Hive Talkin’)
• The Web Is Dead? What Does that Mean (to Nonprofits)? (NTEN Blog)

Datalicious

• Social Media Spend to Double This Year (Brian Solis)
• The 2010 Social Media Usage report: Uncovering some scary numbers (The BrandBuilder Blog)
• Measuring ROI Of Online Communities (Engage365)

Toolbox

• New and improved moderation features for LinkedIn Groups (LinkedIn Blog)
• 10 Steps for Successful Social Media Monitoring (Mashable)
• Bye, Bye FourSquare. Hello Facebook Places? (Frogloop)
• Facebook Places, Revisited (Spredfast Blog)
• Facebook ditching FBML and what it means for your custom Facebook Page (John Haydon)
• Understanding And Implementing Social CRM (Social Media Explorer)

Event 2.0

• Say it Loud and Proud: Top Tips for Hybrid Event Speakers (Fork in the Road)
• Tradeshows Don’t Have to Suck (Tradeshow Insight)

Awesomesauce, LOL or WTF

• Jurassic Web (Slate) – whoa. What the web was like in 1996.
• OpenIDEO – IDEO’s new community for crowdsourcing innovative design ideas
• How The INTERNET Works [INFOGRAPHIC] (MakeUseOf.com)
• WeePlaces.com
• University Website (xkcd) - or many association websites???
• Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Today’s Marketing Catch Phrases (FlowTown)
• Check (In) Yo’ Self Before You Wreck Yo’ Self: Why Foursquare Users Check In “Off The Grid” (TechCrunch) – whoa on the creepiness.

Clearly this is enough to keep y’all busy for a while, but if you want more SocialFish curated links, here’s the link to the feed to subscribe to Maddie’s Reader shares.

During the “Deconstructing Social Media Guidelines” session at the ASAE Annual Meeting, the topic of antitrust came up a few times. I was facilitating the meeting with my Team SocialFish buds, Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer, and got to talk about my favorite topic, risk. The fear of social media just won’t seem to go away, so we preach your social media policy as a guide for people’s online behavior and a way to mitigate these risks. But when it comes to antitrust issues, your social media policy needs to support your association’s antitrust policy and compliance guide.

While monitoring your association’s social media sites, you find members discussing the fee or price to be charged for a specific service or product. Is that antitrust activity?  What should you do? First, you need to understand the antitrust laws and how they apply to your association.

What is antitrust?
Antitrust actions are an inherent risk for associations. An association, whether professional or trade, is a community of competitors where it is easy for members to engage in inappropriate conversations. So what is antitrust? Antitrust consists of any action that could result in an unreasonable restraint of trade such as discussions of pricing, salaries, boycotts, allocation of territorial divisions, bid rigging or “tying” agreements (to get this you have to buy that first). The purpose of the antitrust laws is to preserve competition so any action that tries to hinder competition is viewed as antitrust.

Perhaps the scariest part of antitrust activity is that it does not have to end with a written contract or express agreement that the participants will charge a certain price, refuse to deal with particular vendors or swap territories. Members can violate the laws through informal conversations that have an implied understanding or by mere parallel conduct – everyone does the same thing (raise prices) without a formal agreement to do so.

The penalties for engaging in restraint of trade or unfair competition practices can be severe. The Federal Trade Commission has more resources than your association and can pursue these types of cases aggressively. Mark Alcorn, an association industry lawyer and management consultant wrote in his Association Law Blog about the financial ruin of two dentists in New Jersey that agreed to not do business with an insurance company. The Sherman Antitrust Act is a criminal conspiracy statute so the person can face criminal as well as civil actions. A conviction can carry stiff fines of $100,000 for individuals and $1 million fines for the association per offense.

The risk isn’t new, association discussion forums and meetings have always given members the opportunity to behave badly. The rise of social media just offers additional communication channels and formats in which members can seek an unfair competitive advantage. People often forget that social media activities occur online and electronic information never disappears, it leaves a nice a trail for government prosecutors to follow.

Antitrust Resources
So what does this mean to your association? Your association needs an antitrust policy and compliance guide. You also need to monitor your social media channels for violations of the policy. If your association does not have an antitrust policy and compliance guide, create one immediately. If you are a member of ASAE, its Knowledge Center has many resources:

Board of Directors Resources: Policies
Legal Forms and Models
Policies: Antitrust

Mark Alcorn’s Facts Association Executives Need to Know About Antitrust offers an overview of antitrust with a sample antitrust policy.

What To Do
If your association does have an antitrust policy, review it to ensure it addresses any changes due to social media (probably not). Depending upon your corporate culture, antitrust may not be in the forefront, so you may need to remind your members of its dangers.  An educational campaign may help members to remember the types of conversations they should avoid.

Next, as you monitor the social media conversations, immediately stop any conversations teetering on the edge, or blatantly illegal antitrust discussions. A gentle reminder to the participants will frequently be enough to bring these to an end. [If your association manages a listserv, you may already have some language to this effect in your terms of use or staff monitoring guidelines.]  If the members continue the discussion, than you should refer the issue to the person responsible for antitrust compliance.  Those seemingly innocent inquiries about salaries, what fees or prices are charged for a service, or discussion of vendors may lead to allegations of antitrust activities. Make sure your staff and members understand this issue and continue to monitor your social media channels to interrupt any illegal or inappropriate activity.

We’re totally psyched to let you know that a bunch of blogs we love have been nominated for the #eventprofs Blog Awards, including ours truly, SocialFishing (aka A Blog from the SocialFish). Whoo hoo!!

We’re under the “Best Industry Advancement Blog” category along with our esteemed colleagues Jeff Hurt and Traci Browne.

Splash! A Blog from Memberclicks along with Tradeshow Insight are nominated under Best Corporate Blog (congrats Shannon Otto and Eric Lukazewski!!!) and MPI’s blog Engage is nominated under New Kid on the Blog.

Yay us!

Click here or the pic below to vote – we’d be honored if you would vote for us, but really, it’s all good. Voting closes at 9:00am EDT on September 9 and the winners (for each category, and blog with most votes overall) will be announced at Event Camp Twin Cities on September 9th, 2010 at 5:00 pm CST – it will be livestreamed for those of us who can’t make it there in person. We can’t wait!!

Just a little reminder that we liveblogged five sessions at #ASAE10:

• David Gammel’s session on “Make Money Online! Unlock the Revenue Potential of Your Organization’s Website“

Handout 1 – Make Money Online summary, Handout 2 – Results of Online Revenue Poll, and slides

• Jamie Notter “To Tell the Truth” [starts at the Monday 11:24 point on the transcript]

Handout (Truth As a Leadership Imperative article)

• Jeff De Cagna and Renato Sogueco on “Engage your members using mobile devices” [Monday 4:36]

Handout 1

Handout 2

• Peggy Hoffman and others on “The Benefits of a Strategically Balanced Member Community” [Tuesday 12:05]

Handout

• and many, many thanks to Shannon Otto for liveblogging our session on Deconstructing Social Media Guidelines [Tuesday 1:33]

A little extra plug about our social media guidelines session – by complete coincidence it was at the same time as the regular Twitter Association Chat (Tuesdays at 2 pm EST) – so the moderator KiKi L’Italien incorporated the chat into the session (or rather, incorporated the session into the chat) and opened up the “floor” to discussion from the virtual “chatterers”.  Read the transcript of the chat here. I thought that was pretty awesomely cool.  Oh and here are our handouts for the session – a great set of questions for you to ask yourself from Leslie, and our white paper on the topic.

And you may also notice at one point [Monday 3:12] I mention the LIVE Sweetspot video, which we realized we could embed in the the liveblog window for those following along in real time – so here it is again for anyone who missed it.  The usual shenanigans, of course.  Enjoy.  The sound comes on (just our pre-show banter) around 6:30 and the actual show starts at the 11 minute mark.

You can read the liveblog here.   Apologies that everything is in one transcript – next time, perhaps we’ll try and separate them out though that’s a little complicated on the back end.  Please let us know if this was useful.

I promised to balance out my sad post (Has ASAE Lost its Mojo?) with a celebratory one, and I’ve seen a few calls for positivity already, so here it is:  the Top Ten Things That Rocked My World at #ASAE10.

These are sort of in chronological order, not in any kind of order of awesomeness.

1. The Westin Bonaventure Hotel

Despite it’s 80′s retro shabbiness and bizarre food options, I thought this hotel was insanely cool.  Elevators that don’t stop on every floor?  A running track and exercise machines floating above the lobby?  Elevators on the outside of the building?  A rotating penthouse restaurant?  Fountains where you walk under two huge fish spitting a stream of water over your head?  A walkway to the closing party?  A sweet little room with an awesome view (kept the curtains wide open all day and all night, watched the sun set over city lights in the evening)… I never did get to go hang out in one of the red balcony pods (see pic above) – but I loved it.  It’s high time they film another movie (True Lies was the last, apparently) in there.

2. The Tech Council

It’s my third year on the council, and I love it more and more.  We have so many smart people, and so many amazing things planned for this year, we’re going to blow everyone’s mind.  Our great Chair Dave Coriale couldn’t be there (Dave, you were truly missed!) as his new-college-freshman kid would have disowned him, so he sent us a fabulous video message. I wish  it was on YouTube so I could link to it [Here it is!!].  Awesome.

This year, we divided ourselves into three focus areas – education, communication, and vision.  I’m in the education group and our plan, since technology touches everyone throughout an organization now, is to provide a list of the technology topics we feel are most important to three kinds of audiences, along with sources on how to find that educational content.  We aim to source 1) technology professional development content for non-IT people, 2) technology PD content for the non-tech C-Suite, and 3) strategic business PD content for technologists on a leadership track (CIO’s).  You’ll notice the last two are two sides of one coin.  We will be asking for feedback on our priority list of topics from the ASAE community, so watch this space! Then that list will then be made available to all councils and committees who might be looking for technology content for the various conferences and activities they manage.  I’m very excited about how this project will go and I think it will end up being a hugely valuable resource at a time when everyone is excited about technology in the workplace and the constantly changing needs of IT for achieving business objectives.

I was also asked to give a little ten minute presentation on how Technology Council members could be active evangelists for ASAE and for the technology section.  Here are my slides, which you may find of interest whether you sit on a council or not!

3. The new ASAE website

You’ve probably heard rumors that ASAE is revamping their website.  It’s not fully rolled out yet, but you can see a sneak preview here. I really love it – I think it’s so much more vibrant, has more multimedia, shows off the ASAE community and what members are talking about in the social spaces around the organization, as well as top viewed / top rated content.  Much better search engine, which is priority number one in my mind. Fantastic job.  Can’t wait until it’s live – maybe I’ll actually start going to the home page again – haha.

4. Expo floor shenanigans and the Flashmob

Ok so this one is a no-brainer, but I really do love people getting creative during the expo.  I heard a lot of great comments about members getting top-notch value from wandering the aisles and talking to vendors and exhibitors.  I saw a haunted house, a huge scrabble game, a floor piano, people lining up to build bears.  I drank some posh bourbon (yes, really!).  This was a great collaboration and networking space and I think ASAE definitely made the most of it!

And as for the Flashmob – I have no words.  It was not super organized like the Flashmobs you see on Youtube (like the National Restaurant Association one we were sort of trying to emulate) – but it got lots of people dancing and clapping their hands and asking for an encore (which we did, this video shows both) and I think as a community building experiment it exceeded all expectations.  This kind of thing creates friendships!  That is so amazing.  And thank you again to Meet Austin for getting T-shirts and signs and allowing us to take over their booth – I really hope we get to go to Austin for a future ASAE Annual!

5. Some FANTASTIC educational sessions.

Despite my rant about feeling robbed from not having been to enough sessions, the ones I did go to were all really really good and I saw tons of tweets from others buzzing about what they went to.  I hope ASAE aggregates the session tweets in a way that we can go back and look at them for individual sessions.

I’m going to post my session notes separately, but I wanted to specifically mention a couple of things.  Peggy Hoffman’s panel session on The Benefits of a Strategically Balanced Member Community with Mary Ghikas from the American Library Association and Marjorie Bynum from SOCAP International (The Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals) was incredible.  These are two extremely different associations (one huge, with open communities, one small staff with member-only communities) and the counterpoint between the way these organizations explored – in very different ways – the idea of how they could create value for their members through building community online just blew my mind.  I feel like associations are really starting to dig into how to become social organizations and it was GREAT to see what they are doing.  Same thing with Renato Sogueco in the Engage Your Members Through Mobile Devices session – this was a great case study of how an association surveyed its members to find out what their mobile habits were and then tested the waters with mobile applications.  I wish Joe Romienecki had spoken more about how ASAE is doing the same thing, since we know they are very interested in new mobile publishing models.

Jamie Notter’s session on Truth was also impactful – he has an incredible skill for making deep, complicated, messy concepts not only simpler and clearer but also connected to a bigger picture. From individual behavior to organizational systems.  I talk to him all the time about this stuff, but I still learned a LOT.

I could go on and on (sorry, btw, about the HUGE posts) but really I hope I’ll be able to find time to check out some of the other sessions after the fact. Like this one below. How awesome does this look?? I’m so happy there are notes and resources to go along with the Prezi!

6. The Sweetspot

OK so I know this is partly one of mine, but good god, I love the Sweetspot.  KiKi does an amazing job with her regular webcast about the latest association social media news, and it’s always a real treat for me to be able to come on with her once a month and make her giggle while we discuss good stuff going on in the industry.  But doing it live, with real live people in the audience (hey, it’s LA, right, it had to be done!) – O.M.G. that was so cool.  We had the show split screened with a camera on the audience and got to show off some of the lovely people who watch the show regularly, as well as those we talk about all the time.  We had the ability to interact with the live audience and get comments from them, as well as hand out the weekly Sweetspot award.  It ROCKED.  I hope we can do it again bigger and better at the Tech conference in December.

7. The YAP Party

I literally don’t have words for what YAP means to me.  I hope we will continue to provide fun times, wild stories, new friendships, CAE support and everything else to our ASAE community for a really long time to come.  When I hear people who are at an ASAE meeting for the first time talk about how they were a little intimidated – I WISH I had been monitoring Twitter more closely for that during the meeting.  That is what YAP is for – to help new people feel connected.  We need to figure out a way to reach out to first time attendees in a better way. (ASAE will you help us next time somehow?)  We keep growing and growing (almost 1100 members now, plus we’re going global) so we’ll need to pay attention to what people need and value and how those things change over time, but wow.  Thank you to everyone in YAP for being like family.  I’m think going to cry now…

There are too many pictures from too many fun times, and the party itself was insane and went on in the wee hours (thanks again to Daxko for sponsoring!!)   So instead I’ll post this cute pic of the “YAPStar Night in LA” notebooks we got.  As we walked in the Broadway Bar, we were handed a notebook and told that we needed to get 25 autographs from people in the room, then hand them back for a prize drawing.  Of course I immediately thought this was silly – until I managed to meet about 15 new people instantly.  Awesomeness.

8. Cirque du Soleil

Holy crap Cirque Du Soleil is amazing.  I want more of THAT in the general sessions! Mind = blown.  Every time.

9. Seeing friends and colleagues in the flesh

This one is a no-brainer too – this is what these conferences are REALLY all about.  The photo  below is a perfect example – where else but ASAE Annual can I hang out and drink Fat Tires with Robert Barnes who’s based in Sydney, Australia, Jeff Hurt out of Texas (unfortunately hidden), Matt Baehr in Virginia (you know I won’t cross the river unless I have to!), Jamie Notter in deep dark Maryland (those suburbs, man) and John Crosby in DC – whom I hadn’t met until I got to LA.  I may be the biggest evangelist in the world for online collaboration – but nothing beats IRL.  The online stuff just makes the face-to-face stuff that much more meaningful and awesome.

10. ASAE staff

“ASAE the organization” and its top leadership may be out of sync with some of us, but most of its staff are not.  Thank you SO MUCH for working so hard on this meeting, for running around for us, for bending over backwards to help when we needed it, for always having a smile, for hanging out and interacting with us even when you probably had a million and one things to do, for manning the OWL even when we weren’t there, for dealing with the airconditioning as best you could, for helping us figure out what direction we needed to go.  We know how hard you worked for us.  We’re very, very grateful.

One thing is a fact – I can’t wait til next year.  Bring on St. Louis!  Who’s in for a flashmob?

On Saturday of this year’s annual meeting, I facilitated a session on leadership for the Young Association Executive Committee. My main leadership message was that leadership is a SYSTEM capacity, not only a set of individual skills. I figured the rest of the sessions at the annual meeting would focus on individual competencies like emotional intelligence, communication skills, visioning, cultural competence etc.

But I wanted them to look at their “system”: the YAE Committee. What could they do to enable this system to better shape its future? I had them work in small groups to talk about the following four things:

Connection. How can this group build stronger connections and stronger relationships, because that will enable more effective and quicker action?

Clarity. How can this group achieve a deeper level of clarity and shared understanding about what it wants and why it wants it, because settling for vague agreement results in diffused action?

Commitment. How can this group translate the diverse passions of the group members into coordinated action, because randomly assigning tasks to people rarely works?

Learning (no, I did NOT do the “four Cs of leadership”). How can this group learn continuously, because waiting until the end of the year to talk about it is too late?

I think these themes for leadership development work particularly well for the “social organization,” which is the focus of my column here on SocialFish. While they incorporate individual skill building (those communication skills will come in handy when building connections, for instance), the ultimate focus is on the system. Leadership development assumes a distributed, networked environment. It assumes decentralization. This is the way of the social organization.

This presented me with an interesting lens for the rest of the Annual Meeting. I am going to write a more personal, reflective post on Get Me Jamie Notter about my experience there, but here I wanted to talk about this year’s meeting in terms of this “social leadership” lens.

I think this year’s meeting missed the boat in the context of social leadership, specifically connections and commitment. In terms of connections, the venue was not great for connecting and building relationships. It was too spread out, both in terms of the urban “downtown” area that had absolutely no energy (or people most of the time), and a convention center where the traffic flow ended up completely ruling out the Online Engagement Lounge or other places to hang out and build relationships. There also seemed to be far fewer slots for concurrent sessions. This meant I literally had less to talk about, either with new people I was meeting or my regular circle of friends. I skipped the general sessions (so that was my fault), but they seemed to miss the mark for many. The end result was fewer opportunities to connect with other people.

Another area that fell short for me was around commitment. That is, what was this meeting doing to help me take action based on something that I’m passionate about? There was something about this annual meeting that made it feel like the whole meeting was about ASAE, and not about the members and the attendees. I seem to have hit the wall with my own patience with all the over-produced parts of the general sessions where “brands” are introduced, and Boards dance, and songs or videos are produced. It’s like we are subjected to this because it’s important to the people at the top, or they think we will be entertained, but it doesn’t tap into my passion.

So what if we blew up the general sessions and started over? Here are some ideas:

John Graham or the volunteer leader starts it off and presents a theme for the conference. ASAE now has a tagline “the center for association leadership,” so let’s start off the meeting by hearing from the leaders about what aspect(s) of association leadership we want to explore in this meeting. Then bring in the keynoter who not only does a 45 minute talk (related to the themes of course!), but the audience also has a discussion at their tables about it in terms of application, (and then to keep the learning going, one of the rooms at each concurrent session is devoted to further exploration of that theme in an open space format).

Then the Board (or some other group…the fellows? Leadership Academy Graduates? A staff cross-section? DELP Scholars?) stays up on the stage and has an open discussion in front of everyone about it. You want to showcase your new board? Then give me a glimpse of how they think and what matters to them, but for the sake of humanity don’t make them dance across the stage. If you’re going to cram two thousand people into a room for a general session, then please give us something we can talk about during the rest of the conference (other than how uncomfortable it was to watch the video with the laugh track).

That would facilitate connection, clarity, and commitment. By giving us a theme (or themes), you give us a bit of an event-based “social object” we can toss around with our colleagues in many other contexts throughout the meeting. It helps facilitate connections with others as we dig into it, and it also pushes us as a community to work towards more shared understanding and clarity. In the process, we each begin to understand how these things connect to what we are passionate about in our work, and that can generate new action. That sounds like leadership for the social organization. These are just some brainstorms, of course. You don’t have to do it like that. But I think whatever we do should keep in mind connections, clarity, commitment, and learning.

The ASAE Annual Meeting is a big deal, not just because of it’s size and complexity, but because it is a unique opportunity to have thousands of members of our diverse and extended community in the same place at the same time. As such, it is a unique opportunity for leadership development—to enhance our community’s collective capacity to shape our future. If we all remember that (the staff and volunteers when they design it, and the attendees when they choose how to operate during the meeting), then we advance our mission and have good evaluation scores at the same time. That’s social leadership in action.

I’m sitting here on the plane home to DC after four busy days in Los Angeles at the ASAE’s annual conference, and I want to write a “what a great time I had at ASAE10!” post like everyone else might be doing right now, but instead I’m feeling more than a little depressed. I’m thinking to myself, has ASAE lost its mojo? “Mojo” here being a reference to the truly horrible closing general session speaker – but more on that in a second.

First a disclaimer. I don’t want this post to be a rant, but just an honest attempt at trying to figure out what I’m feeling. I’m only talking about my own personal experience – I’m not speaking for Team SocialFish. Lindy, Jamie and Leslie might have quite different thoughts about it all – and I’m actually asking you here, if you went to ASAE (or attended virtually, or watched the Twitter stream) what your thoughts are on these points. Did you experience anything similar? Am I totally off base?

Here are a few impressions swirling around in my head. Be warned – all of this is bad. I’ve decided I will celebrate all the GREAT things about the meeting in a separate post so stop reading here if you’re not in the mood for this and you thought it was all super awesome, which I’m sure some people did.

The thoughts below are in no particular order.

1. I felt like ASAE doesn’t really care about what its members care about.

At the volunteer lunch on Saturday, new “GIVE Awards” were announced, which celebrated the top volunteer-led projects as voted on by members.  (I wanted to include a link to what these are – but could find nothing.  Which illustrates my point.) Surely this work is what an association is all about, its lifeblood, its reason for being!  Don’t you think?  The award “ceremony” should have been celebratory and should have showed off some of the nominated projects  (and not just the winners) with some fanfare – instead, it was sloppy and without any production effort (music, etc) – especially disappointing considering the piles of cash spent on general session entertainment (more on that later too). It seemed like there was no opportunity to engage the audience, no opportunity to celebrate volunteers and councils and really celebrate what ALL of us had worked so hard on this year.  I know the previous format needed to be changed because people were very bored by the endless lines of individuals coming up to the mike, and I think the awards were a fantastic idea, but really poorly executed.  A LOT of people voted, so that part I think went great.

When Velma Hart announced Untech10 as the winner, she pronounced in “unitech”, left the whole room scratching their heads, and clearly seemed to have not even heard of it – when it was a truly amazing event that was created through the effort of literally hundreds of ASAE members.  I know I’m close to this and was part of it but it made me feel a little sick that it seemed so throwaway.

John Graham, also, was completely incapable of answering some basic questions from the audience and clearly has no clue about the work of the organization. It was shockingly embarrassing. (He also made a HUGE faux pas later on in one of the general sessions where he made some joke about his CEO salary – when hundreds of associations have laid off staff in the last couple of years because of the economy and he gets paid around $1m annually, that is really out of order).  He’s also made the point publicly in various places that he thinks the blogger community is not worth listening to – he might want to remember that we often say what many, many, many more people than just us are thinking.

2. I felt like there was excessive selling and promotion of the ASAE brand, and asking for our money in all the general sessions.

So ASAE has a new logo – great. I like it, actually. But will it affect me directly? No. Was it a surprise to anyone on the planet that the “Center” would be dropped? No. Stop rubbing it in to those who know the history and are not particularly happy about the loss of GWSAE’s attention to innovation and quality education. Those who don’t know about that, honestly don’t care much what the logo looks like.  The customer creates the brand, remember?

Having a new Foundation is great and all, but nowhere in any of the speeches about it (of which there were many) did anyone actually say what they are going to do with our money. This is from one of the Daily Nows:

One of the primary goals for the ASAE Foundation is to equip the next generation of leaders with the knowledge and skills required to successfully manage the challenges and opportunities the community will face in the future. The Foundation will accomplish its mission through fundraising support from individuals, associations, foundations, and corporations.

Excuse me, but, huh? Read that again. That tells us what, exactly? You’re going to support the industry by taking our money? That quote is totally meaningless. (And – if we take it at face value – what then is ASAE the association supposed to be doing for us in exchange for our hugely expensive dues)?

Don’t get me started on the Power of A. Apparently this (hugely expensive) campaign is being “expanded” – meaning they are probably throwing more money at it. By the way – note to ASAE – you can’t have a successful online campaign without involving your online champions. Ogilvy should know better. The first run might have worked had you reached out to the (now very large) blogger community – although we might have told you it made no sense and had desperate need of some strategy behind it. Looking at the site now – it still makes no sense and all the old content, minimal and random though it was, is gone.  Why are you now throwing good money after bad?

3. I felt that all of the money spent on overproduced, fake stuff could have been better spent on real, human stuff.

The general sessions tend to be bad every year, but this year they were unbelievably bad. There was no educational content to speak of. They continued the tradition of spending a ton of money on overproduced and seriously bizarre “entertainment”. Apologies to Howard, DJ, Toni and the other actors in the ASAE-produced sitcom “Guilt By Association” – but really, WTF? It made zero sense (even after watching it back). It wasn’t funny. And the keynote speakers were just old-school, tired, bad.

I know ASAE knows what good speakers look like. Here’s one, and here’s another. Speakers that are intelligent and inspirational. That push you to do more or better or deeper. That get you fired up to go to sessions and learn stuff. That keep you talking about their ideas with your peers throughout the conference.  Whose words stay with you for days after.

Beyond the keynote speakers, why not showcase the great stuff that volunteers are doing at the general sessions? Why not have the GIVE awards then – spend money on some fanfare for what really matters – valuable work that advances the industry? Why not film some videos of real members doing interesting things – like the diversity video in San Diego with Greg Fine and Badia Albanna and others telling us their experiences on screen? That was wonderful and real.  (If anyone has a clip I can link to here, let me know – I couldn’t find it on YouTube.).

And here’s another thing. No offense to Karen Hackett (and every other board president to stand on stage and read the teleprompter), but please, please ask these people to talk to us directly about what they are going to do for us and for the industry. We don’t care that you’re thanking your mom, your kids and your spouse – we have no idea who you are. We have no idea who the Board is, and often we don’t really care, but here’s the thing.  We might end up caring, if you stood up there like real people and told us what you’re working on. What your vision is. (And no, creating a Foundation where you’ll keep hassling us for money cannot be all there is.)

Flashy entertainment is great and it’s important to get us all fired up for the conference – but we’d appreciate it more if it was interspersed with openness, transparency, celebration of things that matter, and real content.

4. I felt that ASAE is continuing to pay lipservice to diversity.

What’s wrong with this picture?  Look closely.

It’s page 33 of the program book, if you still have it.  The yellow ad has ASAE’s commitment to diversity statement – next to pics of three white guys.

Here are some more white guys.  I’m sure the work they won their awards for was good work, but really??

The DELP lunch may have provided some interesting information about what they are doing, but nobody except DELP people are invited or know anything about it – so who knows? It’s like preaching to the choir. If there is good stuff going on, why don’t the rest of us see any of it? Why not talk about it more in the general sessions?  Put your money where your mouth is. That link goes to Patti Digh at ASAE in 2009 asking us to decide what our core intention is in relation to diversity.  Watch it.

How about more of this:

…and less of this.

While I’m at it, here’s another way:

Everyone who’s undertaken the CAE exam knows that you are supposed to “think like the 60 year old white CSE of the ideal association”. Well, news flash – that’s no longer the ideal association. It’s not right, it’s not accurate (though we might have a ways to go) and maybe the exam that certifies you as a bona fide association management expert shouldn’t just perpetuate the myth. Why not rethink the way that exam prep is worded?  Off topic, I know, but why isn’t anyone saying anything about that?

5. I felt that all the places meant for members to congregate and gather and network and discuss their conference experiences were completely secondary to the ASAE-promotional stuff.

Case in point: the convention center lobby had all kinds of weird “advocacy hubs” and brochure stations. In this huge open space, there was nowhere for groups of people to hang out. I never in all four days saw people congregating there. Small anecdote: one person I desperately wanted to meet IRL after building a friendship with her online was Lauren Fernandez. We never managed to be in the same place at the same time. How is that even possible at a conference like this?

Meanwhile, the CAE Lounge was in a dark basement room –  near the parking lot, I think, because I never made it down there.

The Online Engagement Lounge was literally 800 miles away at the furthest possible point away from anything, beyond the very last session room. Poor Amy Hissrich was stuck there the whole entire time (and specifically during a Tuesday morning time slot), ostensibly to show off the new ASAE website – how many people actually found her? Who was aware of this? It wasn’t in the program anywhere that I could see. I spotted it mentioned in a tiny corner of one of the dailies. Those of us who arranged in advance to meet others in the OWL (as I call it) in between sessions or during expo hours had to make alternative arrangements because it was too far away to get back to the sessions in time.

And yet, what is the one thing that I bet 100% of ASAE members are affected by and will use or see at some point during their service with ASAE, even if it’s just to check their CAE credits or their contact info? Yes, the damn website. Helllooooo…..!!! Why couldn’t we have seen something about that in one of the general sessions? So everyone could be impressed by how much better the new site is going to make their individual member experience? Talk about a huge missed opportunity.

Couldn’t these spaces have been properly incorporated into the layout and used to their full potential?  We could have had discussions – even actual sessions, maybe in a fishbowl format – in these spaces.  Are ASAE’s brochures really more important than ASAE’s members?

6. I felt that the educational content was completely squeezed out – but in favor of what?

I remember every previous annual meeting we’d come out with heads spinning about sessions we’d been to and too many notes and takeaways and lots of hallway discussions. The educational content has never been super high end, meaning there was always as much complaining about time wasted in crappy sessions as there was talking over ideas that came out of good ones, but at least we were talking about them.

Here in LA, over four days, there were only 6 opportunities to go to a session.  I went to some fantastic sessions – but was left feeling like I’d hardly been to anything. On Sunday there were 42 sessions in 2 time slots. Monday – 51 sessions in 2 time slots. Tuesday – 42 sessions in 2 time slots.  I counted. Anyone else see a problem with this picture?

Maybe I should have attended the virtual conference – I might have got more content out of it.

7. Speaking of virtual, I felt that the virtual audience was left out in the cold, despite being ASAE members worth as much consideration as onsite members.

I’m not necessarily talking about from a content perspective – I didn’t pay much attention to what was offered for the virtual conference, since I was going to LA.    Given the lack of session time slots at the convention center, they probably got way more content than we did. But why the ridiculous price point when it’s obvious that those association execs that can’t come in person, probably can’t come because of financial reasons?

Read this post by Mike McCurry: Is ASAE’s 2010 Virtual Conference Pass a Value or a Virtual Rip-off? – there are great points raised in the comments especially.

Why not provide some virtual-only special content, like a live chat with various speakers? Why not embrace the remote audience as being part of the conference and have some instances where those of us who were in LA could talk to them? Wave at them from a general session, or talk via a Skype station in the lounges or something? This is 2010, you know. You can Facetime now. You can Ustream. You can Qik. (Look those up.) Kiki and I tried to do our part by having our live Sweetspot show – but I felt bad that this was the only “interaction” – which really was pretty much one way only, despite the chat box, because of a ten minute delay in the stream compared to what the audience was watching – that we onsite attendees could have with virtual attendees. We’re ALL part of the ASAE ecosystem.  There were lots of people watching the Twitter stream from afar too.  Why not be much more inclusive, provide content for everyone?  Entice people to come in person next time by virtue of all the great stuff they are hearing about and getting snippets of?

8. Enough with the Decision to… studies, already. I feel like members are being taken for a ride.

Apologies to those who work hard on these. It’s not your fault. But the latest one, Decision to Learn, seems even more ridiculous than ever. The big takeaway is that… wait for it…  members of an association are most likely to participate in that association’s educational offerings? Really? Wow. STOP THE PRESS.

As far as I can tell, the associations who take part in these studies are totally NOT representative of the industry as a whole – they tend to be the huge ones who would actually benefit from having research data from various studies. So please.  Do us a favor.  We all know this is just a profit center for ASAE – just be honest and market it as such. As in, “you want a study about something? We’ll do it for you for a fee and find other similar associations who are interested in the same topic.” There’s value in that!   Lots of associations would be happy to pay for that value.  Just don’t turn around and sell these books to individual ASAE members at $70 a pop under the pretense that these studies can teach us something.

9. I felt that member-generated activity is tolerated, not embraced.

Several hundred people participated in the awesome Flashmob - we attracted tons of people into the expo hall and the entire area came to a standstill – twice. [More about that in a later post, don't worry you'll get lots of details! Hoping to collect more videos of the crowd dancing, so far they are all of the main stage. If you have any video or pics please send me links!]

But… we had to beg for a column inch in the next day’s Daily Now.  Isn’t attracting members to the exhibit hall what ASAE wants?

Similarly, the YAP party was supposed to be listed in the program and on the YP page of the website – but despite permission having been granted it wasn’t listed anywhere.

News Flash for ASAE: several ASAE members told us the party (which was insanely awesome, just FYI) was the tipping point that pushed their decision to attend the meeting in LA. So for ASAE, that means the YAP party cost them exactly zero, but may have had a return of x times registration. Do the math.

Here’s a lesson: there is no such thing anymore as “unofficial” versus “official”member activity. We’re all part of the same community. We’re all building community and engagement on behalf of ASAE – for you, not for us. The point of YAP is to get young association professionals (including “young to the profession” and “young at heart”) more involved in ASAE. Get it?  We’re doing it for the love.  All we’d like in return is a little love back once in a while.  We’re feeling our love is unrequited, and if you’re not careful, one day we’ll take mom’s advice and go find other fish in the sea.

10. I thought the food was really shockingly bad.

OK, so this one is a throwaway – conference food is always bad.  I just needed a number 10!  Though I will say that I am not particularly picky, I like all kinds of food, and at the volunteer brunch and closing party especially, the food was literally inedible.  I hope they made up for it at the Food and Wine classic, but I never go to those because I resent having to pay more when I’ve already shelled out over a thousand dollars to be here, once you count flights, hotel, registration fee, taxis etc..

I’m not really sure how to end this post, but I just saw this tweet from Peggy and it kind of sums up what I’d like to happen overall with the annual meeting.  I wish it was more about us – about the association execs who are your members – and less about you, ASAE the faceless organization that wants our money and our time.

More about how we can ALL advance the industry – through great education, through investing in vendors and technologies that help us do our jobs better, through service opportunities, through volunteering (on councils and open volunteering), through showing the true face of a diverse industry.

More about how we can ALL share the love – through more collaboration, through more conversation, through more virtual content, through more parties, through more dancing…

What do others think about any of these points?  Has ASAE lost its mojo?

]]> http://www.socialfish.org/2010/08/has-asae-lost-its-mojo.html/feed 88 http://www.socialfish.org/2010/08/psst-open-community.html http://www.socialfish.org/2010/08/psst-open-community.html#comments Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:30:09 +0000 Lindy Dreyer http://www.socialfish.org/?p=4035

Maddie and I are very excited to announce the release date of our upcoming book, Open Community: a little book of big ideas for associations navigating the social web. It’s out on *drumroll* October 1! Sign up to get an email alert when it comes out.

Writing the book has been a real learning experience. We’ve been lucky to get feedback and encouragement from some of our favorite people, including Jamie Notter, Lisa Junker, Andy Sernovitz, Beth Kanter, Brian Solis, Rob Cottingham, and Olivier Blanchard. Thanks so much, guys.

Just for fun, we’re inviting all of our blog and Twitter friends to help us choose the cover of our book. There’s a poll below, and you can leave us comments about why you picked what you did. The cartoon is a rough draft by Rob Cottingham, of Noise to Signal fame–we’ve been working with him on several drawings that will appear in the book.
[Update: @mandydc pointed out a typo in the poll question, but I can't change it without wiping out votes, so I'm going to live by our rule "forget perfect" and just ask you to replace the word "booth" with "book." You're super smart, so I know you've got me covered. Thanks guys.]

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