10 Ways Associations Can Be More Like Twitter

I attended a wonderful session by innovation guru Jeff De Cagna yesterday - Strategies for Association Success in the Era of Social Business.

Jeff and his two co-hosts Chris Hopkinson of DubMeNow and Chris Bucchere of the Social Collective, were gleefully surprised when Jeff asked, "Who here is on Twitter?" and just about every single person raised their hand. It was a fantastic chance to get deeper into the concept of social business and what it might mean for associations.

We did one exercise at our tables that I found awesomely fun and interesting. I don't want to scoop Jeff, as I know he's planning on posting all of the attendees' answers and he'll surely give us some great further analysis, but I just thought I'd share the ideas we came up with at our table.

The question posed was, "How Could Associations Be More Like Twitter?"

Here were our answers:

1. anyone can join the conversation

2. quick response/reaction times

3. keep conversations short

4. searchable!

5. focus on individual members' networks, not the org's network

6. have unconferences and association tweetups

7. survey and listen - easily and often

8. no hierarchy, or hierarchy based on social capital

9. ideas and innovation coming from any individual

10. allow for creativity in terms of adding "applications", without taking away from the core simple platform - platform allows for an organic ecosystem to be built on it.

This was only a small slice of all the answers, we'll wait for Jeff to post the rest - but what do you think? Awesome, or what? What do you think of the metaphor?

We had our weekly Water Cooler chat later that day and told our chat room peeps all about it - and the best conversation we've had yet ensued. I'll try and summarize it for next week's chat post if not before. In the meantime, what could you add to this list? If you come up with more ideas, perhaps we can ask Jeff to add them to the summary!