The easiest blog tool in the world

Always wanted to try your hand at blogging but feel a bit intimidated? Try this. Posterous is the easiest blog tool EVER. No sign up, no login, nothing. Just email text, pictures, links, videos, whatever to post@posterous.com.

Et voila! Your blog is now at http://yourname.posterous.com.

Here's how it works.

A perfect way to get your feet wet, methinks.

Here come the "Anti-preneurs"

Dave Webb asked me and several others via Twitter to comment on his post, "Spin on Cause Marketing Strategy Stirs Controversy", about a recent Business Week article, Meet the Anti-preneurs. The story, about a new style of small business owners who are against globalization, advertising and corporate America, spawned a whole bunch of comments. Dave Webb asked, "is this type of market hypocritical and disingenuous or transparent and genuine?"

Here's what I answered, in my comment on his blog.

"Dave, thanks for pointing me to this discussion! What I find really funny about the whole hoo-ha, and what many commenters on the article are reacting against, is that this type of cause-related "anti-marketing" marketing, is just another kind of marketing. I think you are right that the "anti-preneur" label is misleading and is actually irrelevant to the subject, which is using causes or politics to sell something. This can fall under what Rohit Bhargava calls "un-whatever marketing" (positioning your brand as the opposite of something else) OR "karmic marketing" (doing good with your brand), but it's all marketing. When it works, it's because it's genuinely motivated. If not, the web 2.0 world will see right through it. Personally, I see it all as a very Gen-X style of doing things, where you can have different layers of meaning to what you are doing - i.e. selling something, building a business, making money, advancing a cause, bettering the world. For associations and non-profits, this is actually a very good model because non-profits are actually NOT not-for-profit, they have to make a living and stay in business like everybody else, but they are uncomfortable with that paradox."

What do you think of it all? Is this kind of cause-related anti-marketing marketing just spin? Or could it be a very useful way for associations to market their causes or services?

Lindy Dreyer joins PITV

I am SO EXCITED. After I was invited to become executive producer of Principled Innovation TV, and put a call out for interested videophiles to contact me, I got several people interested and the first one all set up and ready to go is our very own Lindy Dreyer, she of the awesome Association Marketing Springboard blog. A super smart lady with a wee voice, big ideas and wicked sense of humor, she's going to be awesome on PITV. Here's her first video from her new show, Lindy's Learning Labs. (Get it? Maddie's Musings, Lindy's Learning Labs.... yeah, yeah, I know, silly but it works.) Watch it!

And while I'm at it, I might as well give you my usual run down of some of the latest videos on PITV, in case you missed them. It's been a while since my last summary, so there's a whole ton of good stuff here!

- Peter Corbett on the Rise of Social Media
- Social Media in Plain English from our friends at Common Craft
- Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, explains how he came up with the concept
- Focus on a Non-Profit - Idealist.org
- cool Edupunk video
- Dr Vinton Cerf of Google explains how brands can leverage social media
- YouTube sets up a NonProfit Channel
- Jeff Gordinier, editor of Details magazine, discusses his book, Gen X Saves the World
- Clay Shirky on Web 2.0
- Shel Israel interviews KD Paine
- Twitter Whore
- CBS News tries to "get" Twitter
- a cool widget for searching YouTube videos by keyword (go ahead, test it!)
- David Lynch on inspiration
- Help support the non-profit 1-800-SUICIDE hotline
- Geoff Livingston on Social Media 101

And finally, Matt's back! Matt Baehr, regular contributor to PITV, announces his return after a brief hiatus welcoming new baby Maddie (great name btw) into the world.

And, just so you know, I have a PITV headline animator widget over there on my sidebar so you can always see the latest posts and jump right there.

So go on. It's almost the weekend. Go watch some vids! Enjoy!

Bang, bang, bang the drum

Only four days left (including today) to take the Social Tech Survey. I took it the other day and it didn't take me that long, maybe 10-15 minutes. I also discovered my association is actually using a lot more social media than I thought. 'Course, that's because I like to experiment with stuff... : )

Go on, do it now. I want to see the results! Last I heard, over a week ago, several hundred associations had already taken part. How awesome is that!!

The market for something to believe in is infinite.

Those of you who know me or have met me know that I have a fondness for Hugh McLeod's gapingvoid "social object" business cards, which you can order so they show your contact info on one side and a cartoon of your choice on the other. So it is a really weird coincidence that the other day I realized that I had almost run out of my old ones, so I went and ordered new ones, which happened to have this same cartoon which I kept coming back to when I was trying to decide what to get. (I did waver between this one and the one that says "Badass Blogger Chick" - maybe I'll get that one next time). Anyway, the coincidental aspect of it is that Hugh posted it on his blog yesterday, along with a fairly lengthy (for him) blog post about finding your path in life, and finding meaning in that path, even when you somewhat arbitrarily choose one path over another, and going on a big adventure, and reminding yourself of the simple things that matter.

And it just so happens that things feel like they are changing for me lately. I've been asked to speak to associations about social media (more than one, proving the first time wasn't a fluke!); I am getting more and more recognition for this blog (which really did start out like a diary that I was writing to myself and 4-5 blogger friends whose opinions I valued immensely and still do); this blog is now about to be syndicated (by NewsTex); I am finding that I am no longer a "newbie" (even though I still feel like one all the time) - that I really do know stuff, and am beginning to realize I can now start a new phase of helping others navigate these issues.
So anyway. This is all really just to say that this cartoon (and Hugh's post about it) has now proved to be a "marker" of sorts for me, a turning point, and I want to say to everybody that I appreciate so much that you read this blog, and that I am now really going to be available and to put myself out there to help any associations who need it to start learning how to listen and how to join the conversation. Please don't hesitate to contact me anytime. My info is on my "about me" page which you can reach by clicking on my license plate image on the sidebar.

As always, thank you for joining the conversation with me.

Must tell you about Crazy Egg.

Check out Crazy Egg.

It's an amazing analytics application that can help you analyze your website or blog. The coolest thing is a heat map that shows you where on your homepage (for example) people click. The "confetti" option shows you individual clicks. The overlay shows you specifics on each individual element of your page. And, you can get a list of where the clicks come from. Archive all your reports or get them via RSS. All of that is the free stuff - upgrade and you get to share your data with others (eg in your organization), and get live reports.

Here's how it works.

So how would you use this?

Well, when I ran a week-long test on my blog home page, it enabled me to see how many people visited the page over that time frame. I could see that it looks like I use a good number of links, e.g. not too many, because people click on them regularly. Lots of people click on my license plate picture to get to my "about me" page - which is great because I took that (and my "subscribe" links) off the sidebar and into a completely new page, which could have been a mistake. And it showed me which of my widgets people actually click on and which they don't. (And y'all know how much I love widgets! I like to change them up all the time and this can help me keep them fresh.) My new blogroll with live rss links to my favorite bloggers is a big hit, which means others are getting traffic from me (yay!). PITV is getting traffic from my site. People are looking at archived posts, are joining YAP, are checking out my JOTT feeds.

Just think how useful it could be for your association's home page. It could help you see if people are reading your association blog and clicking on links, but it could do way more than that. Have a fundraising module? It could help you figure out if anyone's clicking on it, and if not, you could stop wasting time with it and try moving it somewhere more prominent or doing something new. Have a newsroom? See how popular it is. Have a conference section? If everyone's going straight there, maybe it's time to have a full conference website. These are just a couple of ideas off the top of my head, but seriously, this app is the bee's knees. Try it and see for yourself!

FACT: Using social media will help you attract Millennials.

I was invited to speak about social media to the Business and Professional Women's Foundation's National Employer Summit last week, at which they brought together "leading employers and innovative workplace strategists to discuss and learn about pioneering practices".

The summit concentrated on issues of diversity, generational differences, disability issues, and flexible working practices. Interestingly for me, as I gave my little spiel and spoke one by one to four "round tables" of attendees, the questions were not, as I expected (and had been asked to discuss), about how to successfully integrate social media within an organization's internal working practices (like staff IM'ing each other instead of being blocked from it). Instead, a lot of people wanted to know how you manage the "maintenance" of your social media initiatives once you get started - how you allocate staff time, how you know how often to post to a company blog, how you can (or should) maintain "office hours" in a space where people expect immediate responses... but the idea that everyone wants to get into the social space was a given. Just a matter of time.

Which is great!

But something else happened, which really sparked my interest and that of two BPW board members sitting at my last table. We were sitting with a few other people, including the only Millennial in the room - a student from the University of Maryland. I asked my starter question, "Is anyone using social media personally or through your organizations, are you on Facebook or LinkedIn, for example?" and the young woman suddenly got really animated, telling everyone about how they could attract her generation to events like these. She said, instead of a dry brochure with lots of words, post a video! Something with moving pictures. Show us how we can benefit by meeting others like us. Post your event on Facebook! We have short attention spans. Jazz it up! And the killer quote: "If you had only done this kind of thing, there would be 100 Millennials in this room instead of just one."

The two board members were rapt with attention. They said they were having trouble attracting younger people and had not known why, despite "early careerists" being one of their SPECIFIC stakeholder groups. At the end of the session, when the attendees were asked to shout out some takeaways, one of those directors stood up and said she had just had an epiphany, had just seen someone completely come out of their shell and had seen what topic made it happen. And she was going to see how they could learn from that and embrace social media for their organization.

AWESOME.

The whole thing reminded me of a really good session on Young Professionals at the ASAE Marketing and Membership Conference. I dug out my notes:

- do your promotional materials speak to young professionals?
- is it easy to sign up to your events?
- do you offer student discounts?
- do you have photos of younger people on your website?
- do you have any content that is from a young professional's point of view? Anything about issues related to young professionals? Is scientific content consistent with a young professional's level of knowledge?

and...

- it's hard to jump in to networking when you are new to the profession.
- put your leadership and YP's in the same room - sends a message that they are a priority for the organization.
- are your leaders on Facebook? Great way for them to interact directly with YP's.
- try a case study - content (blog, articles etc) about a YP's experience of the organization
- YP's may affiliate before joining - make it easy.
- enforce term limits so new blood can get on committees. Create opportunities for them.

The session handouts are posted on the YAP Facebook site. Of course, I can't do a post on young professionals without mentioning YAP, a project I started with uber-bloggers Lindy Dreyer, Jamie Notter and supercool Millennial Lauren Wolfe. We are also on LinkedIn, @yapstar on Twitter. In case you don't know, YAP (Young Association Professionals) is a network for supporting all young professionals, whether they are young in age or new to association management or just young at heart, and for helping empower YP's to be strategic thinkers and the next generation of association leaders. And, of course, the "social" is just as important as the "network", so there is a support aspect to the group for anyone traveling somewhere they don't know anyone, where they would be able to have a fellow YAPper to show them around or grab a bite with. The group is also a sandbox for experimenting and innovating with social media, and we have lots of fabulous things planned, which will be announced soon. Our next YAPpy hour is July 1 in Arlington. Anyone is welcome.

Technology enables community, community enables engagement.

Friday Fun: This is so cool

Image via WikipediaCheck this out.

Tag Galaxy is a Flickr-based mashup where you input a tag, say "association", and it first shows you a bunch of "planets" with your tag and related tags. Then you can click on any of the planets, zoom in to see a whole raft pf photos, rotate each planet, spin the whole galaxy around, zoom in some more...

It really has no point other than to search for tags in Flickr, which you can do, well, in Flickr, but it's a great way to waste time and not do any work. Especially when you put in tags like "disco", "Dc United", "Chicago", and anything else totally unrelated to work... ; )

Meet the Queen of Social Media Measurement: KD Paine

As I mentioned in my post about BlogPotomac, I wanted to reserve a post specifically to talk about KD Paine, one of the best speakers at the conference. She has a company which has been helping organizations learn how to measure and monitor social media for over a decade - since before there existed the term "social media"! She has written a book on the subject, Measuring Public Relationships -- The Data-Driven Communicator's Guide to Success.

She also has a blog. Here are a couple of posts from it that I thought you might find interesting:

- In The M Word in Social Media, she describes how this is, per Jeremiah Owyang, the year of measurement. BUT, it's not just about measuring sales.

"...most organizations can't articulate what it is that they want to achieve. So my suggestion is pick one:
1. Improve relationships with my customers/employees (Metric: Improvement in Relationship Scores)
2. Generate traffic to a web site (Metric: Web Analytic improvement)
3. Persuade someone to do something (Metric: Increased donations, pledges etc.)"

- Here's her summary of her Blogpotomac presentation. You'll see why I thought it was packed full of good stuff.

- I really like this - KD proposes a new un-standard for social media measurement. "There can be no standard because there is no standard goal for "communications." Yes, there may have been a standard way to count eyeballs in print and television, (and the accuracy of that can be debated) but just reaching eyeballs is seldom the goal for a good strategic communications program, and the goal always drives the selection of your measurement tool."

This lady is cool, is a really engaging speaker, and is just the kind of person the association industry needs to bridge the gap and show us the way.

Here's a video of her being interviewed by Shel Israel on FastCompany.TV. I'll post this over on PITV too for completeness.

Vanity Fair on the History of the Internet and the World and Everything

Vanity Fair has a totally awesome oral history of the internet. (Although their cover pic of Angelina makes her look totally weird and unattractive).

"Millions of words—multiplied and sent forth by the technology itself—have been written on the world-changing significance of the Internet, for good or ill, and the point hardly needs belaboring. Surprisingly, few books have been written that cover the full history of the Internet, from progenitors such as Vannevar Bush and J. C. R. Licklider up through the entrepreneurial age of our own times. Not many people recall that the first impetus for what became the technology of the Internet had its origins in Cold War theorizing about nuclear warfare.

To observe this year’s twin anniversaries, Vanity Fair set out to do something that has never been done: to compile an oral history, speaking with scores of people involved in every stage of the Internet’s development, from the 1950s onward. From more than 100 hours of interviews we have distilled and edited their words into a concise narrative of the past half-century—a history of the Internet in the words of the people who made it."

Check it out. Thanks to the Buzz Bin for the pointer!

On innovation and leadership

Nina Simon over at the Museum 2.0 blog has a wonderful post on "Innovation, Chaos, and Leadership". You really must read the whole thing - the lady wields a mean pen! But she's basically talking about how we historically view innovation as a trait of leadership - the CEO as visionary. She describes the inherent problem at the heart of this cliche - where "many of the characteristics of innovation--flexibility, risk-taking, chaos, failure--are highly threatening to staff when they are embodied by top management". Which means that structures must be put in place where innovation is encouraged lower down in the ranks - "Managers and CEOs need to provide security and give staff confidence that risk-taking will not count against them." Associations, like museums, are not places where instability and innovation are welcomed - unlike, Nina says, tech startups, for example, where the element of risk is expected.

So, counterintuitively, a protective structure must be in place for innovation to happen - stability for chaos. But she says that's not the most important thing. Her final point is this:

"...managers and especially CEOs need to step back from being innovators themselves. I refer to these leaders in their ideal form as "benevolent visionaries"--people who want to encourage new ideas but are willing to create the conditions for staff to generate them rather than creating the ideas themselves. This is really hard. It means going to bat with funders and boards for ideas and experiments that are not your own. It means stepping back from the "thought leader" role and into a service role: service to staff, comparable to service to board and mission. But the potential benefits are enormous. When leaders' passion for their museums goes towards supporting structures for others to innovate, identifying and granting opportunities for limited chaos, hopefully institutions can grow more flexibly--and more confidently--than ones in which the CEO is the sole owner of new ideas.

Is it harder for a CEO to be an innovator or a service person? Is it harder for top management to risk the institution or to empower junior staff to risk small projects? A lot of this comes down to ego, not change or risk. And I don't have an answer for how to innovate that. Do you?"

Now I am looking at this from the point of view of a second-level association executive, but I think there is a pretty simple solution, embodied in the concept of beta-testing, which I talk about a lot. If small risks are encompassed in all projects, and outcomes adjusted accordingly, there can be a culture of innovation inherent throughout an organization. The trick is to not "risk the farm" on unproven ideas - but to encourage lots of small risks. Some may fail, but the concrete costs will hopefully be made up with those that succeed. Of course Nina thinks it's not about risk taking - in terms of the ego of the CEO, of course that depends on the individual, but the "CEO as broker of ideas" is not a new concept in the association industry and this would be one way to start.

"Fish Where the Fish Are"... Takeaways from BlogPotomac

Had a REALLY GREAT time at BlogPotomac, a Social Media Marketing conference for bloggers organized by Livingston Communications (you may have heard of their blog, the Buzz Bin, linked later in this post). Before everything gets superseded by the superhectic streams of my normal work and life, I thought I would try and write down some takeaways for you.

First things first. The awesome thing about being in a room full of bloggers and techy 2.0 enthusiasts was that everyone was Twittering (here's the Summize stream, and here's the tweme), a million pictures were taken and uploaded to Flickr while we were there, Jonny Goldstein took visual notes, the conference was streamed live by Ustream (although I heard the quality was not too good - no link as it's now off air (obviously)). Some of the speakers' presentations were instantly up on Youtube (Here's the opening speaker Lionel Menchaca of Dell), Jimmy of East Coast Blogging already has an Animoto video up, and generally there was loads of backchannel commentary which was all openly part of the experience. I think this is the way conferences should be now - with an understanding that there is a realtime social media layer of experience that will happen more and more and should be embraced.

The conference was described as an "unconference" - which is not exactly accurate, however it refreshingly had NO POWERPOINT AT ALL. Yay!! There were seven speakers, which each spoke for maybe ten or fifteen minutes then opened up the floor to questions and discussions. There was a great facilitator, Josh Hallett (who founded the first version of this conference in Orlando), who was really good at keeping the conversation going when there was a lull in questions (bloggers do generally like to hide behind their computer screens, I would say, we are not necessarily the most extroverted types!)

I'm not going to go into detail on each speaker, but I will mention a few. There was a fascinating conversation with Dan Beyers of the Washington Post, which is still clearly struggling with how to navigate between its "old media" sense of professional hierarchy and entitlement to "real" news and its buy-in to "new media" vehicles which is what its audience wants and which is taking place with or without the paper. The Post does have a blog, and as I happened to be in the middle of reading Chapter 3 ("Everyone is a Media Outlet") of Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody, a good recap of how the traditional news media industry was completely caught short by the explosion of new media, I found it really interesting that they have still not figured this all out, beyond making their content "shareable and embedable"(per a comment from Helen Mosher). A great question was asked by Jared Goralnick about how local bloggers can be more directly involved in supporting our local paper and stories, when there is no way to link to our blogs in the Post blog's comments, for example. Dan didn't have a good answer. I kinda felt sorry for him, in a way, in his self-representation of the traditionalist with one foot in obsolescence - although it does not have to be that way, at all.

Another fantastic speaker was Maggie Fox, CEO of Social Media Group. Her agency helps businesses dive into web 2.0, so she really knew what she was talking about. She said, ask yourself these questions: "1) Who do we want to talk to? (Where are they? Where are they talking to each other? What are they talking about? What kind of technology are they using?) and 2) What are your business objectives? These need to be clear. She talked about the death of the notion of the "campaign" - in terms of which people still make the mistake of working - where there is a set time frame. We are now looking at a conversation, which may, can and should take an undefined and long amount of time, not just x number of months or until the money runs out. She mentioned the 1:10:90 rule, and said that one possible metric was that 1% of your measurable web traffic was how many commenters or content creators a company should have. She was asked about Twitter, and described how an organization could use it like a "bot" to push out content only, which would not be expected to necessarily reply to questions even though it would monitor the responses, or it could have a real persona, where someone would be willing to have a conversation with those who spoke to them. Aaron Brazell of technosailor fame had the room all abuzz when he asked the question, "Twitter or Friendfeed"? but Maggie was fairly noncontroversial when she said she preferred Twitter for the moment. (Nobody really gets Friendfeed yet, apart from as an aggregator - more on that in a later post).

Here's some video of her introductory comments (skip to when she starts talking).



Jeremy Pepper spoke next; I think he was a PR guy. He said you should always ask "why?" (as in, "we want to have a blog" - "why?") Pretty obvious stuff, for this crowd. He also said you had to sell the idea of social media internally, to get buy-in first before you can engage externally. I found it interesting that he got the least number of questions from the audience. I thought if traditional PR is about crafting your corporate message then pushing out via media outlets, then clearly PR is dead. I used to work in PR - never again, I tell you. It was horrible. Moving right along...

Frank Gruber of Somewhat Frank came on stage after lunch. (My blog title credit goes to him. I plan to use that a lot!) Bad speaker, but nice eye candy (I am sure he would not mind me saying that, we're all among friends here). He was cool, anyway, because he asked about all the shiny new tools we all like to talk about. He then kindly provided a list on his blog here, so I don't need to list them. Although, Lindy and I had to laugh, because someone asked what he would do if someone gave him a pot of money to create a new tool. Ummm, honey - that's exactly what he does already. He's AOL's product development guy!! We all want to BE him. I'll tell you though, despite his discomfort, he gamely tried to answer the question by saying something vague about some photography tool he'd come up with, because he loves taking pictures. I'll tell you, if you gave me a pot of money to come up with a new tool, I'd have a whole ton of ideas. Just one I keep banging on about is a Brightkite-like GPS-enabled way to keep track of your mileage. It takes me about four hours to do a month's worth of expenses, just because I have to go and figure out what meetings I attended, then dig up addresses of places and plug them into Google Maps and remember if I was coming from the office or home and if I went home after or back to work or what. There MUST be a better way!! Anyway. I digress.

KD Paine spoke next, about social media measurement and metrics. She said, "measurement" is NOT just "monitoring". I won't say too much here because I want to talk to her more, she was an AWESOME speaker and I think if she could come and speak to ASAE that would be just what we need. Associations are desperate for knowledge of how to measure the ROI of social media. She would rock as a speaker for Great Ideas, for example (ASAE take note!) - but in the meantime, I hereby reserve a full blog post to her ideas for later.

Finally, Kami Huyse spoke about ethics. The bar opened just before her talk, so I don't think too many people paid attention at first, but she did eventually get the crowd going into a full fledged boxing match over the subject. She mentioned that WOMMA has a good code of ethics, which is boiled down to this: you must have 1) honesty of relationships, 2) honesty of identity, and 3) honestly of opinion. The subsequent arguing was about whether people stealing your content by scraping your blog was ethical or not - and I lost interest. I feel that I have a duty to myself to be honest, but I am Gen-X and I (typically for my generation) do not trust any media, whether it's "big"media or other bloggers, unless I know them personally. Scraped content still sends people back to the source, I think... Someone had a good comment that the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has a good downloadable resources on legal rights of bloggers (what constitutes "fair use", and that kind of thing).

And that was that!! We all headed out for a drink afterwards. A ton of stuff to think about. And as usual, the best takeaway was the wonderful bloggers I met for the first time, some of whom I had been following on Twitter. I'll mention four: I plan to start reading their blogs if I haven't subscribed already, and hope you enjoy them too.

Qui Diaz - @beautifulthangs on Twitter - her blog is Evange.LIST, "social media for social causes". We need to get her involved in the association space soon.
Jennifer Berk - @jcberk - Information Squid, "Better communication through technology".
Joe Loong -@joelogon - Dumb Things I have Done Lately - met him briefly but had a wicked sense of humor!
Andre Blackman - @mindofandre -Pulse and Signal - a look at the intersection of health and technology".

These are just a few of the many great people in the room and just a few of those I met and hope to see again. It was a real privilege to be part of it and I think these takeaways and more will feed my brain for quite a while yet. Can't wait for next year, and can't wait to see how far we will have come by then... and if we haven't, we will only have ourselves to blame.

Too many Chiefs...

I was reading an interesting article in the McKinsey Quarterly: How chief strategy officers think about their role: A Roundtable by Renee Dye. You have to be subscribed to read the whole thing, but the link is here. I was laughing to myself while reading the thing, because each of the panelists basically contradict each other continuously. Here's a good summary paragraph from the very beginning of the article, which reading between the lines, sounds a lot more diplomatic than the conversation probably was. I may be making that up, maybe it was more good natured and professional than I pictured it (like cats in a sack) - but anyway here goes:

"Some of the panelists say that they have one foot in the corporate suite and the other deep in the business units. Others believe that while communication with the business units is very important, a CSO’s primary concern is the development of high-level strategy. In that capacity, CSOs grapple with the challenge of balancing short- and long-term goals: handling the multifaceted demands of an increasingly global business environment, they strive to focus on growth without losing sight of productivity. All panel members agree that a close relationship with the CEO is vital for instigating change, but they voice different views on other issues, such as how to interact with the finance function."

So I was mulling this all over and thinking about all that in the context of maybe writing one of my usual posts about strategic thinking and how it should be nurtured at mid-levels of an organization, instead of all this top-down strategy where they can't even figure out what the relationship should be between the CSO and the CEO and the CFO... and then, a couple of days later, I come across this post by social media marketer Chris Heuer, where he happens to mention another McKinsey article, this time on the Evolving Role of the CMO. It's a premium article, so I couldn't read the whole thing, but the summary said it's about how chief marketing officers' roles will need to broaden:

"Today, many CMOs have narrowly defined roles that emphasize advertising, brand management, and market research. In the years ahead, companies will need their CMOs to lead far-reaching change efforts, shape their public profiles, help manage complexity, and build new capabilities. CEOs have a role too: helping CMOs to set priorities and drive organizational change while fostering closer connections between them and other senior executives."

And Chris goes on to talk about the need for a Chief Social Officer:

"Why do we need a Chief Social Officer? Because embracing social media is embracing change management; changing the way teams collaborate; improving our relationships with customers; affecting our interaction with partners; overseeing customer support; empowering sales people to be purchase support; altering our product innovation and creation processes; and ultimately, bringing us out of the industrial age, beyond the information age and into a new age of enlightenment. It requires us to break down, once and for all, the silo walls that separate groups, the moats that have created fiefdoms of power and the interpersonal bullshit that prevents us from seeing that we all want what’s best, even if we have different ideas of how to do it."

OK.... But seriously.

Do we really need all these Chiefs?

Don't you think adding more Chiefs will simply ADD to the "fiefdoms of power and interpersonal bullshit"?

I agree that we need to break down silos. I agree that we need to change the way teams collaborate and how we interact and create relationships with external stakeholders! And I realize that all of these articles are probably talking about large enterprise management, not little associations. But the whole point of social media is that it breaks down the barriers between the internal and the external "messenger". It turns the "message" into the "conversation". It all started because it empowered the "little people" to speak for an organization - even if the organization leadership didn't necessarily want that.

So while of course you need leadership and vision, and management structure within this context of a new way of working wikily, I really don't think adding a bunch more Chiefs (or even one more) with a bunch more titles with "social" in them is the way to do it.

The way to do it is to empower lots of people across an organization to be able to connect and respond to anyone who connects and inquires with them. To engender and cultivate an organizational culture where it's OK - and good - for staff to talk to members or customers, where it's OK to be evangelists for your association (or to stay silent if you can't), where it's OK to join the conversation that's already out there. Just like EVERY staff person in an association is ACTUALLY responsible for member relations - from the Executive Director to the receptionist - which is something that should be explicit and a given.

And how can you do that? Well, maybe you add a "community" "social" element to the role of EVERY existing manager - social strategy, community marketing, social technology planning. OR, you add someone responsible for listening to and monitoring the community to every department (or a floating team or person who would tie all departments together though that lens - but not a "chief" - someone who would not step on others' toes or override other managers). I'm not saying you should do this right off the bat, unless you're really serious about fully participating from day one and have gobs of money to throw at it (not that that is necessary either!). I'm also not saying there shouldn't be rules and guidelines for how a staff person should represent themselves and how they should act or speak if they are speaking as the voice of an organization.

You could start small, just by teaching everyone how to listen.

But don't just add more layers of top-down bureaucracy.

What do you think?

You will not believe this - The WayBack Machine.

OMG!!! We have come SO FAR.

Check this out. Plug your association's web address in and click on a date near the beginning of when your site was created. You will be amazed at how far you have come in a few short years, I will bet money on it.

This is my home page in 2001

Here it is in 2003 (obviously some of the links don't work now)

And this is my homepage now. I am still continously trying to improve it so there's a whole lot I can still do, but holy moly!

Have you filled out the State of Social Technology survey yet??

It may have a long and boring name, and it may take a little while to complete, but this is the first survey ever to track how associations are using social media. Please do it now. It's important! Everyone will get a copy of the full results as well as the chance to win a $100 gift certificate. I know that's not a great incentive - everyone is too busy for this kind of thing - but really, if we are ever going to really learn how to take full advantage of this new way of working, if we really want to leverage web 2.0 and social technologies in order to create real, lasting value for our members, we need to know where we stand as an industry. We need to know where we already feel comfortable experimenting, and where we really need to be shown the ROI. We need to know where there may be enough choice of vendors and consultants who can help us make the leap, and where maybe we just have no idea where to start. We need to know who else is doing what, so we can learn from each other.

Please take a few minutes and just do it. Details here.

Thanks for your time and effort. You won't regret it.

Read the Essential Guide to Social Media

As you probably know, Brian Solis is one of my social media heroes and an essential source for really clear, simple language and straightforward thinking about how to "just get crackin'" with social media. I had the privilege of meeting him last week at a book signing with Geoff Livingston of their book Now is Gone, and now he's just released a new FREE e-book, the Essential Guide to Social Media.

Read it. Pretty much everything you need to know to get started is right there. Trust me!

Phrase of the day: "Working Wikily"

Image by hz536n via FlickrWorking Wikily:

"Wikis and other social media are engendering new, networked ways of behaving - ways of working wikily - that are characterized by principles of openness, transparency, decentralized decision-making, and distributed action." - Gabriel Kasper and Diana Scearce

Lucy Bernholtz, by way of Beth Kanter.

Awesome.

Keep an eye on this! Sharing is the new way of the world.

The Meyer Memorial Trust launched their connectipedia today.

"Like many foundations, MMT has been building a "knowledge management" system to archive information in an accessible way to help us be the best grantmakers we can be. But we've been approaching this task with a bigger end in mind.

Why, we asked ourselves, would we set up a system that only MMT could use when the need for good information is shared by other foundations... and nonprofit organizations and public agencies and official decision makers and citizen volunteers and... in fact, everyone working for the common good?? Wouldn't that be a smarter investment for us to make?

What if there was a place where we could all exchange what we learn as we go about our daily business? What if nonprofits could see the data and information that foundations use in their due diligence process? What if organizations and people could easily determine which foundations' interests match their project goals? What if foundations could quickly see what groups are working on an issue they are investigating? And so on...

Well, we are building such a place. A place where people and organizations can connect about subjects and places. A place called connectipedia... "

The video of the launch will be available on their website tomorrow June 11, and the wiki will be open for participation. Rock on!

Shameless plug... but could be of interest

I will be leading a round table discussion (at 2:45, under "Build a Practice" Round Table in the agenda) on putting social media into practice next Friday at the Business and Professional Women's Foundation National Employer Summit. Would love you to register and join me.

Here's their spiel. I think it will be really good and I hope to have lots of interesting info to share after listening to their speakers.

Join with national leaders to discuss innovative workplace practices

SHARE YOUR KNOWLEDGE and engage with workforce leaders to discuss promising practices and innovative ideas on how to recruit, retain and fully engage top talent by creating diverse, flexible and equitable work environments.

NES-CapitalOne
EXPLORE the future of work with Capital One—how flexibility benefits both employees, employers and the environment.

NES-Deloitte
ENGAGE with Anne C. Weisberg, a Director in Talent at Deloitte, on how Mass Career Customization™, a new model for how careers are built, creates a customized career experience that enhances individual as well as organizational success.

LEARN from Tammy Erickson, President of The Concours Institute, the research and education arm of BSG Alliance. Erickson, a featured writer in the Harvard Business Review, will share insight on workforce trends and the impact of a multi-generational workforce.

PARTICIPATE with

* Operational Excellence Directors
* Working Women
* Workplace Standardization Specialists
* LGBT Employees
* Diverse Workforces
* Investor Relations Officers
* Association Managers
* Human Resources Department

REGISTRATION at $350 includes these events and take-home tools:

Successful Workplaces Digest Launch Breakfast

Workshops on diversity, workplace flexibility and how-to build practices.

Successful Workplaces Digest features promising practices from: AARP, Accenture, Ernst & Young, The New York Times Company, Verizon and more!

Retire Retirement: Career Strategies for the Boomer Generation by Tammy Erickson.

Quote of the Day

From Sterling Raphael of NFI Studios (my bold), in a comment on my post about "what if you build it and they don't come?"

"[The] key we've realized is to integrate your social media applications into existing programs such as Events & Surveys. Make it a requirement to access certain pre-event and post-event content through the social media channels. Or ask them to submit their feedback through a discussion forum. This allows the users to do what they normally do, then realize there's so much more they can do..."

That is such a good idea!

Sweet slideshow on the value of Web 2.0 for nurturing younger generations in the workplace

| View | Upload your own

care of Bertrand Duperrin.

Heads Up from the blogosphere - 8 things you should know about

Just a few things to let you know about.

1) NTEN has released a CMS Satisfaction Survey which compares a bunch of CMS vendors. There was a lot of talk on this topic recently on some of the ASAE listserves, particularly as pertaining to small staff associations. The report is free to NTEN members, $50 to non-members (but seeing as membership is less than $85 per year (since it's currently pro-rated), you might as well join this very useful association.

2) Another awesome idea from NTEN - they have just started "Office Hours", where volunteer experts on any number of given topics - such as communications, IT, fundraising, and leadership - can chat with you in real time in online chat rooms on certain scheduled dates/times. Again this is a member benefit, but you can at least read all about it.

3) It's not too late to register and come with me to BlogPotomac, on June 13 at State Theater in Falls Church. "BlogPotomac seeks to provide a local “un-conference” on best marketing practices for the social media community in the D.C. metro area."

4) Did you see the article in the Washington Post about how real-world social networks can be shown to be impacting behavior (such as quitting smoking)? Mark Kuznicki has a good post on how non-profits are slow to realize the value is social networks for charitable causes and invites us to attend the Toronto Social Tech Training Workshop June 22-24. - "a unique hands-on Web 2.0 oriented learning intensive for people working in the social change sector. "

5) Fellow blogger buddy Jeff Cobb of Mission to Learn fame has launched a new blog, Hedgehog and Fox. Check it out. I particularly love this recent post about cultivating your blog like a flower garden.

6) Jamie Notter has a real job! So exciting. Read all about it here - he's merged his consulting business with an AMC, Management Solutions Plus, and has come over to the dark side of association management. Should be interesting, and I expect we'll be able to read all kinds of new insight on his blog from this experience.

7) Google have launched Google Health:

"Google Health puts you in charge of your health information. It's safe, secure, and free.

• Organize your health information all in one place
• Gather your medical records from doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies
• Keep your doctors up to date about your health
• Be more informed about important health issues"

I suspect I will want to blog on this topic much more extensively later, but in the meantime, have a look around it. Fred Wilson also had a very interesting discussion about making our health records public (by choice). I want to keep an eye on this issue and see where it leads - could have vast social and political implications.

8) We all know mobile applications are the next wave. Here's a good summary brought to you by the Carnival of the Mobilists of what's going on in that particular tech-verse. (did I just invent a new word? probably not... )

Anyway, happy reading. And if you are local or in town, come to BlogPotomac, it will be a chance to schmooze with DC's fledgling but very active social media scenesters.

You know you spend too much time on Twitter when...

From @nedra - follow her on Twitter, she rocks.

Check out the full list, lots more hilariousness in the comments.

"You know you spend too much time on Twitter when...

... you start calling your family things like @Dad or @Rachky in conversations.

... you only speak in short bursts of 140 characters and self-edit to use synonyms with fewer letters.

... you make decisions about what you'll have for lunch based on how interesting it will sound on Twitter.

... you find yourself thinking up new Alltop topics in the hopes of getting Kawasakied.

... you make a new offline friend and announce to all your other friends that you're just 2 people short of having 200 friends.

... your swear word of choice is "TweetJeebus!"

... your Twitter followers know you are pregnant before your husband does.

... throughout the day you compose tweets in your head about what you're doing, even if you are nowhere near your computer.

... during a Twitter outage, you compulsively hit "refresh" every three seconds hoping this will be the time it will come back on.

... most of your email is now either direct messages or new follower notifications.

... you don't feel the need to go to a conference in person anymore because someone else is livetweeting it.

... you get all your news from @BreakingNewsOn.

... you find yourself referring to the telephone's pound key as a 'hashtag.'

... you have no idea what's going on in your friends' lives unless they are on Twitter.

... you give people your personal website address as a TinyURL.

... you can't hear what someone says to you and you say, "Could you please retweet that?"


Hee hee hee... thanks Sean Twombly for the heads up!

In case anyone is wondering, I do, actually, own a Twitter t-shirt...

I. Have. Arrived! : )

Two amazing things just happened in one evening.

1) OMG!!! That was fast!! This blog made it into Alltop - "Diary of a reluctant blogger" is now listed under social media and under nonprofit! Check out my sweet new badge on my sidebar. Thank you to everyone who recommended me and thank you to Alltop for listing me!

And,

2) I just got notice I have been appointed to the ASAE Technology Section Council, joining some really awesome and smart people. This is sweet. It's going to be SO FUN. Rock on!

So please come celebrate with me!!! - we're having our next YAPpy hour at Rio Grande Cafe in Ballston, VA on Tuesday July 1. SAVE THE DATE. Details will be forthcoming, but in the meantime, don't forget to get your individually customizable YAP flare and/or gear. Remember we are ETERNALLY BETA so suggestions, comments, criticisms, ideas for YAPpy hours, etc are always welcome.

Thank you to everyone for all the props you give me. I really love you guys.

xoxo

Mads