Engaging Your Audience --Tips From Huffington Post

A worthwhile video from WebProNews offers some tips on engaging your audience with social media techniques.

Huffington Post Shares Ways to Get an Audience Engaged

WebProNews had a few words with Huffington Post Chief Revenue Officer James Smith recently, and talked a little bit about what makes the social news site so popular. Why do you think the Huffington Post is so popular? The site logs over one million comments per month! Among the tips:
- polls
- images
- most popular stats (showing popular news stories/ how many comments)

Free, Fast, and Hot: Measuring Your Web and Social Media Footprint

Here is a list of free and paid tools from Dan Thornton for tracking Digital Marketing, with a particular focus on Social Media Marketing. Most of the standards are here. Of course, I'm a big fan of Google Analytics. Google insights for search is great as well. Try typing in keywords relevant to your association's core business.

A new one for me from Dan's page is Addict-o-matic. Tremedously fun. Enter your association name or acronym and see what pops up. How Sociable even gives you a brand metric. Free, fast and hot.

1 thing associations can learn from Facebook

Today Facebook asked me “What’s on your mind?” That question seems a bit confrontational. Why should I tell you?

OK, what’s on my mind is the topic of associations and online ad-hoc communities. I’m referring to online social media spaces that allow anyone to create their own community. Take Facebook Will Be Forced to Shutdown in 7 Days! Join and Save it! For example. An ad-hoc community on Facebook with 1,280,653 members See All to protest the new Facebook interface. By my count this is an ad-hoc group that has formed in less than a week to now comprise almost 1% of Facebook users. It will be interesting to see what happens next, especially in light of their recent change in TOS debacle. The TOS change spawned a similar user backlash and forced a clarification and return to the prior terms which said you owned your content. Facebook’s change to the TOS said Facebook had rights to your content forever, for whatever purpose, and even after you left Facebook. This was either a clumsily executed naked rights grab or the result of incompetent legal staff. We’ll never know which.

The interesting point here for associations is the ad-hoc community bit. Associations are fundamentally about community. Most associations offer some type of online community (community of practice, listserv, or more advanced social media space). However, in my experience, very few allow members the opportunity to create their own ad-hoc communities or interest groups within the association online environment. They typically offer a few communities based on membership interest areas. Creation of new communities is locked down and at the association’s discretion. This flows from the old association mother-ship model of top-down, controlled information flow.

What if an association allowed members to create their own ad-hoc communities? I posit:
* The number of communities would increase dramatically.
* Member to member connections would strengthen.
* The association would get advance info on odd topics of interest and trends. The edges are where all the interesting stuff happens.
* Communities of dissent would form.

That would't be all bad.

Email is Dead: Update

Doing some ego-surfing with the idea that my earlier post on "Note to Association Marketers-- Email is Dead" was perhaps the first reference to the end of email as a marketing channel. No such luck. A quick google search shows references to the death of email going back before 2002. OK. I'm not in the vanguard. A post in Social Media Today 9/17/08 The End of Email tells it better than I can--with reference to statistics. Social networks and trusted media are where it's at. If you are reading this for the first time from me, you are behind the curve.

3/16/09--Nielson reports that social media is now more popular than e-mail.

Note to Association Marketers—E-mail is Dead

Did you know people in their 20’s think e-mail is “old?"

This line from Stephanie Vance’s article Network Your Way to Advocacy Success—Online! Published in the November/December issue of The Association Forum of Chicagoland’s magazine Forum got me thinking.


Outside of work, 99.9% of the email that I get is spam. Granted, I have a couple of websites and domains so my spam bucket is fills daily with hundreds of unsolicited messages. The personal e-mails that were so much a part of my life have dwindled. New, richer communications channels have taken their place.

The messages that reach me, the conversations that I’m interested in, come largely through channels other than e-mail. These channels include social networks, message boards, blog comments, and listservs that I’ve chosen to subscribe to. This is my trusted communication network. I can grow it or reduce it.

Association marketers should pay attention. Marketing plans based on blast e-mails probably aren’t reaching as many customers as you think. There is still a place for traditional marketing activities, but if your association is still primarily cranking out postcards, flyers, and bulk e-mail – well, you are missing the party. And you are leaving money on the table. Associations are uniquely positioned to develop trusted channels and to leverage those channels for revenue through marketing in context and through community. More later.

Web 2.0 Tools for Associations

Social media and Web 2.0 tools are all the buzz in the association world. Rightly so. The rise of social networking sites threaten associations with disintermediation. The tools simultaneously offer associations that adopt them new ways to grow and strengthen their community of members.

The American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) is taking a leadership role in advancing the use of Web 2.0 tools and social media by associations. I'm a member and find value in my ASAE membership. Members get special access, but there is plenty of free stuff on their site. Their association wiki is open to view. Here's a link to their wiki page that provides a great introduction to Web 2.0 tools.

5 things associations can learn from Flickr

Associations that are exploring the use of Web 2.0 tools and social media would do well to take a look at the photo sharing site Flickr.

Flickr is, in their own words,” almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.” I started using Flickr in mid-2006, before Yahoo bought them. That makes me old skool. In the early days they were exactly what they said they were. They are still pretty good. When I joined Flickr here’s what I found:

1. Easy-They provide a very simple interface for uploading your photos.


2. Entry was cheap. They let me use it for free. The terms haven’t changed. Free users have a monthly upload limit and an overall data limit on how much you can store on their servers. I quickly upgraded to unlimited uploads and unlimited storage for a measly $25/yr. I now have over 300 gigabytes of photo files stored on Flickr and it still only costs me $25/yr!


3. Search tools- good search tools allow you to search member profiles, meta-tags,
   photo titles, descriptions, discussions, and more. This allowed me to find and connect with people who share my photographic interests. I happen to like the work of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander. A quick search and I find people who share my interests and I can see the work that they are doing.


4. Peer-to-peer communication- Once you find people that share your interests you can communicate with them, either publicly or privately.


5. Groups-I think this is one of the great things about Flickr. Anyone can create a group for photo sharing and discussion-- about anything-- in public or in private. I created a group around my interest in Robert Frank’s seminal work, The Americans. The group has 230 members from all around the world. I also created a group for photographs of Stuffed Animals Lashed to Truck Radiators. Believe it or not there are 24 members posting photos and geo-tagging sightings of this oddity. No niche is too small. I didn't have to ask permission.

What can your association learn from this? A lot I think. Flickr is just a platform. A pretty good one. It serves my purposes at present. Of course there are similar social media platforms: Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. They all function pretty much the same. They connect people. Their value is in their ability to connect people. It’s not about stuff they push at you.

Do I have any allegiance to Flickr? None at all. I’m not a Flickr evangelist (I hate that word in business context). Flickr has no mission. What keeps me paying my $25/yr to Flickr is the transaction cost of maintaining my connection to my friends.

So... what if your association showed Flickr’s commitment to fostering connections between its members, gave them the tools to share, and organized them under an idea that inspired them?