On aligning social media strategy with your association focus

So that's a pretty meaty title for what is really a simple idea we've used in some of our presentations. The slideshow is below - only four slides so you can follow along as you read this. I'm interested to see if this makes sense to you.

In the first slide, we have three example areas where an association focuses its efforts - membership, education, advocacy. There could be any number of others, of course, but let's just use these three.

Now in your normal daily activities, we think the most interesting stuff happens when some of these overlap. When your educational activities or advocacy campaigns are so cool that they energize your members and help you recruit new members, for example. In the second slide, we show this simple overlap.

On Social Media Strategy

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Now put that aside for a minute. The blue diagram on the right is how we picture the social focus. On the outside, you have all the multilayered and unharnessed conversation happening in social spaces. Some of that conversation starts to engender collaboration, as people start conversing together for specific purposes. And in the middle is where that collaboration becomes collective action.

Each of those rings has its own value - you're not always looking to create collective action, in fact sometimes you're specifically looking to the serendipity of the stream, so to speak. But clearly getting from conversation to collaboration to collective action is harder and harder as you move towards the inside of the diagram. So, of course, it's no surprise that this looks like a bullseye. Lindy likes to tell the story of how she sucks at darts, and is happy if she hits the board at all. When we're talking about social media, too, it's totally OK not to hit the center of the board at first. It may take a very long time and a lot of practice to get there.

So then look at slide 3. Look at what happens when you put these two diagrams together. You can use your individual association focal areas to engender conversation and collaboration, relatively easily, as long as you have content worth discussing and work worth doing. And the sweet spot in the middle, well that's where when the association overlaps and the social overlaps really come together to fuel your collective action. Think about if the association objectives were not about membership, advocacy and education but instead events, certification and publications. Or whatever. The social projects you're really looking for in order to achieve success will be those where all these things overlap.

I figured I'd keep the final slide here too, though that could have been a separate blog post - but basically this shows how every social media project (and overall) strategy works. You define your objectives, you launch, you feed and nurture, you measure and evaluate, and you repeat. And at every single step, you listen. You pay attention. You monitor feedback continuously.

Thoughts?