Good news! Successful social networking among trade and professional associations demonstrate that fundamental principals of business are thriving and that despite my periodic doubts, people still value value. Even better, if you're me, after studying several specific initiatives and talking to lots of people I have uncovered what I think is the pithy success formula for social networking success: enable something virtually which cannot be fully achieved in the real world, and ensure that it has 'real world value' to your participant base. We talk a lot about social networking lacking ROI, but where it delivers real world value, there is strong potential for ROI.
I follow the association sector's adoption and use of social media because I think the association sector is the perfect petri dish for B2B social media adoption since association members already value their strong and multilayered business communities in the real world, many of which are ripe for migration or expansion online. To explore this further, I attended the ASAE & The Center's annual conference in San Diego last month in order to get the pulse of how social media is working in this sector. I paid special attention to how these new strategies were integrated into their marketing efforts. My takeaway is that the sector's involvement is still largely experimental but that social media and networking is growing among associations overall and that there are several very noteworthy implementations that have a lot to teach us.
It was clear from the get-go at the conference (which was huge with over 5,000 participants) that ASAE was making a commitment to educate its membership of trade and professional association executives about social media. Much of this was due to the efforts of the Young Association Professionals (YAP) group that is doing some great work promoting and tracking the sector's adoption of new technologies. Some of the most active YAP members, Ben Martin and Lindy Dreyer - recently of SocialFish - also co-authored a study on association usage of social technologies. You can read the executive summary yourself but the surprising takeaway for me in the results is that more associations are experimenting with social networking (31%) than were heavily into blogging (24%). While I think there are many reasons for this, including the fact that the the majority of this activity is on LinkedIn and Facebook, which is a lower resource commitment than actually supporting your own blog or social network, it speaks to the fact that associations inherently understand the value in networking because it is the core of their value proposition to their members.
There's more to their interest than simple member services, however; many are participating out of fear as well, having experienced lower engagement and membership trends from young professionals over the past few years. Even membership trends are only part of their concern as some associations are experiencing direct competition from disenfranchised members (and non members) who are using social networking as replacements for traditional association involvement. This last fact scares sector leaders quite a bit, as it should, because it threatens the established business model most associations are built upon (i.e., member dues). To make it even more frightening, a few forward thinkers in the sector are predicting that the trade association of the future will have no dues structure but rely on discreet revenue generating offerings such as conferences, publications, research etc. Even if this extreme case does not come to pass for the majority of associations in the short term, there is clear pressure on association executives to evolve their historic business model in order to compete with Free.
For all the buzz and energy around this subject at the conference, though, there were relatively few examples of major initiatives to implement social networks within associations (as opposed to experimenting on Facebook and LinkedIn). This is understandable as such initiatives take time to implement and refine, but two examples did catch my attention, both for their creativity and for the 'lessons learned' that came out of them. These interesting initiatives were rolled out by the American Society of Cataract & Refractive Surgery (ASCRS) and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE).
A couple of things were interesting about the ASCRS experience. First, by implementing a social network (EyeSpaceMD) that allows member ophthamologists to discuss photo and video of interesting surgical cases, ASCRS tapped into a "killer app" enabling their membership to explore professional issues on a scale they could never achieve in the real world. These global multimedia member discussions not only help the association achieve its core education and networking mission, but it gives individual members a starring role in content creation and peer-to-peer education that enriches their professional development as they engage in their own medical practices.
Second, the association is gaining something more than mission accomplishment out of this initiative, while providing a valuable service to existing members they are also appealing to a whole new market segment of 10,000+ ophthamologists in the developing world that they'd never been able to reach before. These doctors cannot afford to attend expensive conferences in the US and so previously simply did not participate or join the association. Now, through EyeSpaceMD ASCRS is attracting new members, many of whom are bringing unusual and interesting challenges not frequently observed in developed countries to the global discussion. This enriched global exchange of new and varied medical case information in the virtual world is simply impossible in the real world. ASCRS provided the technical infrastructure for virtual interactions and the members provide each other with content and networking which has tangible real world benefit. While it seems to be early to quantify a specific ROI on this effort, there is no question that delivered a solid business value to ASCRS in opening up an entirely new market segment for the organization to expand into.
ISTE's experience setting up shop in Second Life was equally interesting in how their initiative appealed to needs that were not - and arguably could not - be met in the real world. When ISTE started its Second Life initiative in 2006 they planned to appeal to younger members and prospects looking for professional development opportunities. What they also tapped into was an unmet need for members of all ages, who spent their days isolated in the classroom with children and youth, to socialize and network with peers in their off hours. Sensing and responding to this need the association began sponsoring social mixer events along with professional development opportunities and it was so successful that they've grown their Second Life membership to 3,000 (15% of their total membership) as well as attracted a cadre of 45 virtual volunteer "docents" in the Second Life world to meet, greet and network for them. ISTE's Second Life initiative was part of a larger and very successful membership drive which grew their member base by 54% over two years.
Most of us who are proponents of social marketing have always promoted it as a complement to real world efforts, and this is as it should be since social networking adoption is far from ubiquitous. What is so interesting to me about the experience of these two professional associations, however, is how it demonstrates that even as a complement strategy, social media efforts still need to provide unique value - unique to their audience and to their media. That value must manifest itself somehow in the real world, because at the end of the day the real world is where we all live. As we early adopters struggle with social media fatigue we must realize that to woo the rest of the world in to join us, it is only real world value that will bring them in. Real world value creation is the fundamental rule of business and I'm glad to see that just because we've happened on another cool technology, the basic rule still stands. Call me old fashioned (or old, that would fit too), but I find comfort in this fact.
Also, call me refreshed. I took the summer "off" from a bunch of stuff, including blogging, and feel all the better for it. Hope everyone else had a great time in the real world too.
(Note: My next post will delve into seven specific tips for making social networks implementations successful, based on the learnings from ASCRS, ISTE and more. Stay tuned and subscribe to this blog's feed or email delivery option.)
