Please join us for our Water Cooler chats, hosted in conjunction with Engage365, on FRIDAYS at 12 pm CST/1 pm EST. 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 discussed how people might enjoy some of ASAE’s Great Ideas conference virtually, if they couldn’t be there in person. We compared the Ustream and Qik iPhone apps, discovered that CoverItLive (our super awesome chat platform) is webcam enabled (yay!) but only for one person at a time (boo), and generally talked tech. View the replay for what ideas we came up with for some virtual content on the Great Ideas theme… We also gave one participant a whole bunch of great blogging advice. Check it out!

I would think we might talk about some takeaways from Great Ideas today – hope you’ll join us!

I’m back from ASAE’s Great Ideas Conference and have a lot of thoughts swirling around my head about what to include in a recap for you. Here’s a few quick links of the obvious stuff.

• Check out the full Twitter transcript in chronological order. I wanted to do a “#ideas10 in 140 characters” post pulling out my fave tweets over the last few days, but it got overwhelming and impossible – but skimming though this will give you a GREAT sense of what it was all about.  If the direct link doesn’t work after a while, go to What The Hashtag and search for #ideas10, then click “read the transcript” (dates were 3/7 – 3/10).
• Guy Kawasaki’s keynote on The Art of Innovation rocked the house.  And you can watch the whole thing at your leisure!  But if you don’t have time (even though trust me it’s well worth it), here’s Lynn Morton’s 2-minute rundown.
• Acronym, of course, has a whole bunch of posts from the conference for you to peruse.
• A few of us tried to record some stuff using Qik or Ustream but, while fun at the time, I have to say this didn’t work very well compared to using a good old Flip – mostly because it didn’t pick up sound adequately.  But maybe Todd Carpenter or Sterling Raphael will post links here if they taped anything worth sharing.
• Here’s the Flickr Pool complete with incriminating pictures.
• Here are four awesome Bisnow recaps.
• Dan Pink’s talk was also inspiring, and having had the luxury of reading Drive on the plane, I want to talk a bit more about what he said.

I’ve posted this video excerpt before, but it’s worth reposting to set the scene.

Two questions that can change your life from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.

The bulk of Dan’s keynote had to do with his take on the three elements of what motivates people: autonomy, mastery and purpose.

I’ll let you read the book to really get the details of these elements, but this little video speaks to the purpose piece, and that was a recurring theme in the conference, most notably with Kawasaki’s idea about “making mantra” – 2 or 3 words to define what we are about.  I saw a whole bunch of tweets throughout the three days from people thinking about what their association’s mantra might be (or what their individual “sentence” – per Pink – could be).

The mastery element, in my opinion, is something associations know very well how to encourage and promote – everything we do is about improving and developing the particular skills of a profession or practice.

But the piece (the “great idea” for me) that has really stuck in my mind is the idea of developing  autonomy. I don’t think this is something associations do at all well (if you think of it as being the antithesis of “we have always done it that way” or “best practices” or “not reinventing the wheel”)  but there’s no reason they shouldn’t.  I feel like everything Kawasaki talked about in his opening keynote, about entrepreneurship and innovation, came back to me very specifically when listening to Dan Pink talk about autonomy.  The obvious example of this in practice is Google’s 20% time (employees are allowed to spend 20% of their time on personal projects, which led to Google News and Gmail, among other big ideas).   Pink had other examples, and they all involved giving staff free time to come up with their own ways of doing things and then reincorporating the best of those ideas back into “official” work.

I made a note of my favorite quote from Pink’s book. I was hoping to quote this during my Truth and Authenticity session but I didn’t get a chance to…

Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement.

Holy awesome, Batman.  

Think about it.  Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement. I think we have mastery down (as a  process baked in to how we operate, anyway, I’m not saying we already know everything about everything we need to know). If we can define our clarity of purpose, through having a mantra or a sentence or however we want to do that, and then add the missing piece of allowing autonomy in the ways we let our stakeholders achieve that mantra, maybe then we’ll achieve the engagement we’re all craving.

Sounds like a great idea to me!

This is the first guest post by awesome nonprofit social media rockstar John Haydon.  John will be providing tactical tips here on SocialFishing on a monthly basis.  Can.Not.Wait.  Whoo hoo!

You’re curious how a Facebook Group can compliment your Page. Or, you may have a Group and want to “move your fans” over to your Facebook Page.

Many nonprofits find Facebook confusing so don’t get down on yourself if you are lost.

Pages, Groups and Profiles
Facebook created Pages, Groups and Profiles – three separate applications – to help individuals and organizations achieve three separate goals:

1. Create a presence for a business, brand or non-profit on Facebook (Facebook Pages).
2. Organize a group of people around a common issue or interest (Facebook Groups).
3. Create a home base on the web for individuals to express themselves and connect with others (Facebook Profiles).

Facebook Pages vs. Facebook Groups
We know that profiles are for individuals, but what’s the difference between Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups?

Facebook Pages

Facebook Pages are used to promote businesses, non-profits, celebrities and artists to Facebook users.

Facebook states that “only the official representative of an artist, business, or brand may create a Facebook Page.” In other words, Pages are intended to be an “official” web page for your organization on Facebook.

• Facebook Pages are indexed in search engines – increasing the likelihood of folks finding your organization through a Google search.
• A Page can have multiple administrators. This lightens the workload of maintaining a page (groups also allow for multiple admins).
• Analyze Traffic. Facebook Pages allows you to capture essential stats on Facebook fans.
• There are no limits to the number of fans you can have on a page.
• But, you need at least 25 fans to create a custom URL.
• Sending updates to all your fans at once is quick and easy. And fans receiving those messages can easily forward the message OR post the message to their Facebook Wall.
• Updates and wall posts can be targeted to specific subsets of Facebook fans.

Tips For Using Facebook Pages:

• You can add Facebook Applications like Video or Static FBML to enhance the experiences fans have with your Facebook Page (Groups don’t offer this option).
• Since each tab has its own URL, you can choose any of them as the landing Page for off-site promotion. You can also choose which tab to set as the default when users find your Facebook Page.
• Work your status! A frequently updated status with useful and interesting content keeps fans coming back.
• Pages now have the same multimedia functionality as the Wall tab on a user Profile – encourage posting!
• Encourage fans to “share” Notes or Photos with their friends or post to their Profile.
• Using the notes application, you can import an RSS feed to drive more traffic to your blog.
• Using Static FBML, you can include an email web form to capture subscribers.

Facebook Groups

Facebook Groups can be created by anyone interested in promoting and organizing people around a specific interests or cause. All members of a group have the ability to contribute content that appears on the Group’s wall – photos, videos, discussion threads.

• Active participation: Because members of the group actively contribute content and participate in informal but meaningful discussions, they are more likely to keep coming back.
• Groups come in three flavors: Open (anyone can join), Closed (group admin approves requests to join) and Secret (Only members and those invited know that the group exists).You can change the flavor of your group at anytime.
  • Warning: Secret Groups don’t allow you to send a second event invitation to the same person.

Tips For Using Facebook Groups:

• The Group name should make people want to join. Which name would make you join: “Let’s talk to Coca Cola about saving the World’s children” or “ColaLife“?
• Invite your raving fans to start a discussion on the group (you know who these people are, right?). They’ll feel a sense of pride and will likely invite new people to join the group.
• Upload photos and videos – encourage members to post these to their profile so that their friends can easily join the group.

What Facebook tip would you add?

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!

(photo credit)

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

(photo credit)

If you haven’t already, hop on over to Tony Rossell’s blog and follow the link to take the 2010 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Survey. Today and tomorrow are your last chance to participate. Last year’s survey produced an interesting snapshot of how association execs view their membership marketing effectiveness, including some interesting findings about which marketing channels are working the best for recruiting and renewing members. There are a few questions related to social media use. Last year’s findings were a bit bearish on using social media for membership marketing, for example…

“Of the respondents who reported using social media to recruit new members, 26.8% of those who used it reported a decline in new member acquisition compared to just 21% reporting a decline from all respondents. These groups also reported a higher likelihood to have renewal rates under 80%.

Why might some of the more passive channels be reported as less effective? Membership is what marketers call a “push” product. A push product must be proactively sold. So it is not surprising that highly targetable, proactive, and direct to customer methods are rated as the best channels for recruiting new members from this research.” – 2009 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Survey Report

I’m curious to see if the 2010 results will show any improvement in the way association execs view their efforts in that area. Any ideas why folks using social media to recruit members would see a decline? Does this suppose they stopped using other channels? I’d also wonder if they’re experimenting with social media because other channels are already declining…hmmm.

Check out this totally awesomesauce video by Joe Flowers of the National Association of Dental Plans, showing off some of the cool tools he uses in his association social media arsenal (more explanation from Joe here!). (Although, it has an embarrassing and unexpected bit showing all the places yours truly lives on the internet… no wonder I have no life! Ha.)

This video was a submission to the Sweetspot, in response to Kiki L’Italien’s request for the same. I’m going to take this opportunity to say, watch this, and send Kiki your version of this! What tools do you use? I LOVE this stuff. …*running off to check out nomee.com*