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.

Personal Identity Management Takes a Major Step Forward

Facebook joins the OpenID movement!

Thanks to @jowyang for spreading the word announced yesterday that Facebook has thrown it's weight in with OpenID, joining Google, IBM, Microsoft, PayPal, VeriSign and Yahoo! on OpenID's board. I think this is great news, because getting the big players together is the first step in a long haul to helping make the social web more useful, trustworthy and important to the broader population.

My opinion might differ from others' a bit in terms of the importance of this first step - critical mass - in that I think a centralized login ID is only a prerequisite to the true impact of this movement, which is ultimately (multiple) personal identity management. What's the difference? Centralized login is a quantitative improvement - reducing the number of logins you have to manage across multiple platforms (and thus potentially improving security over them). It certainly is beneficial and will reduce barriers to joining multiple networks, but it's not the holy grail. The holy grail is being able to centrally own and manage your personal identities. In other words, having one identity which you use on Facebook and LiveJournal, and managing it through the same tools as you do your separate professional identity on LinkedIn and Business Exchange. OpenID does this really well, or might once they get the buy-in and support to build out what is now very basic functionality in this regard.

Expert Advice: Humble Thyself Before the Paradigm Shift

Got an exec breathing down your neck wanting to know the ROI on your social media budget while you scramble around trying to develop monetization schemes and explain why social network ad revenue is down? Don't show her this video. Instead, grab yourself a big cup of something steamy, sit down, and watch it yourself. Watch it to be reminded that behind the curtain of the social media revolution you are monetizing your career on, is a cultural paradigm shift so fundamental that there is absolutely no way an expert or anyone else today can know what the marketing plan of the future really looks like.

Watch the video while anthropologist Michael Wesch (KSU Asst. Prof) takes you on a hour-long insightful and entertaining tour of the dynamics of social networks' popularity through the example of YouTube. The social media maven will laugh but the true expert will see that behind the fun Dr. Wesch is explaining how the social revolution in communication (not media) is building new models of human interaction and even self-identity that promise to shift our definition of community as deeply as the shift from tribe to nation state did thousands of years ago, but along entirely new dimensions (he doesn't' go that far, but I do).

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And after you've watched the video - all the way to the end, past the silly teenagers and babies spawning viral fun on a global scale to where the crotchety old man reveals his many selves and the people cry and feel betrayed to where the man who lost his child talks about how YouTube helped him live again - reflect on your own social media experience that makes you so sure you're an expert (ever mindful that even experts can disagree).

Sex Proves Once Again We're Only Human - Even in Cyberspace

I'd tripped over this stat a few weeks ago, that Facebook has surpassed "sex" and "google" in Google searches, but it took a ClickZ article by Dave Evans for me to focus on why this was more than just titillating information for the geek in me that likes it when new technology succeeds.

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.]

The Psychology of Social Media - Some things Never Change

I've been harboring a theory for a while now that human beings don't change very much when they go online. We watch some of our communication behaviors change as we become addicted to various technologies (Twitter seems to the be the most annoying recent addition to this habit, though I'll admit I haven't tried it... see more on why below). But fundamentally, we use online tools to do the same things we do offline - kill time, learn, play, work. When it comes to social media, just like in the real world, we move between networks depending on which other friends are there, what they're doing and why we want to interact with them. If we're loyal to groups offline, we're probably loyal to them online. If we're fickle, well - we hop networks online too.

[Under the link I muse on about MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google's OpenSocial, Twitter, LiveJournal and Ning with more opinions about the psychology of the human species.]

Basic Social Media Etiquette

View all Member-to-Member.com posts on Social Media Etiquette.

Whether it's you, your executives or your members that need help moving into this brave new world of social media, everyone needs to learn the basics. Remember when email came out and people lost their jobs for flaming their boss and hitting the "reply all" button? Today, everyone knows the Don't Email When Angry and the Don't Write It If You Can't Defend It On National News rules of professional emailing (well, almost everyone).

What are the equivalent rules in the land of social networking?