Member-to-Member

On Leadership

Jamie Notter accidentally started a meme on leadership for association executives which I've enjoyed reading. He didn't tag me but as I was reading people's entries, I realized that while working with executive teams, I've developed a few "themes" that - while grounded in my social media marketing view of the world - are applicable to organizational leadership more broadly. This advice is pertinent to commercial companies, non-profits and associations; it is targeted at CEOs and their direct reports but any leader should find it useful. Here are my three pieces of advice for leaders:

1. Lead Towards a Vision Impossible 
2. Try to Put Yourself Out of Business
3. Be the Best of Who You Are.

Web Sites Need Strategic Plans Too

I recently ran across a list serve request for a "Web Site Strategic Plan." I was happy to see the words "strategic" and "web" strung together like that so I pounced on it. My modified response below. I think this applies to any technology initiative regardless of the technologies it leverages, social or otherwise. Hope you find it useful. Note: this was for an association, so many of the examples are too.

Having written and implemented any number of web site plans for a wide variety of organizations, programs and products, I can tell you that your web site's strategic plan should be as unique as your organization. I agree strongly with [someone else's] recommendation to align your web plan with your organization's plan very closely and to put yourself through the rigor of a "business case" analysis which defines as precisely as possible what benefits (financial and otherwise) your effort will produce at what cost. There are two reasons to do this:

• you will be able to get executive and peer support more easily if you show them how their financial and personal support will help them accomplish their primary business objectives through a successful web initiative; and
• you will have more confidence in your own efforts and better understand how to make priority decisions about functionality, changing technology choices, budget etc., because you know your end game.

The place where I see web strategies often go wrong is in the imprecise statement of their objectives. It's easy to allow objectives to be too many and too broad. Of course we want to "serve our members" and "grow the membership base", but this gives little meaningful guidance to designers and marketers and results in expensive iterations of everything from coding to design. More precise objectives like "provide the membership with better networking opportunities" and "attract new members graduating from college and graduate school" are much more likely to produce effective web sites.

Here is a high-level Strategic Plan outline to get you started. Make it your own and you'll succeed.

Word of Mouth (Meme)

What fun! I got tagged to do a post on Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing - focusing on membership marketing for associations - by the Social Fish mavens, Maddie Grant and Lindy Dryer. They said it was supposed to be fun and not take a lot of work, so I admit I'm recycling a bit here and including non association examples, but it'll fit the bill and it gives me a soapbox to address the frequent association angst around the question Should we be on Facebook and LinkedIn?

On to the meme!

Word of mouth marketing is what happens when someone other than you talks about your organization, product or offering. There's a whole Word of Mouth Marketing Association that has some good definitional stuff. When I started in marketing (before you were born), WOM was a happy accident, something that happened because of some cool promo at a trade show worked better than expected or because a goofy or touching employee story that happened to hit the big press thanks to serendipity or an industrious PR person.

Now that social media is here, WOM is enjoying a revival for several reasons: 1) it's easy to design WOM campaigns that social tools can enable and 2) the speed of dialog with customers is so much faster (some would say more natural, being two-way and all) that marketers can adjust WOM campaigns on the fly to better hit the customer's sweet spot and 3) through the magic of technology, WOM is more trackable than ever before and thus can earn its way into an actual marketing plan. WOM has its dark side of course (*cough* Motrin and a bunch more), but for the most part it's a good thing.

How Will Business Socialize: Exploring the Social vs. Collaboration Conundrum

A CMO friend and I were having lunch and she asked me about Twitter*and whether I thought it was a decent solution for helping her sales teams communicate real time at conferences where they're trying to track down prospects and partners and such. I had to tell her "no" because Twitter is so open and she didn't want all her competitors seeing who their top prospects were on her sales teams' tweets. I knew it was just a matter of time before someone figured out how to capitalize on this opportunity, and sure enough I later tripped over Yammer, which appears to have jumped on this market opportunity to create private TwitYam networks. I've shot it off to my friend and hope her sales teams will soon be yammering away. Yammer makes me hopeful that we are now entering the phase of social tech where businesses will weigh in with some cash and legitimize and invest in our budding industry. That being said, I think it may be a rough transition because social tech is just really complicated.

Being old now, I've seen this cycle so many times in the communications space. I'm generalizing a bit here but new communications tech waves, from telephone/telex (ok, I'm not THAT old, but I started my career in telcom), email (I AM that old), SMS/txt, IM and now Tweets and LinkedIns - they all get frothy attention in the public network space where innovation thrives and viral usage can explode to prove the validity of the medium. But then they run smack into the business model problem.

Secrets to Social Networking Success: 7 Lessons from the Association Sector

As I wrote in my last post about providing real world value, I think the Association sector offers unique insight to how social technologies - social networking in particular - will be successful as it matures. As a result of attending ASAE's annual conference last month, I picked up a number of tips for helping social networking be successful. Many of these takeaways came from a great presentation by Jessica Medaille and Jennifer Ragan-Fore of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) on their Second Life initiative, which I referenced in my last post. I also garnered insight from presentations made by the American Society of Cataract & Refractive Surgery (ASCRS), the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), Risk and Insurance Management Society (RIMS) and several others.

From these examples, and from a variety of other sessions and conversations at the conference, here are my key takeaways on '7 secrets' to making a social networking initiative work among a group of already-connected-to-some-extent professionals.

The Value of 'Real World' Value - Social Network Lessons from the Association Sector

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.

Branding in the Era of Social Media

Pundits and hacks alike have been pondering the impact of social media on the mysterious yet powerful discipline of Branding. I am no different and am cooking on a truly brilliant theory of my own (really, I am - stay tuned) about this multifaceted subject. But before I get to brilliance, I wanted to point to a dialog going on among ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership members on its marketing list serve because - thanks to Ben Martin and his insightful blog response to the discussion - it illustrates a specific and yet important example of what modern 'brand police' are having to deal with.

Associations: Leadership and Missed Opportunities in Social Media

"Why would I want to read blogs and learn about what some high schooler had for breakfast?"

I've heard this too many times from professional colleagues who seem to take Andrew Keen's view in The Cult of the Amateur, that all that blathering from anyone who wants to speak isn't necessarily a good thing. And as those of us who watch social media know, organizations far and wide have responded to the scary no-one's-in-control reality first surfaced by the Cluetrain Manifesto (1999) with trepidation and concern. [Cluetrain Wakeup Message to Organizations: No organization or individual is in control of their marketing conversation anymore now that customers, employees and whackos can blather very loudly in cyberspace and can influence anyone who likes what they have to say, regardless of its veracity or tact.]

Despite their hesitation, however, anecdotal evidence in my corner of the world points to the fact that organizations are beginning to experiment with models for how to move beyond the "control paranoia" to leverage the power of social media for their stakeholders. Nowhere does the potential for social media seem as great as in the marketplace for trade and professional associations, yet association executives are generally as conservative, if not more so, than other business execs when it comes to their comfort zone on sharing the megaphone. And it's for this reason that I give ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership, credit for helping take a leadership position with their members to help them figure it out. This month's ASAE monthly magazine includes a special Social Media supplement which has some excellent articles, including a cover story article by Keen himself.

[In the rest of the article (1722 words) I discuss Keen's article and look at what Associations are doing (and not doing) in social media adoption.]