SocialFishing...

I've moved!!

2009-08-04T16:00:00.005-04:00

I am very excited to announce the launch of our brand new SocialFish website at www.socialfish.org. We've updated stuff, prettied everything up, added more than a dash of awesomesauce, and - most importantly - aggregated our blogs over there. Please have a look and see what you think!

I would also greatly appreciate it if you would update your subscription link to this one here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/socialfish - please click on the link or paste in Google Reader (or whatever reader) to re-subscribe. Thank you so much!

If you come here directly to www.diaryofareluctantblogger.com (yeah, remember when that was my blog title? how times change!), you'll just see this final post. From today on, I will be blogging over on socialfish.org. Join me there!

Online Community Vendor Spotlight: Social Collective

2009-08-03T10:40:00.004-04:00

This is the third in a series of six interviews of CEOs of online community platform providers to the association industry, in conjunction with a white paper we're writing about them. The first two interviews are here. The white paper will be available for free download in the next few weeks.

CEO Interview - Chris Bucchere, The Social Collective

Tell us a bit about the history behind The Social Collective. How did you get where you are now?

I've been running a consulting company for over six years now and about twice a year, we invest some of our bench time and resources into building products. If the products don't generate any traction, we drop them. If they do, we put more resources into them. It's very much a "strategy" of throwing lots of spaghetti at the fridge and seeing what sticks.

The Social Collective came out of one of these experiments. We launched it at a 1000-person BEA conference in May of 2008 to rave reviews and outstanding usage statistics. We knew we were on to something when we saw how well it was received. I remember thinking that in five years, every conference will be running software like this. It's just a question of who can get the right product to market at the right time.

We went on to do a handful of other small events, but our real breakout moment came when we launched My.SXSW on our platform in early February of 2009. SXSW, being on the bleeding edge of technology, gave us the street cred we needed to approach other events with confidence. We now have a very strong pipeline and some real marquee customers using our software and telling us that they're getting more registrations, generating more buzz and even saving money (on things like printing costs) by using our hosted software.In the summer of 2009, LaunchBox Digital -- a DC-based startup incubator -- invested in us and provided the leadership and guidance to attract other investors. Although we have not yet made a formal announcement of our funding status, we're making significant progress toward a seed round and participating in investor pitch days on the East and West coast in August.

What's your vision for the company? Where are you going?

Quite simply, we want to be the hosted social networking, scheduling and vendor community platform in use by every major conference, tradeshow, festival and event in the world. We handle the large, high-end events with our "managed service" and we're also getting ready to launch a "self service" option whereby smaller events can set up their own sites without ever communicating with our support staff.

What makes The Social Collective's platform unique?

We're not in the business of loading up our product with tons of features. Instead, we're focused on the aspects of the software that address and solve real problems. Don't know who to meet at a conference? Import your Twitter and Facebook friends and search for other attendees by city, state, industry, title, etc. Don't know how to approach them? Send a quick online introduction using our Twitter-integrated messaging platform. Wondering how best to spend your time at an event? Build a customized schedule, view it on your smartphone (optimized) or sync it to your calendaring software and device of choice. Need to follow up with the great contacts you made? Download their vCards following the event. Need to attract and intice new event sponsors? Use our "Fan Pages" to create living, breathing communities of interest around your sponsor's products.

Every feature ties back directly to a value add for the conference organizer. Our argument is that -- for the cost of taking out an ad in a newspaper -- you can get social media credibility, generate year-round buzz, increase registrations, get your attendees to talk about you on social networks and attract more and higher quality sponsors.

How do you see your platform shaping the association industry? How does it change "business as usual" at the operational level?

The tools we're using have already been proven to work in a social context -- look at Facebook and Twitter -- and in a business context, e.g. LinkedIn. As I mentioned earlier, in five years, every event is going to be using these tools. Those that don't take the plunge will quickly become obsolete. If an association has outgrown the free toolset and is looking for a "social media in a box" strategy, The Social Collective is a great choice.

If you could use just three adjectives to describe The Social Collective, what would they be and why?

Exciting -- get the word out about your event and get people talking about you in social media

Cohesive -- transform your once-a-year IRL community into a buzzing hub of year-round marketing

Essential -- give your attendees the tools they need make your conference a must-attend event

Stay tuned for more CEO interviews, as well as more details about the white paper in due course.

Want more info on the Social Collective?

www.thesocialcollective.com

Email: info@thesocialcollective.com

Call: 415.516.3941

Twitter: @nowgetsocial

Blog: http://blog.thesocialcollective.com

Literally cryin' my eyes out at how cool this is.

2009-07-31T11:25:00.000-04:00

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

NTEN Water Cooler Social Media Chat 7/30

2009-07-30T10:42:00.000-04:00

Your friendly neighborhood Socialfish will be "IN" the NTEN Office Hours Communications Chat Room every Thursday (that's today!!) at 3 pm EST. Got burning questions about social media strategy? Or just want to hang out and shoot the breeze and get a break from work? Now's your chance!

Last week, we discussed our YAP Bling! party for ASAE's Annual Meeting in Toronto along with other fun events in the works. And we have an announcement about this chat, which is that we'll be rolling off the NTEN schedule (now that we've been doing this for a full year!!) - they are looking at other ways of doing their "office hours", and we're ready for a change. Given that, we did discuss the pros and cons of doing chats on Twitter, as well as checked out other chat sites like TinyChat and Today's Meet. We talked about Twitcam which is a way to stream live video to Twitter; this also has a chat component. We'd also like to participate more in #assnchat, the Association Chat on Twitter (Tuesdays at 2 pm EST), even though it has the worst hashtag in history. Meanwhile back at the ranch, we will probably have our final chat the week before we go off to Toronto (August 13) - but never fear, by then we will have figured out other fun ways to keep the conversation flowing.

Whether the conversation is deep or just a nice break from the dullness of your daily routine, though, we're all about sharing. Pick our brains, we'll tell you our take on things. Click HERE for the chat room.

Online Community Vendor Spotlight: ThePort Network

2009-07-29T10:34:00.001-04:00

This is the second in a series of six interviews of CEOs of online community platform providers to the association industry, in conjunction with a white paper we're writing about them. The first interview is here. The white paper will be available for free download in the next few weeks.

CEO Interview - Bob Cramer, ThePort Network

Tell us a bit about the history behind The Port Network. How did you get where you are now?

Software development is in the core DNA of ThePort Network. We were one of the first organizations to leverage XML and over the years built one of the most powerful and flexible white label social media platforms in the world. ThePort’s hard-core development focus has allowed us to stay in front of a rapidly changing industry while creating real products tailored for associations that deliver true ROI and reliability.

What's your vision for the company? Where are you going?

ThePort’s vision is to create a comprehensive social media platform that delivers tangible and measurable return on investment for our customers. This means creating new ways for associations to engage their membership and deliver real value to members. Our goal is to create the most tailored platform for associations that is also integrated with their association management systems. With ThePort’s Social Media Solutions, we can help members share news and resources online, create more involvement in association events and introduce new methods for increasing non-dues revenue. We try and listen carefully to the needs of the market and then deliver those specific solutions.

What makes ThePort's platform unique?

Being a pioneer in this field has allowed ThePort to assemble a customer list that is unrivalled. There is a reason that so many large and well-respected organizations have decided to work with ThePort. First and foremost, we deliver what we promise and that is not often the case in this new market. Many companies talk a good game, but delivering the sophisticated solutions that are needed to create online communities is much harder to do. We also support our customers diligently and continue to offer them new capability and functionality as it becomes available. We also pride ourselves on being able to deliver solutions that fit the requirements of organizations large and small.

How do you see your platform shaping the association industry? How does it change "business as usual" at the operational level?

The association industry can take their relationship with members to new heights with the power of social media. They can do this cost-effectively and with great impact. By giving people who share a passion or interest a place to congregate, exchange ideas, become thought leaders, associations can increase member participation and also develop new tools to drive revenue.

If you could use just three adjectives to describe The Port, what would they be and why?

Leadership: ThePort is the clear market leader for associations who want to deploy their own socially enabled communities.

Integrated: ThePort has built the most open platform in the industry allowing us to link together with other association management systems and databases to let appropriate information flow where it is needed.

Reliable: ThePort has the most experience and most users of any company in our space.

Stay tuned for more CEO interviews, as well as more details about the white paper in due course.

Want more info on ThePort?

www.theport.com
contact: Aaron Biddar – 678.391.7826 – aaron.biddar@theport.com
Blog: www.theport.com/blog.aspx
Twitter: @ThePortNetwork

ASAE09's hub tool rocks.

2009-07-28T09:23:00.001-04:00

Check this out! ASAE has done a great job setting up a mobile hub for ASAE09.

To get there and play for yourself, go to http://asae09.org/ or http://asae09.org/m/ on your mobile phone. You can just view, or if you login using your normal ASAE login, you can connect it to Twitter so it will automatically append the #asae09 hashtag if you tweet from the hub. Add stuff to the "contributions" tab (although the "add to calendar" doesn't have the right dates yet). Obviously the scheduler's not working yet either since we're not at the conference yet, but it's all pretty cool...!

Anniual Hub

View more presentations from amyhissrich.

Since I'm on the topic of ASAE09, here's some stuff we'll be up to over in Toronto:

Sunday 8/16 - 3:15 - Lindy's session with Jeff Cobb on The Power of Technology on Association Education and Learning

Sunday 8/16 - 3:15 (same time - bah!!) - My session with Jason Della Rocca on CounterIntuitive Paths to Success: Upending the Status Quo this conversation will be continued by me and Elizabeth Engel in the CAE Lounge afterwards. [UPDATE: - Jason's accompanying article is out!]

Monday 8/17 - 10:30 - Buzz2009 Recap Unsession - in the unsession room, directly after the general session that day. For anyone who was at Buzz and would like to share the ideas they got from it and anything they were able to implement since; also for anyone who was unable to attend Buzz2009 and wants to hear the scoop, and anyone who's interested in Buzz2010. [UPDATE: We're assuming anyone who would be interested in our Buzz2009 recap might also be interested in talking to Charlene Li after her keynote, so we've moved this to the Engagement Lounge, where we'll talk about Buzz after Charlene's little Q&A unsession. W00t!]

Monday 8/17 - 10 pm - Bling! YAP party - not to be missed. Help us come up with the perfect YAPtini! Sponsored by Avectra and SusQtech - go to their booths to get the bling you need to get in to our VIP area.

See y'all there!

Quote of the week: Get the culture right

2009-07-27T11:47:00.003-04:00

"Our whole belief is that if we get the culture right, then most of the other stuff, like delivering great customer service or building a long term enduring brand, will happen naturally on its own."

- Tony Hsieh, Zappos, interviewed by Entrepreneur. MUST READ. Powerful lessons that totally apply to associations and nonprofits.

Do you use social media for Professional Development activities?

2009-07-27T08:33:00.000-04:00

Do you use social media as part of your association's professional development offerings? Are you using community building tools alongside your PD programs? If so, Lindy's looking for case studies for her session with Jeff Cobb at ASAE's annual meeting.

Here's the session description:

Social networking, collaborative online technologies, and increasing financial and time constraints require that associations rethink how they develop programs and engage members in learning activities. Discuss how to implement Web 2.0 capabilities in association learning programs and leave with new insight, a list of resources, and a commitment to implement at least two new ideas.

Contact her @lindydreyer or here.

On aligning social media strategy with your association focus

2009-07-24T10:04:00.001-04:00

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

View more presentations from Maddie Grant.

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?

NTEN Water Cooler Social Media Chat 7/23

2009-07-23T12:00:00.001-04:00

Online Community Vendor Spotlight: Socious

2009-07-23T09:44:00.000-04:00

As you may have heard, Lindy and I are working on a white paper - working title Building Community For Associations: SocialFish on Six Social Networking Platform Providers to the Association Industry - which will provide information about six online community vendors. The vendors we chose are among the companies we work with, and are those who are also an integral part of the association community - which is a big plus in our opinion. They understand association issues and concerns, and understand community needs based around a framework of membership and citizenship. This post is the first of six Online Community Vendor Spotlights where we interviewed the CEO of each company. I will post one every few days in the run up to ASAE's Annual Meeting, at which time we'll have more information available on the full white paper (which will of course be a free download).

CEO Interview - Scott Balthazor, Socious

1) Tell us a bit about the history behind Socious. How did you get where you are now?

Socious was started in 2002. Two of us were batting around the problem that large scale ERP customers were having: how to find connections and solutions to problems that we knew they all had. While there were user groups and associations out there, no one had developed a secure place for them to share and network with each other over the internet. We contacted one of the largest PeopleSoft associations (the Higher Education User Group) knowing that due to their “Higher Education” nature, they would gravitate towards this type of social interaction. We built the 1st version of the software with them and Socious was born.

We then virally grew quickly as related groups heard about their success. We focused our development and support efforts on making the tools the infinitely configurable tools we have today that fit the needs of any size/style of association or user group.

2) What's your vision for the company? Where are you going?

While Socious has always been a software company, we are a service company at heart. While other companies may have more installations than us, our focus has always been on understanding our customers goals and helping them utilize our tools to meet those goals – not just getting them running. Our vision for the company is to offer unparalleled customer support to make every one of our current (and future) clients as successfully as they can be.

Part of that support is understanding where the market is going, seeing future trends, and listening to what our client’s needs are – and bringing those ideas together with cutting edge functionality. We were the first to seamlessly integrate 3rd party social networking content into user profiles, we were the first to have a full event system for chapters and sub groups, we were the first with a mobile application, and we were the first with advocacy tracking tools. For our clients to stay ahead of the curve Socious must as stay ahead as well with industry-leading functionality and support and continue to have ‘firsts.’

3) What makes Socious' platform unique?

I think the main thing that makes our software unique is the amount of functionality we offer in our software and the number of ways that it can be configured. While each client may have similar needs, each client is unique in how they want to meet those needs – and Socious has functionality to make sure every need is met. When you look at the depth of functionality in each of our modules, our difference shines through. Socious is not just a social networking tool, but a powerful knowledge repository that considers how a busy member would engage with a site like this. Our biggest advantage is that our developers have put all of this functionality in the software and still keep it easy to use.

4) How do you see your platform shaping the association industry? How does it change "business as usual" at the operational level?

Many associations look at social media as their outpost strategy (how they use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc) and their private social network strategy (on their own site) as two separate strategies. Our belief is that those two strategies need to be one overall social media strategy and each of those functions must compliment the other. Socious gives associations the tools to integrate content from their member’s outpost accounts and repurpose it for use with the association. Your members already have pictures on Flickr, updates on Twitter, profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook and videos on YouTube. Don’t try to be a substitute for these tools because your website never will be. Where we change the game is allowing members to use the tools they already love and the content they already have to participate within your association in a way, before Socious, they never could.

5) If you could use just three adjectives to describe Socious, what would they be and why?

Powerful- Socious has the functionality to turn your website into a destination.
Seamless- No matter if we are integrated with an AMS, LinkedIn, YouTube or any other 3rd party system, it is easy to share information with the Socious system.
Supported- With Socious, you have a support team that is not only there for you, but cares about your success.

Stay tuned for more CEO interviews, as well as more details about the white paper in due course.

Want more info on Socious?
www.socious.com
contact: Paul Schneider, 602-734-5353
Blog: www.socious.com/paulschneider
Twitter: @paulschneideraz

Quote of the week: Authenticity is Saying Things Right

2009-07-21T09:41:00.002-04:00

"Authenticity is saying things right. Authority is saying the right things. But transparency is saying everything. And it’s wrong. You don’t need to say everything to be transparent, and you don’t need to be transparent to be authentic and authoritative.

Just say what you mean and mean what you say."

From Michel Fortin, Don't Be Transparent, Be Authentic Instead

Personal vs professional social media identities

2009-07-17T11:18:00.004-04:00

Check out this fab slide deck by Kivi Leroux Miller. Nice nonprofit examples, and she raises the questions you're probably asking yourself too. I have a pretty clear opinion on this issue, and I believe it will become more and more impossible to separate personal and professional digital identities, but I also think that many of us are in the pretty enviable position of being able to think about this from the start. See what you think.

Personal - Professional Mix in Social Media: For Nonprofits

View more presentations from kivilm.

NTEN Water Cooler Social Media Chat 7/16

2009-07-16T11:14:00.004-04:00

Your friendly neighborhood Socialfish will be "IN" the NTEN Office Hours Communications Chat Room every Thursday (that's today!!) at 3 pm EST. Got burning questions about social media strategy? Or just want to hang out and shoot the breeze and get a break from work? Now's your chance!

So we skipped our chat last week, as we were Buzz'ing. The week before, we had a very fun conversation about my new iPhone, (must have apps - Shazam, Urban Spoon, FourSquare, Tweetie), of course about Buzz, about Second Life and some other non-serious stuff including this fabulous bullsh*t generator.

This week, we're unfortunately off again as we have a Buzz debrief with the SmartBrief gang - where we'll be discussing the evaluation comments we've had so far, among other things (if you haven't done yours yet, go here to post your feedback) but we're SO lucky to have our lovely friend and awesome blogger Deirdre Reid hosting for us. Thanks Deirdre!

Whether the conversation is deep or just a nice break from the dullness of your daily routine, though, we're all about sharing. Pick our brains, we'll tell you our take on things.

Click HERE for the chat room if it's not working well embedded below.

[chat room removed after chat]

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Thank you SO so much

2009-07-13T10:49:00.000-04:00

THANK YOU so much to everyone who came to Buzz2009 last week, everyone who blogged about it beforehand and will after, who tweeted from there or from afar, who watched the webcast, who had a drink (or several) with us after, and of course thank you again to all of our sponsors and advisors who helped us put it on and to SmartBrief. All of you truly rock the house. We'll surely do some more debriefing blogging in due course but I just wanted to put up a couple of quick links before all the other stuff I've neglected over the last two weeks takes over. :)

Check out our Twitter stats - as of this writing, 1,639 tweets, 334 contributors - pretty incredible considering we had just 80 people in the room!

Here's some other good stuff:

- a transcript of the tweets in readable order (*love* What The Hashtag)

- Jeremy Epstein's recap of the pre-event WOM Slam

- Lynn Morton's sweet recap of Andy Sernovitz's keynote

- I almost passed out when I heard we had 5,000 people registered for the free webcast - here's the link. I think this will not be up for long (couple of weeks?) so watch it now, it's really really good. 90 minutes you won't regret, I promise. And just in case, here's a play-by-play from the GasPedal blog.

- Jeff Hurt's analysis - from the point of view of someone participating remotely via Twitter and the webcast. Awesomesauce beyond belief.

Were you there? Two things I need you to do for me pretty please:

1) Our open evaluation post is up (yeah, who needs those annoying survey evaluations?) Please give us feedback in the comments over on the Buzz blog here and tell us what you thought. Be honest. We want to make it better and better every year we do it and we can only do that if we know what you're thinking. (And yes, the weird mic issues and spaceship HVAC noise is already on the list). We also welcome any comments from anyone who followed along remotely.

2) Share what you learned on the SmartBrief Blog. Everyone had pages and pages of notes and tweets - so spill.

Thanks to all and hope to see you back next year!!

p.s. I just have to repost the Buzz2009 scholarship submission post - read the awesome commment submissions - and in particular check out KiKi's slideshare response. Hilarious. We are so happy we were able to give out 7 scholarships this time - next year, hopefully more!

Get this badge.

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Quote of the Week: Listening Internally

2009-07-12T09:30:00.000-04:00

"To effectively listen to customers, you must first listen internally. When you then ask your team to listen to customers, they will - not only because they know how, but because they realize that if they hear a good idea, it will get implemented."

- Eric Fletty and Jan Bottiglieri, "Step One: Quit Digging" (Culture Change Drives Association's Success - online version), Associations Now. Great article about systems thinking, non-traditional team-building and culture change from the ground up.

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Buzz2009 Twitterfountain

2009-07-09T09:00:00.002-04:00

Wish you were here with us - but if you're not, you can still follow along! Follow the Twitterstream here. If you are on Twitter, participate, ask questions via Tweetchat here (assuming it's working, apparently it's been quirky lately...)

Next year, perhaps? Subscribe to the Buzz2009 blog for continuing conversation and future updates.

p.s. No Water Cooler Chat this week, as we are, umm, otherwise occupied at Buzz 2009... :)

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20 objectives for organizational use of Twitter for events

2009-07-06T09:13:00.000-04:00

In an ideal world, every organization should start their social media efforts by listening on the social web, finding out where their stakeholders are, then analyzing what value could be derived from embarking upon building an official presence in those particular social spaces so they can begin to participate strategically in those conversations. Note that WHICH social spaces (which tools) to experiment with comes AFTER the listening part!

But every once in a while, there's an opportunity to act fast, to try an experiment with a particular tool. We're working with one group who had exactly this scenario - a fairly big event coming up quickly, and members asking about their social media presence, and they figured they should just jump in and set up an official Twitter account to see what would happen. We held a brainstorming session with a large group of staff from all different departments and they came up with a nice list of objectives which I thought I'd share. In no particular order:

- to keep up with things happening around exhibits, and communicate with exhibitors
- to be the cool kid
- to experiment with a different kind of communication
- to find out who uses Twitter within their community
- to see if members are interested in using this forum
- if it works for meetings/events, could it be used for other activities?
- to hear buzz from the community
- to respond to their members (customer service)
- to reach potential donors, learn things about them that you wouldn't know from any where else
- to explore a new way of communicating (two-way)
- to communicate more concisely, faster, more easily
- to facilitate interaction with members who couldn't attend in person
- to communicate event-specific announcements very easily, as soon as they come up and repeatedly
- to find out what members are particularly interested in (via links shared)
- to drive/listen to conversation about specific topics
- to promote/reward members e.g. contest winners
- to have some fun
- to give staff a voice, allow people to get to know them
- to help exhibitors promote themselves
- to extend the life and space of the event.

Awesome, right? The event itself went great, and especially considering that the staff who were tweeting were pretty new to this, they did a fantastic job. They achieved a lot of these objectives - and those that weren't immediately apparent this time still gave them the impetus to do it bigger and better at their next (much bigger) conference in a few months.

Want to try this at home? Just make sure you go through the exercise of thinking about what you hope to achieve with your experiment. Make a list. Whether you have 3 objectives or 30, keep them in mind during the experiment. Have a debrief afterwards, check things off the list, add new things, figure out how to make it even more awesome next time. If some things don't work like you expected, understand why not. Evaluate, learn, do it all again.

Rock on.

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Only a few spots left for Buzz2009!

2009-07-02T11:00:00.001-04:00

Get this badge.

Only a few spots left! And tell you what, there are a few $100 off discount codes floating around the socialsphere... search on Twitter for #Buzz2009 to find one. (It's so easy already, we need to make you do a little something, don't we!)

Here's a few items we think are particularly cool, in case you haven't seen them already. You know you can subscribe to the Buzz 2009 blog anytime to get the scoop delivered to you. If this event rocks as much as we think it will, we'll do it every year so there should be good content in the blog long after the event is over.

- Live webcast - noon-1:30 pm EST - we've already got close to 3000 people registered for this already, so if you REALLY TRULY can't come in person, sign up here. Here's the scoop on it.

- don't forget there are scholarships available!! Just go here and tell us why you should get one.

- We want to know (whether you'll be in attendance or not!) whether you have identified particular social media goals for your association or organization. Tell us here.

- Rob's really excited about his Association Social Media Spotlight panel session... Find out why. Reason 1, Reason 2, Reason 3... Subscribe to the blog to find out Reason 4.

- I know you want to come and talk to Guy Kawasaki in person about the Alltop for Association Management he set up just for you, don't you!

- In our session we'll be talking through how we've used word-of-mouth tactics specifically for Buzz 2009. We call it our living case study... and yes, we're so meta... Hehe.

- Don't just take our word for how important this event is for you, though. Check out who we got to help us make sure the content and format of our conference was really what the association community needs... and see who's talking about it. Thanks SO so much to everyone who has helped us promote the event. We really wanted to reach as many people as we could who might need this more advanced social media educational content - and using our relationships and social media to do it is a no-brainer, really! :)

- as a matter of fact, click here to see who's talking about it RIGHT NOW.

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NTEN Water Cooler Social Media Chat 7/2

2009-07-02T09:06:00.001-04:00

Your friendly neighborhood Socialfish will be "IN" the NTEN Office Hours Communications Chat Room every Thursday (that's today!!) at 3 pm EST. Got burning questions about social media strategy? Or just want to hang out and shoot the breeze and get a break from work? Now's your chance!

Thank you SO MUCH to Lynn Morton for hosting our chat for us last week. Sounds like we missed a really fab conversation on the following topics:

- What shiny new toys become overwhelming for your non-tech audience?
- The Friend v. Follower dynamic - You can be a friend of someone on one site & a follower on another, is this suggestive of the type of relationship you have with them? Symmetrical v. Asymmetrical relationships, reciprocal relationships seem more purely "social".
- How do "collectors" affect the dynamic of social media relationships? In what way can experienced Twitter users help the newbies to acclimate them to the culture?
- How Twitter has replaced RSS for some people.
- The merits of Tweetdeck & what's cool about the new Seesmic desktop application.

Whether the conversation is deep or just a nice break from the dullness of your daily routine, though, we're all about sharing. Pick our brains, we'll tell you our take on things.

Click HERE for the chat room if it's not working well embedded below.

[chat room removed after chat]

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Web design using principles from psychology

2009-07-01T10:25:00.001-04:00

Fantastic slidedeck from Joshua Porter. The man is a genius. Read his book. Seriously.

Designing with Psychology in Mind

View more presentations from Joshua Porter.

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New Media - Old Risks

2009-06-29T10:05:00.002-04:00

Here's the second in a series of guest posts by our risk manager bud Leslie White of Croydon Consulting, LLC. Follow her on Twitter at @ltwhite. I'll also take this opportunity to let you know that Leslie has kindly agreed to work with us at SocialFish so that we can offer her guidance if you need help with drafting your own social media policies. We're also writing a white paper with Leslie about the hot topic that is Risk Management and Social Media Policies (yeah, I know, we need a pithier title). We'll let you know more about that soon!

This post is a follow-up to my first guest post (thanks Maddie), The Hidden Risks of Social Media – It’s Not What You Think, which discussed the business risks of social media. Business opportunities are lost while not participating in social media, and harm can arise from participating badly (not engaging the right communities and participants). However, I didn’t discuss the legal liability issues - which are what scares people the most.

Every social media presentation raises the risk question. The responses range from “don’t worry, be happy” to "it's the end of the world as we know it (Danger! Danger! Will Robinson!)". At the recent Blog Potomac, the speakers’ answers were on the lower end of the risk continuum - not surprising from people whose careers are built on social media. While social media risks are not cataclysmic, they exist and can have adverse reputational and financial consequences IF the exposures are not acknowledged and managed well.

According to Elizabeth Engel’s post, Shel Holtz said at Blog Potomac while discussing the barriers to social media, “2-3 years later none of what the lawyers warned us about has happened.” True, we have avoided the apocalypse so far, but we do not yet know all of the legal risks since it takes years for litigation to work its way through the United States court system. For example, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act in 1996 where Section 230 (47 U.S.C.§230) essentially bars claims to hold the service provider of an interactive computer service (your association) liable for tortuous or unlawful information that someone else disseminates through that service. The act seems fairly simple, but thirteen years later it is still being litigated.

Last month, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals partially overturned the 2005 dismissal of a case against Yahoo! The appeals court in Cecilia L. Barnes vs. Yahoo! Inc. (May 7, 2009) ruled that the plaintiff’s allegations of a breach of contract by Yahoo! for failing to remove offensive material is not precluded by Section 230. This means the original case goes back to the U.S. District Court for litigation – costly for both parties. Is this court decision disastrous? No – but your association had better review its complaint procedures and train the appropriate personnel to respond appropriately. [More on the case here].

Social media is media, so that is where the risks are – defamation (libel or slander), disparagement, invasion of privacy, copyright or trademark infringement, and plagiarism - to name a few. Associations also have to worry about antitrust allegations and professional liability exposures from any standard setting, certification or accreditation activities. Media exposures have existed since the first spoken or printed word. However, the nature and complexity of these risks have changed with the adoption of social media.

First, associations have lost the illusion of control of what people are saying about your organization. Associations still have the same level of control over “official” information distributed or published through its Web sites, magazines, newsletters, training materials, and body of knowledge materials. But now staff and members are writing blogs, commenting on blogs, making videos and publishing material about your association and industry. People were doing these things before; you just did not know about it. One advantage of social media that is often overlooked is that now you can listen and find these conversations with just a little effort.

A more significant change is the speed with which this information travels through the universe. In the electronic world, information becomes “viral” because it can spread so quickly. Before, conversations involved a few disgruntled members or employees, now via the Internet and telecommunications the word spreads rapidly throughout the universe. Conversations take on a life of their own and your association cannot control them. But you can decide how to respond to the negatives and extol the positives. A strong social media strategy will help you manage these risks.

Social media is too important for associations to avoid or abandon due to fear of litigation, but a healthy respect for the risks is a good thing. I do believe the risks can be catastrophic IF you do not manage the risks proactively. Most exposures can be handled by policies (social media, code of conduct, crisis communication, and others) but all policies need to be supplemented with training. Most people mess up accidently because they did not know any better. Help your staff and members become smart social media participants. A little planning and training goes a long way. Good luck.

[photo credit]
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NTEN Water Cooler Social Media Chat 6/25

2009-06-25T12:17:00.002-04:00

How to Think Like A Social Media Marketing Genius

2009-06-22T09:39:00.000-04:00

Busy bee this week - Boston today, Philly tomorrow, Charlottesville Friday... but here's something to keep you busy in case I don't get a chance to add my usual volume of stuff to your Google Reader. (Sorry about that by the way, I have tried to do less blogging but it's just my natural rhythm, can't help it! Just so much good stuff out there and things to think about!)

Anyway this one is a really great slidedeck by the prolific Beth Kanter. Enjoy - and share!

Craig's List Nonprofit Bootcamp

View more OpenOffice presentations from kanter.

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Twitter Search in Plain English

2009-06-20T09:59:00.000-04:00

The latest awesomeness from Common Craft.

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Trying to take a break.

2009-06-19T02:07:00.002-04:00

Not very good at it I'm afraid. Hat tip to Randi Sumner for the LOL cartoon. :)

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NTEN Water Cooler Social Media Chat 6/18

2009-06-18T11:24:00.003-04:00

Your friendly neighborhood Socialfish will be "IN" the NTEN Office Hours Communications Chat Room every Thursday (that's today!!) at 3 pm EST. Got burning questions about social media strategy? Or just want to hang out and shoot the breeze and get a break from work? Now's your chance!

Last week, we had really full house for some reason, which is great! We talked about...

- the Facebook vanity url situation (which I am sure will have gone through several more permutations by the time this is posted - and oh look!)

- buddypress.org, which creates a social network from your Wordpress blog.

- building a Drupal social network from scratch

- BlogPotomac

- homebases versus outposts and how many associations still make the mistake of starting with the tool rather than the objective

- listserves (ugh)

- ASAE's Technology Conference versus NTEN'S Nonprofit Technology Conference

- our forthcoming 80's party in Toronto. #ASAE09 FTW!

(I had to look up what "FTW" means, btw, so it's OK if you do too.)

Whether the conversation is deep or just a nice break from the dullness of your daily routine, though, we're all about sharing. Pick our brains, we'll tell you our take on things.

Click HERE for the chat room if it's not working well embedded below.

[chat room removed after chat]

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What's all the Buzz about?

2009-06-18T09:07:00.000-04:00

Get this badge.

Yeah yeah!

I am sure you've heard that Lindy and I, with the help of our smart and savvy SmartBrief friends, are working hard on getting ready for our Buzz2009 Social Media for Associations conference.

Here's the scoop.

It's a one-day conference on July 9th in downtown Washington DC. It's "the only event that ties cutting edge social media concepts and practices to the unique challenges of association management."

Really, you say? Why yes! Want proof?

We'll start the day with Andy Sernovitz doing the keynote. He's the original Word Of Mouth guru, and has a ton of association experience, which makes him doubly awesome.

Next up, we've put together a fantastic series of snapshots from associations who've done exciting things with social media - from a "problem solving" perspective, like member recruitment, energizing advocacy, building event buzz... Here's a teaser, but subscribe to the Buzz2009 blog to hear a lot more about associations working the social media machine. The panel will be moderated by Rob Birgfeld.

But wait! That's only the morning!

The "lunchtime special" will be a presentation by "The Man", Guy Kawasaki himself, talking about the brand new Alltop for Association Management he's built just for us... and for you! He will then moderate a panel of experts from the corporate world. Brendan Hart of National Geographic, Stacey Kane of California Tortilla, Stephanie Miller of Return Path, and Andy Sernovitz will talk about massive viral successes they have seen in their social media marketing efforts. For those of you who can't attend in person, this panel will be viewable live via a free webinar - check the site for details, to be posted soon.

After the panel, the webcast will end and here's the real reason you need to be in the room - you'll be able to ask Guy and the panel questions about how to apply their strategies for success to association-specific goals and objectives. How often does THAT happen? No, not very often!

Next comes Lindy's and my roundup session, where we'll focus and summarize the things we've learned so far and engage you in deeper, strategic ways that you can apply to your own problem-solving back at the ranch.

And just when you thought you couldn't take any more awesomeness, there's more! Jeremy Epstein will finish up the day with a really fun, practical session to give you plenty to think about and ideas to take home with you... But not til you've had a drink with us at the closing happy hour!

Do YOU want to:

- Recruit more members?
- Energize your events?
- Activate your community online?
- Reinvent publishing with online content models?
- Engage volunteers by leveraging your social capital?
- Raise money through social fundraising and micro-donations?
- Connect grassroots advocacy efforts with public conversations online?

Then this conference is for you.

Register here! Can't wait to dig in to all of this with you.

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On personal vs corporate branding

2009-06-17T10:08:00.001-04:00

I was at BlogPotomac last week, and as you'd expect in a room full of bloggers, there were some great roundup posts. The speakers included Shel Holtz, Shireen Mitchell, Scott Monty, Liz Strauss, Shashi Bellamkonda and more.

Read this one in particular by Mahdi Gharavi, which gives a perfect, pretty straight recap of the speakers' main points. Each had some good nuggets to share.

And here's a more irreverent but fun recap by Elizabeth Engel that I loved.

The session I've been percolating, though, is the one on personal branding which was a debate of sorts (though they both seemed to agree on everything) between Aaron Brazell (@technosailor) and Amber Naslund (@Ambercadabra). I'm going to put in some quotes below recorded by PR Mom on her blog, which are a pretty good snapshot of how confusing this was. Aaron also posted a follow-up blog post which summarizes his view on the issue of personal branding.

Basically, both Aaron and Amber were of the opinion that personal brand should not trump corporate brand, if you work for a company. I disagree, perhaps just on the semantics of it all, and will explain why, as I did not have a chance to make a comment during the session.

First, I thought they did not adequately define what they meant by "personal brand", which seemed to be a reference to the Robert Scobles (and Scott Montys) of the world. Here are some excerpts by PR Mom:

Amber: It is the idea that personal brands have become a shortcut for building a real relationship that is not cared for. You are listing these bullet points about yourself and then others are just suppose to buy it. Your personal brand is not your own, it is not what you say it is, it is what the community says it is.

Aaron – the fundamental flaw is the concept of a personal brand, a personal brand is more about ego. A brand should be bigger than an individual person. Where do you position yourself, are you positioning yourself for yourself, or are you positing yourself for your company. Never allow your personal brand to eclipse the greater initiative, the greater goal of your company.

Amber: you cannot separate a personal brand with your professional personality, it’s about knowing who you are and representing it across everything you do. Your company is paying you to do your job, your reputations are tied together because it is for both of your benefit, it’s not about you, its about the company, can it enhance that, if you can- that means that you are being a good employee.

Aaron - It is okay to have a personal brand, but does not like the word personal brand because there is a cockiness about it that says it’s all about me vs. all about us. Your brand is controlled by your customers.

Amber – You can’t control what is put out there about you. Doesn’t matter what information you put out abut yourself, it matters what others say. We have a personal responsibility to know what is being said about us, should be doing vanity searches on Google to see what is being said about you.

So on the one hand, I was bemused because to me you can't NOT have a personal brand when we're talking about operating socially and professionally online. (And remember the context here is a room full of 150 bloggers, who by their very nature as bloggers, are all about having an online persona which is both personal and professional). Everything you do on the social web leaves a permanent mark, and the collective of all those traces of you become your personal brand, whether you want them to (or manipulate them to) or not. (I talked about this from the organizational point of view in this post on the paradoxes of identity in a digital age.) Your personal brand is actually your digital identity and everyone has one.

So obviously I agreed with what both said about, on the one hand, your brand being created by how others see you, and on the other, how "you cannot separate a personal brand with your professional personality". But those statements and the circularity of the conversation seemed to me contradict the overall point that both were making, which is that your personal brand shouldn't trump your being a "team player" and part of a company's brand. If your digital identity, or brand, is created by how others see you, then you have no choice in the matter. Sticking with corporate examples, Tony Hsieh IS Zappo's. Gary Vaynerchuck IS Wine Library - and Scott Monty is Ford (and the best thing about Ford, IMHO). Whether they are CEO's or PR dudes, they put a face to the brand and I think that is a good thing for the brand.

But those are extreme examples. What about the rest of us?

As bloggers, we have a vested interest in making sure our digital identity/personal brand is as authentic as possible, whether we represent ourselves, our own companies, several of our own companies, or someone else's company or organization - we're bloggers because we want to write stuff from our own personal point of view, regardless of who we work for, and we want to engage our readers, learn from them, converse with them, debate with them as individual voices.

If we work for a company or organization, whether we're bloggers or not, we collectively make that organization what it is, and this is more and more true in the digital age (although for smaller companies it's always been true). Companies are made up of individuals, and in the social web you can actually find out quite easily who those individuals are and -whoa - talk to them directly. Brands are created by the collective voice of those individuals, as well as customers, members, stakeholders, and anyone who cares. And yes, a huge Scoble-like personality inside an organization could hypothetically eclipse a corporate brand, but how often does that really happen? Each employee brings certain skills to the table, for a certain time, and then they go off and do something similar (or better) for some other organization. It's extremely rare that any one individual controls the corporate brand.

In my opinion, the corporate brand is becoming irrelevant, at least in terms of anyone blasting marketing messages out about it and hoping the public at large believes the hype. Don't believe me? Check Brand Tags and look up Ford. (Let's just say, despite Scott Monty's efforts, things don't look good.) So what do you do about that? Well...

As an individual, you can only be truly responsible for your own words and actions, and collectively, with others who care about the same things, whether they are products or services, you help build communities that gather around brands - and those are the brands that will last. But you don't need to have LESS of a personal brand to do that - in fact you need to have MORE of one, to tend it more carefully, to live it more honestly, to be an evangelist for the company you work for but only if you're real about it. (And if you can't evangelize your company, maybe it's time to find one that you can rave about - which means tending your personal brand even more in this economy!)

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BlogPotomac 2009

2009-06-12T10:39:00.003-04:00

So I'm here at BlogPotomac, which is just as awesome as it was last year. As I'm in a room full of bloggers, I'll be lazy and not live blog it myself - I'll concentrate on Tweeting it. (Follow me @maddiegrant, the stream for the conference is #blogpotomac

Here's a great recap - refresh throughout the day to get the scoop.

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NTEN Water Cooler Social Media Chat 6/11

2009-06-11T11:43:00.001-04:00

Is Twitter "information overload and interaction underload"?

2009-06-11T09:46:00.002-04:00

You're probably familiar with Rohit Bhargava's image of the Five Stages of Twitter Acceptance.

I also like Jason Hiner's "Four Stages" version on ZD.net:

1. Confusion and indignation

>>>> 2. The first "Aha!" moment

>>>>>> 3. Remembering to Tweet

>>>>>>>> 4. Thinking in 140 characters.

Then this got me thinking about it all, now I'm almost two years into it. Maggie McGary recently posted, asking "Is The Twitter Honeymoon Period Over?" Her conclusion: "Twitter is starting to become information overload and interaction underload." I know exactly how she feels... namely that in some respects the more immersed you get into Twitter, the lonelier it feels.

Having said that, it seems to me like this is a cyclical and repetitive process which is entirely to do with the growth of the "stream" as you progress from newbie to power user, and your use of and experimentation with more sophisticated applications in order to handle that growth.

I've gone through several cycles:

I joined Twitter on September 6, 2007, after my first ASAE annual meeting in Chicago and the immense value I got out of meeting people via the Mozeo text backchannel set up by blogger bud Ben Martin. At first I listened closely to everyone I followed, and being a social, extroverted type, felt right at home. At this point the mobile value was huge, since I was following a small number of people whose tweets I could read on my phone.

Then, at one point fairly early on, I had to stop getting tweets delivered by SMS except for a handful of friends. That changed the way I listened to the stream and I started investigating Twitter apps. I found a myriad of great ways to find new and interesting people to follow, and I followed back everyone who followed me. I started seeing the value of link sharing, I connected it via RSS to my blog, I started feeding my stuff to my Facebook page. Over time, Twitter became less of a "cocktail party" and took over as my RSS reader. My follow/follower counts grew to over 500.

I kept finding great links and content and kept adding miscellaneous people, many of whom followed me back. I found more ways to connect to people - local to DC, tech scene, startups, anyone who had a Twitter app (or any other online app) I was using, brands, bloggers, social media mavens, more and more association friends and colleagues, nonprofiteers... I eventually decided I couldn't deal with the fact that the stream of tweets I was following had become a raging torrent. I spent a whole afternoon trying to cull the list of who I followed - I got it down from 2100 to 1300, which was hard for me, as I want to listen to everyone! I couldn't bear to unfollow anyone I knew personally, even if many of those people had yet to tweet or had dormant accounts. At this point, some of the Twitter apps I had checked out started developing group functionality - like Tweetdeck - but I unfortunately already had too many people in my stream to be able to divide them up into groups easily. My advice for you - do this before you are following more than a couple of hundred, or it's a bloody nightmare. (and same goes for Facebook. Sigh.)

I stopped automatically following people who followed me. I turned off @replies to people I didn't know, then later turned off all @replies not addressed to me (until they decided to mess with the settings and now I annoyingly have them back. No offense, but I really don't need to read a 25-tweet conversation between two people I know, regardless of the fact that I know them.) At some point, I had to automate my "thanks for following" messages because I couldn't do them fast enough to keep up and I thought it was important to say it anyway. Eventually, the backlash against auto-DM's became such that I recently stopped bothering (apologies to any new followers).

And right now, I'm currently in a new "brain freeze" stage, where I'm so busy that I feel like I'm missing out on lots of good stuff, I'm clicking on less links directly (have reverted to my Google Reader for blog reading because it's more controlled - which, by the way, I also cull regularly); I've learned to spot really good stuff by watching for multiple retweets; and I'm starting to learn to really use the search and trending functions better and better. Groupthink and the wisdom of crowds here we come.

Call it "Twitter fatigue", "Twitter blues" or something else, I'm actually OK with this cycle - or spiral - of growth and culling, of plateauing and adjusting, of diving in and pulling back to get the lie of the land. I think that one the one hand, Twitter is still a brand new communications tool, maybe just like an awkward teenager with zits, and as it grows and the apps around it adjust to that growth, it's going through its own organic development cycle. Whether we're actively involved in all that beta testing or we're just along for the ride, the kinks are being worked out as we use it, and that's not only ok, it's awesome to see.

Twitter is a simple concept with vastly complex applications and iterations and add-ons. It's easy to get frustrated, or overwhelmed, or simply lose the plot with it over time - but it's also easy to take a break. When the current become too strong for a while, just sit on a rock and catch some sun for a bit instead. And when you're ready to swim again, just start by responding to your friends! If there's one thing I remind myself, it's that "All community forms in small groups". Just start small again and roll with it.

Dang, look at that, that pesky incrementalist strikes again! :)

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Associations and voting

2009-06-10T13:04:00.002-04:00

Votenet Solutions needs your help. If you hold elections, take their 5-minute survey. CEO Michael Tuteur says, "We’re working with AssociationExecs.com to capture a snapshot of average voter turnouts, voting costs and processes, trends in online voting and more." This will be annual so they can track trends, and of course you'll get a copy of the results.

I know questions about online voting processes (specifically) come up on the ASAE listserves all the time - so this could be interesting for you. The deadline for responses is Monday, June 15. Thanks!

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Authenticity means...

2009-06-10T10:00:00.001-04:00

Authenticity means realizing there's no such thing as brand perfection. Brand perfection is dead. Some gems from this post by Douglas Karr:

- It’s no longer the choice of the brand manager or the CMO to maintain the integrity of the brand. It’s now the responsibility of every employee in the organization.

- If you want to kill a bad story in a search engine results page, you need to work much harder as a company to make some good stories make the results page instead. Much, much harder.

- The good news is that consumers don’t expect perfection anymore… but they do expect honesty.

- We can’t control the message unless we can live up to the expectations of what we wish our brand to portray. We can’t cover up our faults anymore, we have to be open about them.

Jeremiah Owyang summed it up quite nicely over a year ago:

What does Authentic, Transparent, or being Human look like?

- Training and entrusting employees to build real relationships using these tools
- Admitting when you’re wrong
- Asking the community for help, working with the community to build better products
- Showing your strengths –and weaknesses –in a public forum
- Showing more of unique side of the employees (that you invested in) in addition to your products, technology, and services
- Realizing the brand is actually owned by the community and not just the MarCom brand police

Authenticity means telling the truth. Maybe allowing everyone to tell the truth.

What else might it mean?

[photo credits]

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Quote of the week: Audience vs Community

2009-06-09T09:22:00.001-04:00

"The difference between an audience and a community is which direction the chairs are pointing."

From Chris Brogan. Full post is here.

Apologies for lite blogging this week - will hopefully make up for it on Friday, when we'll be at BlogPotomac. Can.Not.Wait!

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NTEN Water Cooler Social Media Chat 6/4

2009-06-04T10:19:00.004-04:00

Self-explanatory awesomeness

2009-06-03T10:14:00.003-04:00

Check it out at minsh.net. Follow @minshdotnet to sign up for a fish!

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Small pebbles make big waves: 15 tips for fundraising on Twitter

2009-06-02T09:55:00.000-04:00

Originally, I thought I'd write this post in order to summarize the comments to this post on Twitip, which posed the question of how to fundraise on Twitter and requested help from readers in the comments. But I actually found a lot more ideas after a quick Twitter request, so here's what I've come up with so far. If I've missed any, please list in the comments, and thank you to everyone who sent me links and ideas. These are in no particular order, and I haven't gone into any great detail - I figure you can get a better sense from exploring the links below about how these worked.

1. Use a hashtag to promote a link to make purchases. Retweet several times over a few days and ask followers to do the same. The hashtag will show all the other people interested in the cause and build a sense of community around it.

2. Get a celebrity to back your cause (this doesn't need to be a TV celeb, it could be someone big in social media or someone big in the relevant field or industry).

3. Offer a prize; each person to donate gets entered to win. Get someone (or a company) to donate something cool for the prize.

4. Use Tipjoy, a great twitter widget with a "goal thermometer".

5. Find people on Twitter interested in your cause. Search by keyword, but also by location (try NearbyTweets).

6. Try something like Tweetsgiving - set up a simple website that tells your story, use a ChipIn widget, tweet it, list and thank donors, make it shareable in lots of ways.

7. Make your campaign time-limited, to encourage people to donate now. Encourage small amounts.

8. Plan a Twestival - i.e. find sponsors for a face-to-face event promoted through Twitter, where people can meet each other, socialize, maybe auction some donated stuff. If you can have more than one event going on concurrently in different places, it's a Twestival, otherwise, it's a Tweetup, but both are good!

9. Do a 12 For $12k - combine efforts with other causes to maximize exposure and viral power.

10. Try a Tweet-a-thon - a limited time campaign with a live video component (using a site like Ustream) and celebrities (of all kinds).

11. Find a "hook" - like 140 characters for 140 smiles - a simple idea about how small pebbles can create huge waves.

12. Write a personal appeal that really touches people.

13. Start a bidding war for something cool, silly, or meaningful.

14. Encourage champions for your cause to be able to set up their own "red kettles".

15. Create a game like Trick or Tweet.

Now you may have noticed some talk about "social media fundraising burnout"; however I believe that there are always people willing to help others. But you need to find a way to tap into your community (so you should have a community to begin with, or have a cause that community can gather around); and you need to have a story, be creative and have some fun with it, because no individual can really donate to every cause that will come across their Twitter stream. I believe that successful fundraising using Twitter needs to be easy, needs to be shareable, and needs to be interesting. Hmmm... now where might I have heard that before? The same keys to creating word of mouth apply here. Good luck!

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Community series on Acronym

2009-06-01T09:42:00.000-04:00

Just in case you didn't see it, Acronym has a cool series of posts all about community, which of course, is my thing.

Shirky: Associations must be the broker of connections - thoughts from the Man

Building and sustaining community - thoughts from me and Lindy

New thinking about community - thoughts from the Gode

Community at ISTE - Part I and Part II - thoughts from an association which is ahead of the curve. Check out this rockin deck from them:

25 Tips and Techniques for Using Social Media to Build Member Communities

View more Microsoft Word documents from Jennifer Ragan-fore.

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NTEN Water Cooler Chat 5/28

2009-05-28T11:20:00.001-04:00

Your friendly neighborhood Socialfish will be "IN" the NTEN Office Hours Communications Chat Room every Thursday (that's today!!) at 3 pm EST. Got burning questions about social media strategy? Or just want to hang out and shoot the breeze and get a break from work? Now's your chance!

Last week, we discussed the advantages and disadvantages of having chats like these on Twitter versus on open yet "off-Twitter" chat rooms. We discussed "ask the experts" Q&A forums and how to bring them into the 21st century; we discussed some of the popular webinar platforms and the process of working with webinars; and finally, we talked about "baby steps versus body slams" in terms of getting internal buy-in to new ideas. (General consensus - ask for forgiveness, not permission).

Whether the conversation is deep or just a nice break from the dullness of your daily routine, though, we're all about sharing. Pick our brains, we'll tell you our take on things.

Click HERE for the chat room if it's not working well embedded below.

[chat room removed after chat]

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Good concrete example of how to start listening on the social web

2009-05-26T10:59:00.000-04:00

Eric Johnson posted this interesting case study"Where are my people?" on the Case Foundation's blog. I do my own listening, of course, so I spotted this in my normal monitoring because he picked up on a Twitter conversation Lindy and I had at the nonprofit technology conference (which we mentioned here as number 3 of our top 12 WTF moments).

So of course my first thought was, sweet, what a great reference, that's so cool. But as I read his whole post much more carefully, I realized that Eric gives us a great, concrete example of how an organization might start doing some listening on the social web, using some search tools. He takes us through an actual search for a specific example organization, and shows us what we would get in different search tools and then what we might do with that information. Check it out, it's pretty awesome.

Bottom line is, if you haven't started listening yet, you should. Start now, even if you have no specific plans for thinking about social media strategy yet. You can spend a fair amount of time (as long as you want) listening and getting the lie of the social media land before you decide whether you need to start actively participating. Many organizations wonder where they should start - but the listening part will tell you that. The listening part will tell you where your people are. It will tell you what they are talking about. It will tell you when it might be wise to jump in.

Just start by listening.

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Web 3.0 = Data Web 1.0

2009-05-23T10:46:00.002-04:00

Want to know what that title's all about? Check out this truly awesome slideshow by one of my fave bloggers Scott Brinker.

"What will marketing be like in the semantic web, the burgeoning new "web of data"? This presentation for the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference outlines a framework of 7 missions for data web marketing."

Data Web Marketing

View more presentations from sjbrinker.

BONUS: A great little slide deck from Louis Gray on how to manage your data flow between social networks.

How To Optimize Your Social Media Data Flow for All Networks

View more presentations from Louis Gray.

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The Hidden Risks of Social Media – It’s Not What You Think

2009-05-22T10:39:00.003-04:00

I'm very interested in the issues surrounding managing risk around social media, and so I invited cool risk manager Leslie White of Croydon Consulting, LLC to write this guest post for me. She can be found on Twitter at @ltwhite.

This is my first guest blog posting so be patient with me. The topic is a summary of my session (with great assistance from KiKi L’Italien of the Optical Society of America) at ASAE’s Finance and Business Operations Symposium on the Hidden Risks of Social Media.

Most people expected me to talk about liability risks – defamation, invasion of privacy, copyright and trademark infringement and release of confidential or proprietary information – all serious risks but easily mitigated or managed. Instead, I identified the greatest risk of social media as the potential to cause a perceptual change of your association’s reputation or brand. Risk is as much about opportunity as loss. Innovation is risky and uncertain – you don’t know if the new service or program will be a success or the greatest failure since new Coke. So your reputation can be harmed or enhanced via social media. But by developing a social media strategy using informed, fact-based decisions your association can influence the outcome.

Lack of active participation in social media may be your greatest risk. Your association may not have a formal social media strategy but many of your employees and members (especially chapters) are already participating through LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, FriendFeed or Ning, just to name a few. People are conversing about your association - if they aren’t talking about the association, then you have a larger problem.

Without a social media strategy, you have abdicated your brand by allowing others control the conversation. The conversations are occurring, so your reputation is at risk and the potential harm increases by your lack of effective participation. Your goal is to engage the right people in the right communities with the right conversations. Your association may have a blog, Facebook page, LinkedIn group or Twitter alias but if you are not listening in the right places to the right people all you get is meaningless chatter. Without a social media strategy, your rewards, if any, will be limited and the potential for a disaster is high.

The best way to increase your chances for success is to develop and implement a social media strategy. The creation process should be an organizational effort involving many departments such as communications, public relations, human resources, legal, information technology, membership, and chapter or component relations. Identify and analyze the risks and rewards and establish the training, policies and procedures needed to have an effective program. A social media policy is critical and should tie into your employee handbook, members’ codes of conduct, user agreements, antitrust and conflict of interest policies. Review Lindy Dreyer’s series of posts on social media policies for some guidance. Also don’t forget to update your crisis communication plan to reflect the world of social media.

The importance and relevance of social media to the association world is still being discussed. But if you view social media as another communication tool to engage your employees, members and others relevant to your association, it has value. Social media can be a powerful tool for good or evil so evaluate your risks and rewards and develop a program that works best for your association.

The hidden risks of social media

View more presentations or Upload your own.

[photo credit]
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NTEN Water Cooler Chat 5/21

2009-05-21T10:49:00.001-04:00

Your friendly neighborhood Socialfish will be "IN" the NTEN Office Hours Communications Chat Room every Thursday (that's today!!) at 3 pm EST. Got burning questions about social media strategy? Or just want to hang out and shoot the breeze and get a break from work? Now's your chance!

Last week, we talked about all the awesome books we're reading; discussed different chat room apps and how they basically all suck (someone find me something better than Meebo, that has an archive, no spam and is embeddable, please!); compared Seesmic Desktop (not too impressive so far) to Tweetdeck (still the champ of Twitter clients) to Destroy Twitter (my personal fave - like Tweetdeck plus threaded conversations); debated about whether we've moving to FriendFeed or not; and gave Lynn Morton some feedback on her new AAPA conference blog. Phew!

Whether the conversation is deep or just a nice break from the dullness of your daily routine, though, we're all about sharing. Pick our brains, we'll tell you our take on things.

Click HERE for the chat room if it's not working well embedded below.

[chat room removed after chat]

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Creative Commons explained

2009-05-20T10:33:00.002-04:00

This slideshow does a good job of explaining what it means to license your stuff under a Creative Commons license.

Creative Commons : Spectrum of Rights

View more presentations from Yann Geffrotin.

Want more? Found this via RWW - and apparently there's a new CC Facebook app (more on that here). Also read this great analysis by Elizabeth Engel on intellectual property and Creative Commons.

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More on Social Media Policies

2009-05-19T10:29:00.000-04:00

Since we're talking about this a lot lately, here's another good slide deck from Elizabeth Engel. Plus we're quoted. W00t!

Social Media Policy

View more presentations from Elizabeth Engel.

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How easy is it to get to your employees?

2009-05-18T10:49:00.002-04:00

I recently came across this blog post at Twittercism by a blogger who took it upon himself to find all 47 (and counting) employees at Twitter and figure out what their roles are.

Here, then, in alphabetical order (by first name), is a list of the 47 people who work for Twitter including, with official confirmation where possible, details of what they do. If you have an interest in keeping up-to-speed with all developments on the network, you might find following some of these accounts of enormous benefit. Indeed, from what I have seen, many of these guys are more open and communicative about changes within Twitter than their esteemed leaders.

Now, obviously, this is about Twitter staff, who, as you would expect, are all on Twitter (though, interestingly, at least one of them has protected their updates). But to me, this was a big eye-opener, a sign of things to come.

A sign that people will expect a company or organization's staff to be accessible, to be found online.

But more than that, a sign that people will find ways to "get to the source" rather than listen to the party line. Did you see the last sentence of that quote? "...many of these guys are more open and communicative about changes within Twitter than their esteemed leaders".

Whoa.

So what does that mean for your organization? It simply means you need to be able to empower your people to speak for you, because they probably will anyway. There are plenty of ways to do that - start with good common sense policies.

Most importantly, you need to enable trust. You need to be able to figure out how to be transparent internally, so that people really understand when they can share information and when they can't and why. Don't wait on this one. Don't be that example of what not to do.

[photo credit]

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The 2 Paradoxes of Identity in a Digital Age

2009-05-17T10:06:00.004-04:00

I was flipping through my copy of John Palfrey and Urs Gasser's book Born Digital this morning, and I came across a very interesting section. In it the authors describe how "identity in a digital age gives rise to two paradoxes".

First, that people (digital natives specifically, but really anyone) can adjust their social identity (online) with ease, but have little ability to control how that identity is perceived by others. "Social identities are much richer, more varied, and more persistent - and far less under our control - than ever before."

Secondly, that although one can easily create multiple identities online, we are "more bound to a single identity". In other words, we can create different identities depending on whether we are in Facebook, or LinkedIn, or World of Warcraft, or Second Life - each tailored to the specific audience, and we THINK we can keep personal and professional identities compartmentalized - but in reality, these multiple identities are starting to converge more and more, "creating a much fuller picture of the individual than was possible before, spanning a greater period of time." Further, "An onlooker can look across these networked publics and pull together multiple versions of someone's identity together into a single view. Over time, the identity of a Digital Native may come to look extremely different from the identity that the Digital Native intends to convey to the world."

If we extrapolate these two paradoxes and think about how they relate to an organization's online identity as opposed to an individual's, I think they still apply. The first is really saying, "we think we have control over our brand, but we don't"; and the second one is saying, "we target communications and how we present ourselves to different audiences, but our whole brand identity is easily revealed." I realize I'm probably skipping a few logical steps in there, but you get the gist, right? The first is "the myth of control", the second is "authenticity is the new cool".

In other words, as an organization, we also have a social identity. We are building a presence on the social web, opening up our communications, learning how to engender trust, how to enable employees to represent us, how to have a personality, how to be transparent, etc. We're thinking about how to layer all kinds of rich conversation on top of our traditional marketing. We're adding complexity while peeling away layers, if that makes sense; we're learning to relinquish control and give our members more ownership, in several different yet connected spaces. More varied, more complex, less control.

At the same time, as we build our online presence, we try to be sensitive to the "cultures" of the outposts we choose to operate in. We listen to the social web, we find our members, we start conversing with them more socially in Facebook, more professionally in LinkedIn, more succinctly (and faster) in Twitter... if we're able to, we choose specific people to be community builders in each outpost according to who already has a comfort level for each space; we try and match our organizational presence to each culture in order to be welcomed and included in that outpost. We create our own personality around our homebase website too, of course.

But all those carefully thought out presences each become just one slice of our organizational brand, just one link among many in a 3-second Google search for the organization's name.

So is this a good thing or a bad thing? That's not really the point, is it. It just is what it is. But realizing that this is WHY you have to forget about control, this is WHY you have to be authentic, that's what matters, I think. That the complexity of our organizational social identity will only continue to grow, but the more it grows the less control we will have. And the less control we have, the more our brand will be (as it already is) shaped not by us as the organization but by the beholder. So we really have no choice but to be authentic, because anything else will be impossible to maintain over the long term.

But what does it mean to be authentic? Maybe it means facing the fact that you no longer have a value proposition in these social times. Maybe it means being more than just relevant (more than "not dead"). A very tough decision? Of course. But just think how easy it is now to start something new and fresh...

[photo credit]

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Changeblogging news

2009-05-16T11:00:00.004-04:00

Lots of cool saving the world going on in the social media stratosphere!

Check out this awesome site. Jobs for Change is a project of Change.org; their goal is "to spark a nationwide movement toward careers in the common good – including nonprofit, government, and social enterprise jobs. We’re currently building a huge database of social change jobs with our partners and have just hired a team of career advisors who will be blogging every day to provide guidance on finding and developing a career in social change."

Hey! I wonder if there might be synergies between them and Job Angels...? Talk amongst yourselves... :)

And in other news, Light, Camera, Help has launched! The Austin-based film festival judges will evaluate "films and videos with a cause directly related to a non-profit or grass roots organization", proceeds go to the winner. "This festival is the first of its kind in the nation and reflects the spirit of Austin, a city with prominent non-profit, grassroots and activism communities. Non-profits, grassroots organizations and filmmakers will use the festival to spread the word about their cause, develop a community of followers, and expand the film-for-a-cause genre." - Submit Your Entry now - you only have til June 30. Better get crackin'!

And more...

Geeks Unite for a Good Cause - The Society for Geek Advancement (yes, really) partners with Room to Read - get your geek gear here.

And last but not least...

My fave blogging tool/app/awesomeness Zemanta teams up with Social Actions and launches their Blogging for a Cause campaign - go blog about your fave nonprofit and win them $6k, their $3k winnings from NTEN plus a matched donation from Weber Shandwick. Deadline is June 6!

Every little helps. Get to it. :)

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An assignment: See the world as Google sees it

2009-05-15T00:44:00.002-04:00

Jeff Jarvis' book What Would Google Do? is about "seeing the world as Google sees it, finding your own new worldview, and seeing differently." He says, "It's hard to name an industry or institution [...] that should not be asking What Would Google Do?"

The book is fantastic and I highly recommend you read it. A quick scan of the chapter titles in the first half of the table of contents tells us that Google is about:

- new relationships
- new architecture
- new publications
- new society
- new economy
- new business reality
- new attitude
- new ethic
- new speed
- new imperatives

Now, there's a ton of great background info in the book, but we all know Google. We are what Jarvis calls Generation G (not all of us, maybe, but many of us. Anyone who instinctively searches rather than navigates the web.) We all have a sense right now, right here, what at least some of these "new" things Jarvis describes are all about.

In the second half of the book, Jarvis delves into specifics of what a Googley world might look like - looking at industries as diverse as advertising, manufacturing, service, utilities, public institutions, and retail. It's all visionary and practical at the same time (like Google itself!) - right up my street, of course, and happening all around us... I giggled to myself reading the chapter on aviation, where Jarvis describes planes with wifi - gotta love GoGoinflight, which I experienced for the first time on a Virgin America flight to San Francisco a couple of weeks ago and which is now going to be on ALL Air Tran flights. It's all happening, man. So cool. Radical!

So, rather than post a simple review of the book, blogger bud Jeff De Cagna and I were chatting and thought it would be fun - in fact, totally awesome! - to try this exercise for our association industry. We're going to coauthor an article on this... but we want your help. We want to be Googley about it. We want to know what you think:

How could associations be Googlier? What might the Global Google Association look like?

How would it operate? How would it make money? How would it harness the wisdom of its members? What kind of structure would it have? How would its members be defined? What would its internal structure be like?

WWGD? - The PowerPoint

View more presentations from jeffjarvis.

If you haven't read the book yet, look through this slide deck summary. You can also find lots of great examples from all the various industries Jarvis looks at in his blog, the Buzz Machine. Have a scan through that, then think about it, and come back and let us know in the comments or via email (maddie [at] socialfish.org). Give us a few practical ideas or just one. We'll put everyone's responses together in our article.

This is going to rock. Have some fun with it. Google forth and prosper!

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NTEN Water Cooler Chat 5/14

2009-05-14T09:38:00.001-04:00

Cluetrain-Plus-Ten: On Social Media Policies

2009-05-12T09:43:00.001-04:00

The ClueTrain Manifesto is the seminal writing that first defined the rise of the social web, the "market as conversation", back in 1999. From Wikipedia:

"Fundamental to 'The Cluetrain Manifesto' was the premise that the Internet provided a new and unique forum for communication that would ultimately shift the nature of business communication and marketing. Essentially, the change that is central to this text is one of breaking down corporate barriers and forming a conversation between those within and those outside a corporation -- online marketing would be more about holding conversations with people rather than broadcasting half-truths about products and services. The authors of the manifesto suggested that such a shift would occur through substantial and pervasive changes in current company-to-consumer interaction. Communication would shift from mission statements and marketing media aimed at consumer segments to open dialogues or conversations between businesses and consumers."

The manifesto is made up of 95 theses that break down and define the paradigm shift that we are all now familiar with.

Ten years later, blogger Keith Macarthur had the idea to celebrate this big anniversary by setting up a wiki - "Cluetrain-Plus-Ten" -where bloggers could sign up to each write a blog post about one of the 95 individual manifesto theses, to be published on the anniversary, April 28, 2009. Of course it's a a few days later than that, but when I came across this via Twitter it was noted that there were still a few of the theses that had not been picked, so I thought I'd go ahead and play.

So here's the one I chose.

Thesis 41: Companies make a religion of security, but this is largely a red herring. Most are protecting less against competitors than against their own market and workforce.

In the association world, it wasn't so long ago that not everyone even had a website. At the association where I used to work, I remember helping them build the website in 1997-98 - just before the Cluetrain Manifesto. This association was already 70 years old, the internet was a new and exciting way to advertise their programs. A broadcast system that could be more immediate and could grow as the organization grew (though systematically, not organically!). Websites, databases, electronic registration, shopping carts, all these things got more and more complex over time, and while they now allowed stakeholders to click on things and buy things and sign up for things, it was never about two way communication. It was never about the conversation.

And here we are now - how times have changed. With the conversation age and the relationship economy has come the associated risks of letting people speak - even if they might be wrong, or malicious, or defamatory, or anti-trustworthy (new word, you like?). We're all trying to figure out how to best allow our communities to interact and converse in a safe, protective yet non-spirit-dampening way. Openness and transparency are concepts still very new to a lot of organizations. Letting go of that pesky myth of control is still very uncomfortable. But organizations are, slowly but surely, realizing the truth of that 41st thesis from the Cluetrain Manifesto - that if you put in too many barriers to participation, in this new world your people will go elsewhere. Your members will congregate in places they can talk freely - about you or about anything. Your staff will build relationships through their cellphones if they can't get access on their office computers. As with Jurassic Park, life will find a way. (Hat tip to Scott Brinker for this perfect analogy).

But we're all working on it! We're testing out policies, looking at examples from the corporate world, discussing how to adapt them to our industry. Which gives me a perfect reason to remind everyone about Lindy's fantastic series on her blog about social media policies:

Introduction - social media policies cover concerns which are different depending on whether you're talking about your own "official" spaces or about your activities on unofficial outposts. These concerns are also different if you are talking about policies for employees, for members, for commenters, etc.; and the risks are different in each case.

Part 1 - what are we talking about? "The true goal of every type of social media or web policy should be to make interacting on the social web easier, more comfortable, and safer for your stakeholders."

Part 2 - unofficial outposts - create guidelines that encourage meaningful participation.

Part 3 - Policies for official outposts - do you need them? well, depends on the risks you're trying to mitigate.

Part 4 - Policies for your homebases - how to build a circle of trust for your website, your white label community, your blog community.

"Summing up four posts in one sentence:

Trust your peeps to do the right thing, and help them define what the right thing is."

I hope you will help us share your models and samples by adding links to your organizations' policies, terms of service, disclaimers etc. in the Association Social Media Wiki. Lindy and I are also working on templates for you - if you have any advice, or thoughts, or needs, or wants to share on that please get in touch. This is a steep learning curve for our industry, but I'm excited by how fast we're learning. I'm excited to see how the Cluetrain-plus-twenty will look!

...Want more? Check out Dave Fleet's series too.

31 Days to Build A Better Blog - Part 2

2009-05-09T10:24:00.001-04:00

Someone I know teaches us to understand, choose, do, learn - so here we go. I am now at the end of my 31 Days to Build a Better Blog personal challenge from Problogger. I listed the tasks for the first 15 days here; this is the second half of that project. Once again, in the spirit of designing in public, here are all the tasks from the challenge and how I did on them. (Numbers correspond to days but you didn't have to do it that fast if you didn't want to).

16. Solve a Problem - 7 Ways to Identify Reader Problems

This was a great task. I feel like my blog is really entirely about solving problems, really, or exploring solutions, so I didn't write anything more specific for this task, but I did look back at my posts from this "problem solving" point of view. Most importantly, Darren talks about how you use the search feature of your blog to figure out what people are looking for. I specifically looked at my search stats - Lijit specifically provides a section for "searches that produced zero results" - that's very important for thinking about things you should be writing about. Great tip that I will use forever!

17. Watch a First Time Reader Use Your Blog

This was a really interesting one. Since I don't work somewhere with people who have never seen my blog, I did it slightly differently than described, and sent a request out on Twitter for anyone who had never read my blog to have a look at it and give me a critique.

I got some awesome responses, from total strangers (who are no longer, I might add) and took their advice to heart by doing a bunch of things like cleaning up my sidebar, for example. I have more to do but this was a really useful exercise.

18. Create a Sneeze Page for Your Blog

A "sneeze page" is a page that links to old posts. Check! I also use a PostRank widget which shows top rated posts by readers - it totally works, it changes all the time, unlike if I just had my own list up there.

19. Write an Opinion Post

Umm, yeah, I do this a lot. Check!

20. Leave Comments on Other Blogs

This seems like a no-brainer but I very consciously spend time doing this. Every time I go through my blog reader, I basically skim everything, but "star" posts I want to read more carefully. Some I'll post about, some I'll just comment on, some I'll share in Google Reader, some I'll tweet. But whatever level of engagement I have with these particular blog posts, I try and make this part of my blogging routine. My comments are tracked here on Backtype.

21. Breathe Life Into an Old Post

By coincidence I just did this by expanding and rewriting my Twitter for orgs post so that I could guest post it on Twitip. I am sure I have many other posts that could be updated, but I think given the fact that social media changes so fast, it makes more sense and takes less time to just be on top of things and write new posts on the same themes. I also like to see the progression in not only my own thinking but the way the association blogosphere has grown into itself and graduated past the wonder years, has got more sophisticated in our thinking as a group.

22. Pay Special Attention to a Reader

Ooh lucky me - just did this one with my recent New Blogs of Note post.

23. Call Your Readers to ACTION

This one I am pretty good at, in different ways. In this post I reminded people to sign up for our School of SocialFish workshops before they fill up, and in this one I asked people to help Lindy with association-industry burning questions she could bring to the Smart Brief Advisory Board on your behalf. These are only two examples, I bet I could come up with a whole ton more. I try and ask people to participate a lot. Often it just takes an ask. (Read that link - it's a great article about calls to action and why they work for getting blog comments and lots of other things).

24.How to Use a Magazine to Improve Your Blog

Wow, this one is packed with great ideas. I have not had time to do this yet, am shelving it for later. You basically need to go look at a magazine, perhaps one on the topic of your blog, and see if you can be inspired by how it's designed, laid out, story ideas, sidebars, all kinds of stuff. I have a copy of Wired I haven't read (not a magazine I have read in a very long time too, so it would be fresh) - plus my latest copy of Associations Now. Maybe I'll do this exercise with both of them and have a think about it... perhaps fodder for a new post later...? To be continued.

25. Ask a Question: 10 Reasons Why Questions Work & 12 Tips on How to Ask Them

I actually don't do this often enough, and I now have started a little list in draft of things I might want to ask people. But I did ask my Yapstars to tell me their story over on Yapstar.org, and that has turned out to be really really awesome.

26. Improve Another Blog

This is really about doing your part in the blogosphere, but specifically with regards to one individual blog. I want to do more of this too, but in this case I did reach out to Jamie Notter and Eric Lanke regarding their new Hourglass blog on Generations which I really like a lot. I just offered to help on the back end, setting up their RSS flares and stuff like that. Of course part of the fun of blogging is experimenting with all that yourself, but since I'm in the business and all... :)

27. Hunt for Dead Links

This post suggests some tools for finding dead links: Link Sleuth, Dead Links, or this Wordpress Borken Link Checker. Sadly this is too techy for me, I tried them but have no idea what to do with it.

28. Write a "Review" Post

I haven't done a review in a long time. I didn't have time before I wanted to post this, so this remains in my "to-do" list, but I'd like to think about maybe doing a review of the crowdsourced issue of Associations Now. I've also read some really interesting books lately - Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block, The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, The Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, in the middle of the fantastic What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis, about to read World Wide Rave by David Meerman Scott. If you have other suggestions of things I should think about reviewing, let me know.

29. Develop a Plan to Boost Your Blog’s Profile and Readership Online

Because my blog is about social media, the things in this post are things I think about every single day. I really encourage other bloggers to read this one in particular, though, as there is some really important stuff in here about listening and building a social media presence from the blogger's point of view (as opposed to organizationally) - regardless of your blog's focus. Check out the really useful additional links at the end of the post too.

30. 17 Statistics to Monitor on Your Blog

I use Google Analytics and Lijit for this, and Lijit in particular sends me weekly stats so I don't forget to check them out. Postrank also tells me my most popular posts.

31. Plan the Next Steps for Your Blog

This post contains some useful ideas for ongoing planning regarding your blogging schedule. Like I said in relation to this earlier task about setting up an editorial calendar, this kind of pre-planning is not my thing because I have so much I want to post about all the time, but for some bloggers this is really helpful. Also very useful for thinking about an organization's blog.

So there you have it! I thought taking part in this "challenge" really helped me, even though it seemed like I was already doing a lot of the tasks, and even though I of course didn't get to absoutely everything. But sometimes, even though I feel like blogging is something that comes naturally to me, it's helpful to take a step back and look at it all more objectively (and subsequently get the feedback from the big boys that you seem to be doing things pretty well!). And also to get more ideas about blogging tips and tricks and structural things, rather than just ideas about content. I hope you'll dig around some of these links and see if you find things that are helpful for your own blogs, even if you don't need to do the whole challenge. I hope some of this stuff will be useful for you! Enjoy.

On Social Media Metrics

2009-05-08T10:38:00.000-04:00

Kristi had a good question on my recent Quote of the Month post about metrics:

"I get that, about page views, I really do. But when you need a starting point, something to show people who don't get soft stuff like engagement, something to show people who want hard data, exactly where do you start? It seems like a reasonable first step until you can bring some other info to the table (like evidence of recruitment/retention or contributions from members)."

Good point! As it happens, I've just heard of this Social Media Ad Metrics Definitions document written by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. According to them,

"Social media speaks to a new way of understanding how individual users are interacting with branded content via online publishers, social networks, blogs, and applications. Before the proliferation of social media, the primary way for users to receive advertiser information was one-way. Social Media has changed the paradigm of how people consume online media.

The most profound difference is that Social Media has added a participatory element where an individual not only receives information but has the ability to take part in the creation and distribution of content. Furthermore, social media tools have enabled a dialogue and discovery around this content. It is the combination of these unique and appealing aspects that defines the true value of social media.

Value is derived not only from the primary distribution of branded content but also the additional interactions that result as users share, participate with, and propagate advertising content. In the end, social media adds another layer of value through its ability to engage users and create additional reach."

They then break down the "social media landscape" into three areas, "Social Media Sites" [social networks], "Blogs" [which I agree are an entity all their own], and " Widgets & Social Media Applications" which are things which enable content to live in more than one place.

The document defines each and lists metrics appropriate to look at for each, such as unique visitors, return visits, interaction rate (with an ad or application), embeds, comments, poll votes, number of members/fans, inlinks, influence, etc. I won't list them all of course, you should definitely go and have a look. I honestly don't know how comprehensive the list is, but it seems pretty good. The document is written for a marketer's point of view, but if you think about it, what an organization might need to know to benchmark and measure its own progress within these social spaces is pretty much the same as what a marketing team would want to know in order to better reach target audiences and track ROI.

Have a look-see; I'd love to know if you think this is useful from an association perspective, because, as Kristi says, those all important "softer" metrics like retention and recruitment numbers won't come in until you've put some time in to your social media efforts.

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NTEN Water Cooler Chat 5/7

2009-05-07T13:16:00.001-04:00

Quote of the Month: Beth Kanter on Metrics

2009-05-05T09:41:00.001-04:00

Beth Kanter's session at the NTC was on "Mapping Social Media Strategy To Metrics: Listen, Learn, Adapt". Her session (and panelists) rocked and that's where she gave us my Quote of the Month:

Wondering what to measure when using social media?

"Measure what you need to know to figure out if you have reached your goals."

Sounds like a "doh!", doesn't it! But think about it. Have you clarified exactly what your objectives are for your socmed project? How will you know if you've achieved success? You'd be surprised how many of us are measuring the wrong things - maybe based on "what we've always measured". (Wee hint: pageviews are irrelevant...)

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Energizing Events Through Social Media - NTC Session Stuff

2009-05-04T11:27:00.002-04:00

Just a quick post to let you know that all the materials from our NTC session are up on our website. This includes the full video, slides, and bibliography of links and good stuff. We're waiting for the ReadyTalk recording, but you don't really need it if you watch/listen to the video.

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I think I'm going to take notes like this from now on.

2009-05-02T09:44:00.001-04:00

I heart Rob Cottingham. These are his notes on Clay Shirky's talk at NTC. Rob, what do you use to get this online? a Bamboo tablet? So frackin' awesome.

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Top Twelve “WTF?” Moments From the NonProfit Technology Conference

2009-04-30T13:31:00.008-04:00

So Lindy and I got back late last night from NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference, which was, of course totally intense.

We’d never been before (and were able to find lots of others who hadn't either, creating another layer of collective newbie experience (awesome!))... We were able to meet a whole ton of cool people IRL who we had gotten to know online, which was, as always, truly incredible... We met a bunch of brand new folks too, not least some amazing socmed/nonprofit experts we follow all across the social web... We recruited at least 8 people to YAP.... We hung out with an awesome DC contingent... We designed and presented a session on using social media to energize face to face events that went really well (and was recorded live, so we’ll let you know details for how to get the recording if you were not able to watch it at the time)...

Overall, we got a good sense of the great things happening in the nonprofit space and made some fantastic and hopefully long-lasting connections.

But you know us – we’re fairly irreverent and a bit cynical for this do-gooder scene (teehee) – so true to form, just for fun, instead of doing a serious recap, I thought I’d share our top twelve “WTF?” moments. Please note tongue is firmly planted in cheek!

No. 12 - we had a stress attack in the whole run up to our session about how everyone at this conference appeared to be obsessed with fundraising... and then no one in our session cared about that. Phew! Note that link is to the Twitter stream for our session - lots of good stuff if you want to check it out.

No. 11 - In a generally female-dominated industry, the NTEN Award winners – and the presenters of those winners – were all male. It was a little weird. Jus' sayin'.

No. 10 - Rockstar Beth Kanter was being followed around by hordes of groupies all day every day for 4 days. By the time we caught up with her in the hotel bar on Tuesday night, the poor dear was about ready to collapse or cry or both. We had to give her hugs and help her with chill vibes for a little while. [Love!] :)

No. 9 – The conference food was awesome. Seriously. Not joking. In what weird twilight zone does that happen??

No. 8 – The very active Twitter stream went dead by 9:30 pm on the first two nights. Dang, y’all, association peeps party way harder than you nonprofiteers. Lightweights!

No. 7 – Speaking of which – the DC contingent rocked the house (despite jetlag) at the afterparty on Monday night, closed the bar down and refused to leave (and all headed elsewhere for more shenanigans late into the night). Who closes a bar at 12:30???

No. 6 – The session on sustaining and building community had a Facebook Causes guy on the panel. Eh?

No. 5 – The whole conference’s obsession with the Swine Flu. I mean, really. Avoiding swine flu is easy. Drink lots of bourbon.

Or click here to find out if you have it.

No. 4 – The panel session on grassroots advocacy’s key final takeaway – “write emails that cut through the noise”. Email? Really? Seriously?

No. 3 – David Neff of the American Cancer Society telling a whole room of nonprofits that they should start with Facebook. Dave – we heart you, but… huh??? You really think so?

No. 2 – The Google guy in the usability session downplaying site search because “it usually doesn’t work” – and never mentioning Google gadgets. Or the fact that the two websites they were looking at had no search box. That’s your usability problem right there dude. Who “navigates” any more?

Number 1 "WTF?" Moment... Rob Cottingham of Noise to Signal fame doing stand-up comedy at the afterparty. Yes, really! Awesome.

Seriously, though, it was an honor to be part of this conference. I couldn’t think of a good joke to make in my list about Clay Shirky, whose genius and awesomeness know no bounds, but I will share this perfect link from Chad Norman on 15 Clay Shirky Quotes That Blew My Mind at NTC which sums that up quite nicely. [UPDATE - and check out Rob's doodles on his keynote - OMG. Kool and the Gang or what!!]

Nor can I say anything about Holly Ross and the NTENny staff (a whole five or six of them total!) to adequately express how really truly amazing they are. Thanks so much for the invitation to participate. It was really great to see you again (or for the first time F2F) and I really hope we can make it to Atlanta next year!

To end, here (among many, many good ones) is my all time 09ntc favorite tweet of the conference.

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NTEN Water Cooler Chat 4/30

2009-04-30T13:04:00.002-04:00

8 Steps for Building Community on Twitter: Tips for Membership Organizations

2009-04-25T09:58:00.001-04:00

(Image by Maggi_94)

Here's a repost of my TwiTip Guest post from 4/11/09. You've already read this, but I'm including it here for archival purposes. This was a follow-up from this post where I laid out 4 step for setting up an organizational Twitter account. For the TwiTip post, I rewrote it by adding steps for building community in general.

Twitter can be a great space for building community around your membership-based organization, whether you work for a professional society, trade association or a cause-related nonprofit.

Here's a quick eight-step rundown of how to set up a Twitter account for your ".org". This isn't the only way, of course. But if you are starting from scratch, this is what we're finding works the best.

1. Set up a main "umbrella" account for the organization - e.g. @ORGtweets or just @ORG ("ORG" being whatever your acronym is).

Why? So people can find you easily. In the description, put in a nutshell what the organization does. A mission statement in under 140 characters, for example. (Be pithy - people like that. There are lots of other places you can be boring). For the website link field of the profile, create a Twitter landing page on your website which says, "Welcome to the Twitter page for [ORG]! We're glad you're here. Here's what we're all about. Here are some of the things we tweet about. And here are our team members, should you be interested in following them too." Then list your staff on Twitter as per #2.

2. Give your staff their own individual accounts - e.g. ORG_Bob, Maggie@ORG, etc. If you have several staffers already on Twitter with their own followers, allow them to use their accounts for tweeting on your behalf, assuming they are willing to do that.

Why? because people want to see individual people representing their organizations. There can be backlash when that doesn't happen. Presumably each staffer will have their own personality, their own things they like to tweet about personally and professionally, and they will also have their own content that they are responsible for - namely PR, or marketing, or advocacy, or publications, or events. Each person will grow their own followers independently - and can share them under the umbrella account as they go along (see #5.)

3. Use a multiple Twitter account client to manage your accounts.

Why? Because it's MUCH easier than signing in and out of accounts all day. SplitTweet works great, as do HootSuite and CoTweet (currently in private beta). All these services allow you to monitor multiple accounts at the same time - so your team can choose to tweet something to their individual accounts and the umbrella account, or just to one at a time. SplitTweet has a cool "track your brand mentions" feature; CoTweet allows you to tag your replies as being from a particular person, and allows you to assign responses to team members. HootSuite has great analytics and intelligent search for Twitter conversations. All three are always improving and evolving as professional Twitter use grows, and there may be a new multiple account application on the scene by the time this post appears, so just find the one that has the functionality you need.

4. Ask each staffer to follow people who tweet regularly about your industry or cause, as well as actively Tweeting members, donors, or other stakeholders.

Why? Because Twitter is about conversation - and directed conversation can build community. Find those other interested Tweeps simply by using Twitter search for your particular industry keywords, your organization name mentions, even competitor or sister organization mentions. Twitter directories like Twellow , We Follow , and Twibs allow you to find people based on tags or types of business. Each staffer should find their own relevant people to follow, based on their particular interests or area of expertise. If you have members, or an email list of any kind, use Twitter's own import function to import emails and find those members already on Twitter (only do a few at a time). Look for names you recognize, or clearly active Tweeters (you can tell by the number of updates, friends and followers they have). You only need to find a few key active stakeholders - others will come with them when they start to interact with you. Ask those you have a good "real life" relationship with to help you spread the word about your new presence on Twitter.

5. Under the umbrella account, periodically retweet items from your team members as well as from their followers/friends.

Why? To show a coherent stream of content where visitors can immediately see what you're about and that different people speak for you in different ways. If managed well, you can follow relevant public conversations between team members under the umbrella too - conversations that might draw people in to whatever topic you are discussing. Retweeting good stuff by people who are part of your network gives them an ego boost and shows them that it's not all about you, that you're paying attention to what they are talking about, that you're interested in learning from them too.

6. Got an annual conference or big fundraising event? Use hashtags to enable your registrants and anyone else to find you through your event promotion.

Why? Because the buzz leading up to and during face-to-face events can bring your organization into focus and can attract new people to your cause. Tweet lots of good stuff about how cool your event will be and use and promote a specific designated hashtag for it. Remember to publicize the hashtag in your other promotional materials too. We're often asked about whether it's a good idea to set up a separate Twitter account (as opposed to a hashtag) for a conference - this can work too, but a hashtag is more easily found in search, will trend if you have lots of people Tweeting the event, and allows you to differentiate between annual conferences from year to year - e.g. #Tech09 versus #Tech10. Also, the staff members who have built a following on Twitter will stay visible and won't be hidden under a conference account. They will each be enabled to add their own personal takes on the conference, by talking about the particular sessions they are attending and the things they care about from their individual (professional) viewpoints.If you set up a new account for each conference, you are basically starting from zero friends and followers each time - and it takes time to build those networks.

7. Bottom line: Share great content.

Why? Because great content sparks word of mouth, and word of mouth (you guessed it!) builds community. Ask each staffer to take responsibility for sharing links with interesting and useful information relevant to their specific areas of expertise. Encourage them to engage in conversation with their Twitter networks, respond to things other people are tweeting about, retweet links and tweets from people outside your organization as well as your own; don't be afraid to actually converse about topics of interest. Find champions within your networks to help you spread the word about specific issues. Use your umbrella account to corral it all in a place where people can find it easily. Community builds around shared interests, but only if you nurture it and feed it, which means listening as well as talking.

8. Bonus: Benchmark and measure!

Why? So you can see how it's all going and know when it might be necessary to put in a bit more effort or move up to the next level of awesomeness. Benchmark and measure your progress using whatever metrics make the most sense to you. Number of followers, organization links retweeted, new registrants to your events, etc. There are lots of specific Twitter analytics apps out there, but measure engagement in other ways too. Building community online is all about building community offline.

That should be enough to get you started! Here are a couple places to find examples of associations and nonprofits on Twitter, as well as three related posts from Twitip that dig a bit deeper into Tweeting for organizational use. Tweet on!

- Associations on Twitter
- more associations on Twitter
- Nonprofits on Twitter
- more on nonprofits using Twitter

TwiTip Resources:
- Building an Effective Business Profile on Twitter
- Tips for Brands and Nonprofits
- How to Handle Multiple Users Within Your Company

San Francisco Here We Come

2009-04-24T10:58:00.003-04:00

So we're about to head off to sunny San Francisco for NTEN's NTC09 conference. I know some of you will be there and I'm very excited to meet a bunch of NTENny peeps in person for the first time, as well as hang out with Brian Solis, Chris Carfi, Margaret Francis and any other local Tweeps we can find! If you are local and want to meet up, please contact us via Twitter (@maddiegrant and @lindydreyer).

I've also set up a YAPpy group inside the event network (NTConnect - login required) in case any association folks will be there, so we can meet up and hang out. (You only need two YAPstars in a room to create a party...)

Lindy and I have never been to NTC before, so we're very excited and we are sure to do some live blogging while we're there - you can also follow the Twitter stream if you are interested in the going's on out West. Here's everything you can do remotely via their live coverage.

And big news, our session will be available via ReadyTalk! Here's the session info, Unleashing the Ultimate Cool Factor: Case Studies of Conferences Energized Through Social Media, and here's the link to the free webinar of the session - 10:30 PST on Tuesday 4/28.

It's a panel, so I hope everyone has good questions. If you have some (about using social media at events) please do tweet them to us before and during, using the hashtags #09ntc and #cool. Thanks!

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140 Health Care Uses for Twitter

2009-04-24T10:29:00.000-04:00

If this doesn't inspire you...

Go on. Try finding 140 uses for your industry. Just for fun, or for your future.

140 Health Care Uses For Twitter

View more presentations from Phil Baumann.

NTEN Water Cooler Chat 4/23

2009-04-23T13:29:00.002-04:00

Your friendly neighborhood Socialfish will be "IN" the NTEN Office Hours Communications Chat Room every Thursday (that's today!!) at 3 pm EST. Got burning questions about social media strategy? Or just want to hang out and shoot the breeze and get a break from work? Now's your chance!

Last week, Lindy and I showed up super fashionably late to our chat due to a client meeting - sorry guys! must pay the bills! - and found our regular crew engaged in a deep and super serious conversation about the semantics around the word "nonprofit" as opposed to "community benefit" (they were discussing Hildy Gottlieb's ideas). So we just hung out and watched the awesomeness unfold (...at least until someone mentioned tequila). So happy! You guys are so great!

Whether the conversation is deep or just a nice break from the dullness of your daily routine, though, we're all about sharing. Pick our brains, we'll tell you our take on things.

Click HERE for the chat room if it's not working well embedded below.

[chat room removed after chat]

What viral video can do for you

2009-04-22T10:01:00.000-04:00

I wrote a little article for ASAE's Tech Council E-newsletter, Technoscope, on an IEEE video project which they created to celebrate their 125th anniversary. My article has a bit of background, but you don't really need it to get it. It's a simple idea which created a really moving, still ongoing, simply and deeply engaging and beautiful thing.

Here's the video. Watch to the end as they get more and more creative with the piece of paper with the IEEE logo...

But here's the clincher. I posted a link to the video on Twitter (the article itself is behind the firewall, which is irritating in the extreme) and immediately got this back:

BAM! That's what you want your stuff to do. Make it easy, make it shareable, make it WOM-worthy, and your value will spread all by itself.

Reasons Why Some Social Networks Fail

2009-04-21T10:17:00.001-04:00

Just read this fantastic post over at AriWriter from guest poster Ethan Yarbrough, who explains how as a social media expert he wants to be asked not only how many social networks he has managed, but how many have succeeded or failed.

Read the details of the two networks he built that did not work and why.

"In the first example I misdiagnosed the need and thus designed the wrong solution, in the second case I designed a solution for a need that didn’t exist. I am an idealist and an enthusiast, and my excitement over social networking and media led me to the same mistake that many others have made: I fell for the tools and forgot about the strategy. I fell victim to the Field of Dreams Fallacy: “If you build it, they will come” … it works in the movies, but it’s not a good strategy for designing a social network."

[My bold]

Building community using social networks, whether white label or on public sites like CollectiveX, is not an easy task.

That's why you must have strategic objectives you want to accomplish before you can figure out the roadmap for getting there. Your objective cannot be "we need to set up a social network". Why are you thinking about doing that? Is it because your members are self-forming groups all over the place and you want them to have a home base to do it in? Is it because you have chapters in different locations that could benefit from having a central place to get to know each other? Is it because you want to provide a place for "raise your hand" volunteerism, where everyone knows how to find things they can do for the association and for each other?

This is also why social objects are so incredibly important. After the initial launch, people will not automatically begin to interact in your new space unless you give them social objects and actions to do around those social objects. Being connected by virtue of being members of your organization is not enough. "Networking" on its own is not enough.

Read Ethan's "lessons learned". Major food for thought.

31 Days to Build A Better Blog

2009-04-20T11:52:00.007-04:00

So I'm taking part in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog challenge (well, exercise - you're just challenging yourself) from ProBlogger Darren Rowse.

I thought in the spirit of designing in public I'd let you know what I've done so far and how it's all going, as we're about half way through. If you have a blog or are interested in starting one, you can't go wrong doing this challenge too or simply bookmarking this post (and the second one I'll do at the end of the 31 days) and checking out each step. You totally do not have to do it in 31 days straight - I am, because otherwise it will get superceded by everything else, but you can do it at your own pace or just browse through the tips to see if anything sounds useful to you.

Each of these numbers corresponds to a daily task, and my comment afterwards is what I did with it.

1. Write an Elevator Pitch for Your Blog

I have one! W00t! "Association/non-profit blog on social media, community building, strategic imagination." Check!

2. Write a List Post

Awesome coincidence, had just written one! List posts are great, everyone loves them and they are pretty easy to write.

3. Promote a Blog Post

I didn't do more than I already do on this task, but there are lots of good tips here. I'm already all over the web, I figured I should keep on keeping on and not saturate the market (hehehe)!

4. Analyze a Top Blog in Your Niche

I actually skipped this one. I like to do my own thing, having had a bit of success with it so far... :)

5. Email a Blog Reader

I'm pretty good at interacting with my blog community (I hope), but this was a great coincidence that I asked you guys for help on that same day.

6.Must Read Advice from Successful Bloggers

I wasn't too thrilled with this. There were three posts each from nine bloggers. I would have preferred one from each, or having them be organized by subject matter (for example so I could skip all the monetizing ones - I don't plan to ever put ads on this blog). Having said that, Liz Strauss on why people don't comment and this one on 43 web design mistakes to avoid were fantastic posts.

7. Write a Link Post

This one was easy for me; I linked to the Leadership Meme post that I had just written. I probably need to actually write more of my own stuff and quit linking to everyone else all the time. hahaha....

8. Interlink Your Old Blog Posts

Interlinking to older blog posts is something I think I do pretty well, as I try to write thematically. I've bookmarked this one though, to come back to periodically. If I had time I would do more of this.

9. Join a Forum and Start Participating

Hmmm... Lucky me!

10. Set Up ‘Alerts’ to Monitor What is Happening in Your Niche

Dude. Listening? I'm all over it. :)

11. Come Up with 10 Post Ideas

"Ever run out of things to write about on your blog?" Ummm... no. Skipped this one. I have a bunch of posts in draft at all times. Can't keep up with all the stuff I want to write about. But if you ever get blogger's block, read this post. His exercises for extending past posts are really good.

12. Develop an Editorial Calendar for Your Blog

I skipped this too. I have my weekly chat post set to go on Thursdays, otherwise I post when I have good stuff to post. Which is pretty much all the time (I hope you agree!). If I tried to get more "organized" about it all my backlog would probably get worse.

13. Take a Trip to the ‘Mall’ and Improve Your Blog

I haven't actually done this specifically yet, but I do like to think about what I see out there in the real world. I think I'll save this one for later.

14. Update a Key Page on Your Blog

This one was another no-brainer for me, I'm continuously changing my about page (linked from my license plate above, currently points to my website about page), moving stuff around on here and trying widgets and thinking about usability. BUT, I want to find a way to move all my badges and many of my widgets to somewhere other than the sidebar, as it all gets messy (even though I change them up a lot and get rid of stuff that's not useful). Need to figure this one out still. If anyone has any ideas let me know - I don't think you can do "pages" on Blogger, not that I can figure out anyway.

15. Find a Blog Buddy.

Hmmm. Check! :)

So I'm feeling pretty good about the fact that so far I've been able to do all these tasks pretty easily (or skip them because I was already doing the directives in general). But I think this has been a really useful project so far. It's hard to take a step back and look at your own blog as an evolving piece of work, and doing something like this has helped me confirm that there's a lot about blogging that I "get" instinctively, that it comes naturally to me I suppose, but also it's been good for thinking about it all in a different way than just "from the gut". I'm enjoying it a lot and can't wait to see what the next 2 weeks worth of tasks will be. I'll certainly let you know with another recap later, and we'll see together whether it's helped me build a better blog after all...!

NTEN Water Cooler Chat 4/16

2009-04-16T13:25:00.002-04:00

"The edges between work and social life are blurring. People are shifting their social networks into their work networks and vice versa—business associates and childhood friends, side by side. Associations need to capture that."

And the hilarious comment from newcomer to the chat room Peter De Jager, that he had learned more about associations in the last fifteen minutes than in the last five years. LOL! So I guess you just had to be there. So no excuses! Join us or miss out. :)

Whether the conversation is deep or just a nice break from the dullness of your daily routine, though, we're all about sharing. Pick our brains, we'll tell you our take on things.

Click HERE for the chat room if it's not working well embedded below.

[chat room removed after chat]

Check Out Association Jam

2009-04-16T09:47:00.000-04:00

Brought to you by the cool kids at Wild Apricot and Bonasource Inc., Association Jam is a news site for associations, with user-submitted articles of note. Like a Digg for Associations. You can:

1) Find stories (most popular float to the top, based on votes by others);
2) Submit stories;
3) Vote for stories, and join or start discussions;
4) Connect with association peeps.

The site is still in beta, but please check it out and feel free to add stuff and give your feedback. My take? One word: Awesomesauce.

Tagging As a Community Building Tool

2009-04-15T10:41:00.001-04:00

I'm just finished an awesome book called Tagging: People-Powered MetaData for the Social Web by Gene Smith.

It sounds like a dry subject, but tagging is really super cool and has massive implications for the design, building and nurturing of online communities. I thought I'd jot down some notes I took straight out of the book so you can see why.

*************************************

How tagging works:
1) Tags are multiple ways of finding something
2) Tags are a way to browse
3) Tags are part of a community pool - act as a bridge between personal and community knowledge
4) Tags connect objects to other objects
5) Tags are hooks used to pull information together from other website that use tags, like Technorait, Flickr, Delicious.

Tags by themselves are like a filing system without files - need USERS and RESOURCES to be useful.

Tags can be created from three perspectives:

- Information Architecture - for organizational content
- Social Software - to facilitate group interaction
- Personal Information Management (PIM) - organizing stuff for an individual's use.
There can be friction between these.

Tagging is related to the re-emergence of oral culture online. (Alex Wright)

Tagging is NOT like folders, where you move something from one place (e.g. inbox) to another (folder) - tags allow things to live in several places at once.

Tagging is SOCIAL = personal + collaborative at the same time. Tags show minority viewpoints as well as consensus. (Tag Clouds are a visualization of this).

Value Centered Design = value comes from balancing the goals of the people who create the system (RETURN ON INVESTMENT) with those of the people who use the system (RETURN ON EXPERIENCE).

Motivations for users to tag (ROE):
- ease of use
- to manage personal info
- sharing and collaborating (---> communities of interest)
- fun
- self-expression

Business benefits (ROI):
- to facilitate collaboration
- to obtain descriptive metadata
- to enhance findability
- to increase participation
- to identify patterns
- to augment existing classification systems
- to spark innovation (e.g. data mashups, geodata/geotagging)

THEREFORE:

- tagging must be made easy,
- it must help people manage their info as well as yours
- it must encourage collaboration, play, self-expression.

ALIGN USERS' GOALS WITH SYSTEM'S GOALS.

Tags connect objects together and help disparate users find each other = social experience through common interests.

*******************************************

I know this is just the bare bones and I could get a lot deeper into this, but I'm wondering if anyone has found "communities of interest" bubbling up from their organization's use of tags? Do you allow user-generated tags?

Good Tweet <<>> Bad Tweet

2009-04-12T10:10:00.001-04:00

Good Tweet Vs Bad Tweet: A Guide To Being Not Boring On Twitter

View more presentations from Flightpath.

Feed Hell

2009-04-12T09:22:00.004-04:00

OMG. What a complete nightmare. To anyone who experienced craziness from my new Feedblitz feed, I am so sorry. I have completely shut it down now, so hopefully that should stop soon, if not immediately (which is what I'm hoping).

I have reverted to my boring old Blogger feed with no bells and whistles. Everyone breathe a sigh of relief. And whatever you do, DO NOT switch your own feeds to Feedblitz!! I suspect they got a massive influx of new feeds after the widely discussed Feedburner problems and they didn't plan for it so their servers have completely lost the plot.

If you don't hate me, please resubscribe here. (Copy link and paste to your reader subscription field.)

Thank you so much, and again I really am so sorry for the hassle and the feed spam.

The Leadership Meme

2009-04-11T18:05:00.003-04:00

So Jamie started what is turning out to be a really interesting meme asking three qualities a leader should have. His three? "Know yourself", "Understand systems", "Learn communication". Read his post for his analysis.

Jeff then posted his: "Take responsibility", "Be courageous", "Embrace learning"...

...and Deirde added hers: "Have a spine", "Have a heart", "Have open ears and eyes". Their posts have wonderful further descriptions of what they mean by their choices.

So here are mine, which actually relate to a lot the others have already said.

1. Combine big picture thinking with practical knowledge.

Know how things work on the ground, even when you see the future in the blue sky. Engage team members at all levels. Provide future direction that has a roadmap for getting there.

2. Give ownership of the system to each player.

Help everyone have a part to play in the strategic direction of an organization. Encourage ideas from all sources. Remind each team member how important they are. Break down silos. Level the playing field. Encourage individuals to shine. Give kudos when deserved.

3. Be real.

Be accessible. Talk to people. Don't be afraid to be wrong - but figure that out early. Don't be afraid to argue. Don't be afraid to laugh or cry. Ask questions. Mentor. Share yourself.

That's it from me. Can't wait to read more. Next!

10 Ways Associations Can Be More Like Twitter

2009-04-10T08:54:00.000-04:00

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!

NTEN Water Cooler Chat 4/9

2009-04-09T13:27:00.002-04:00

Your friendly neighborhood Socialfish will be "IN" the NTEN Office Hours Communications Chat Room every Thursday (that's today!!) at 3 pm EST. Got burning questions about social media strategy? Or just want to hang out and shoot the breeze and get a break from work? Now's your chance!

Last week, we had a fairly intense conversation about setting up a blog for your association: whether it's a good idea to ask publications staff to switch to blogging (no!), whether controversy helps (yes!), and how blogging (specifically, maintaining momentum) is actually quite difficult and you absolutely have to find people who will do it for the love, whether staff or members, or it will fail.

Then, true to form, we cheered ourselves up with these addictive sources of non-work-related amusement: Unnecessary Quotes, Twitfave, #oneliner, and of course, Beer Haiku Daily.

Whether the conversation is deep or just a nice break from the dullness of your daily routine, though, we're all about sharing. Pick our brains, we'll tell you our take on things.

Click HERE for the chat room if it's not working well embedded below.

[chat room removed after chat]

Reader Help Requested: An Association Blog Dilemma

2009-04-09T08:52:00.003-04:00

Image by bitzcelt via Flickr

Lindy and I were recently approached by a colleague in the association world who told us about a dilemma they were having with their newly launched blog. They asked if I would post their dilemma here and ask my readers to comment.

This is an interesting one! We gave her our take, but we're all curious to know what you would do, what your thought are about it.

Here's the pickle:

Our association blog is multi-author representing various industry topics from multiple perspectives. In our initial weeks, things are going very well. Lots of traffic on the site, etc. Two other industry blogs launched during the same month we did. The dilemma is that we all have the same authors who are supplying us with the same (or recycled) content. We are all participating on the same social networking groups, posting the same articles with links to our blogs. I’m trying to embrace the cooperative spirit of the blogger world. However, this just isn’t helpful to our readers. If they can read the same article on 3 different blog sites, we, of course, want our blog to win this competitive game. We want to be the best industry blog, with the best authors, with the best content. We have the same small audience subscribing to our blogs and participating on our social sites. You may recall, we developed a blogger application with a list of rules and guidelines, and a release form. We ask our volunteer authors for “original” content, but not “exclusive” content. The other two blogs are managed by supplier companies for the industry our association represents, however, neither are member companies. One of the managers of the competing blog has reached out to us to “partner” and cross-promote. We would approach this “frienemy” thing different if they were a sponsor, exhibitor, or advertiser with the association, however, we’re really not interested in “partnering” with a non-member company.

1) Are we turning off our readers by posting recycled content?

2) Do we go back to our blog authors to ask them to only submit to us “exclusive” content for our blog?

3) Am I silly to be worrying about sharing content with competing blogs?

4) Is this situation likely to resolve itself as we all gain wider readership and more folks in the industry begin to blog?

What do you think? Please post in the comments. Thanks!

What's YOUR story?

2009-04-08T10:27:00.001-04:00

Do you know who's part of your community?

Who are your people?
Why are they here?
How have they changed?
What's important to them?

Have you asked recently? And while we're at it.. what's YOUR story?

Want to Swim like a SocialFish?

2009-04-07T10:35:00.001-04:00

Lindy and I currently working on our Spring schedule of School of SocialFish workshops. Full information is here. Our workshops are small (4-8 people), intensive (3 hours), hands-on (bring a laptop) and tailored to the people in the room. We do workshops specific to an organization (we come to you) or we group individuals who have specific interests together.

We do practical workshops on blogging (introductory and advanced, individual and organizational), on specific outpost strategies for social spaces like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, as well as thematic workshops on listening and brand monitoring, nurturing your homebase community, engaging young professionals, building buzz around your conference, and lots more.

If you are interested, as an individual or organization, in any of our workshops please let us know as soon as possible as space is limited. Dates are not yet set and will depend on each group members' availability.

Please also forward to any colleagues or friends who might be interested. Thank you in advance for sharing some SocialFish love!

New RSS feed for SocialFishing...

2009-04-06T13:22:00.007-04:00

If you subscribe to this blog in a reader, please note I have changed my RSS service to Feedblitz, due to ongoing crapness from Feedburner.

[UPDATE OMG did this not work at all. Reverted to Blogger feed with no bells and whistles.]

Thanks!

Yummy Shrimp with Chili and Basil Recipe

2009-04-05T11:14:00.001-04:00

Oh, plus my interview at Social Gumbo, which I thought you might like to have a look at. (The recipe is included at the bottom of the post, just fyi!)

George "Loki" Williams is a New Orleans based, music industry blogger whose first blog, HumidCity, became notable when he podcasted evacuee interviews during the Katrina disaster and subsequently used viral methods to help find musicians and industry people in the aftermath. He's also worked with community radio and continues to work with the Human Digital Memory Bank which records Katrina and Rita survivor stories - read all about his story here. Thank you, Loki, for the interview!

Just riding the coattails...

2009-04-03T10:42:00.001-04:00

Just wanted to let you know that my lovely biz partner Lindy's now on the advisory board for Smart Brief on Social Media. Totally awesome - and check out the illustrious company she's keeping. Holy sh- I mean, Wow!

Here's the press release with more on Smart Brief. Their goal with the (free) SBOSM newsletter and blog is to "enlighten business leaders and marketers about ways to use social media to their advantage."

This is great for her, and great for SocialFish, but far more importantly, it's great for you. Lindy will be able to bring the association perspective to the table, ask questions on your behalf or bring up those all-important issues about community building and engagement as well as social media marketing and technology. Let's all keep her well stocked with all those burning questions we like to think about. As a matter of fact, she's already got two questions for you. Please give some good stuff!

Yay Lindy!

Nice SocMed Slideshow from the National Wildlife Federation

2009-04-03T10:33:00.003-04:00

NWF Staff: Intro to Social Media

View more presentations from Danielle Brigida.

Got this via Beth Kanter. It's by Danielle Brigida of NWF, who I had the pleasure of meeting at the DC Twestival and who created this for NWF staff. See what you think!

NTEN Water Cooler Chat 4/2

2009-04-02T13:00:00.001-04:00

Quote of the Week : On Community

2009-04-01T10:42:00.000-04:00

"The key to creating or transforming community is to see the power in the small but important elements of being with others. The shift we seek needs to be embodied in each invitation we make, each relationship we encounter, and each meeting we attend. For at the most operational and practical level, after all the thinking about policy, strategy, mission, and milestones, it gets down to this: How are we going to be when we gather together?

- Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging

Lil' Pile O' Links - Toolbox

2009-03-31T10:35:00.002-04:00

Here are a few links to tools I have been looking at recently, as well as some interesting posts about other stuff.

On Social Media Monitoring tools (thanks to social media explorer who explains what these do.)

FREE
101 level monitoring
Filtrbox - brand tracking
IceRocket Blog Trends (the best blog search service I've found so far)
Nielsen's Blogpulse
SM2 by Techrigy
There are tons more search and brand tracking tools, these are just a couple worth looking at.

NOT FREE
Scout Labs
Radian6
Cymfony
Scout Labs, in particular, looks really promising and Lindy and I will do a full post on these once we've had a chance to really dig into them.

Monitoring Tools on Twitter
There are more new tools every day, here's just one good post which mentions 8 Twitter analytics tools.

More Twitter stuff
Twibes - now you are a seasoned Twitterer, use this to recommend some of your fave people to follow.
Mailana - very cool visualization of your network. Click to go deeper.
FriendFiltr - a way to really get the scoop on who's following you.
Tagalus - the user-powered hashtag dictionary.
WeFollow - add yourself to this directory.

On Social Media Marketing
Great white paper - The social media marketing industry report - here's the download link.

On PR 2.0
Brian Solis' new book with Deirdre Breakenridge, Putting the Public back in Public Relations is now out. I can't wait for mine to arrive.

On Facebook for Professional Use:
Ten Facebook Tips for Power Users
How to Use the New Business Page Layout
5 Tips for Marketing on Facebook's New Pages
Facebook's redesign - good concept, but not there yet (good summary of the changes and what everyone's pissed about)
And this is not about tools, but Joshua Porter predicts Facebook will go asymmetrical - I totally agree, read the post to find out what we're on about...

On Communities
Online community examples from lots of industries; here are the examples for the nonprofit sector.

And finally, a really nice little post on Ethics by Dave Fleet.

Phew! Thinking this might keep y'all busy for a little while. :)

New blogs of note

2009-03-30T10:30:00.001-04:00

Just wanted to let you know about four new bloggers I have had the distinct pleasure of getting to know recently.

Pat Jones is the Executive Director of the International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association. He blogs at Tolling Points.

Deirdre Reid is an association pro, and was until recently Director of Member Services at the California Building Industry Association; before that, she was at the National Association of Home Builders. She's currently making a move to Raleigh, NC and her personal blog is at Reid All About It.

Toni Rae is a performing artist and Association Director of Education - she blogs at Toni Rae's Version of Life.

Art Hsieh is CEO of the San Francisco Paramedic Association. He writes at EMTeacher.

All four, despite being relatively new at blogging as far as I know, have that special voice I love, where they write in an open, inviting way that shares part of themselves, that lets their personalities shine through, regardless of whether their posts are specifically personal or more professional in tone.

I hope you'll welcome them and I'm so glad they are part of our ever-expanding association blogosphere.

Twitter is not about what we had for lunch. Get over it.

2009-03-27T12:40:00.007-04:00

Here's a little bit of a rant, for which I apologize in advance.

I find the theme about Twitter being all about what people eat for lunch totally irritating at this point. Yes, maybe two years ago people would write about every little thing they did, including eating lunch. But Twitter has evolved far beyond that now - and if some of us by some bizarre twist of fate are still only reading those kinds of tweets, then clearly we are not following the right people.

My response to the listserve discussion about Twitter referenced by Jamie's post above was this:

This is an interesting conversation. Part of my work as a social media strategist is to help associations figure out how to use Twitter, but I decided long ago that it was not part of that job to convince anyone to use it. So my take would simply be that with 6 million people on Twitter in the US alone (see http://www.quantcast.com/twitter.com), and with Twitter's demographics showing 79% of users are between the ages of 18 and 49 and 63% college-educated, (http://www.quantcast.com/twitter.com#demographics), the chances are at just about 100% that some of your association's members are on Twitter.

It is a communications channel which enables word of mouth about your organization, but only you can decide if you have 1) something to talk about and 2) enough of your stakeholders there to do the talking.

Here's a starter list of association professionals on Twitter - (If you use Twitter and aren't here, add yourself and your association.) You can always contact anyone on this list and see how they use it for their organization.

Here's a screenshot of my Twitter screen right at this moment. (I only have a mini-laptop, so I'll just show you the number of tweets that I'm seeing on screen right now, lest you think I am craftily hiding all the lunch posts. And yes, I follow people all over the world, so just because it's late afternoon here does not mean it's not lunchtime somewhere else right now).

So lookee here. We have:

- a message from Pepco, reminding people they don't tweet over the weekend and how to reach them. That's pretty cool I think.

- someone speaking at a conference and inviting us to have a look

- someone giving kudos to someone else who apparently helped them via Twitter (reading between the lines)

- someone giving info about weekend activities

- someone tweeting the Government 2.0 conference

- someone discussing marketing and inviting us to check it out.

Obviously this is only one snapshot - I could very easily bore you with a whole bunch more, but I'll refrain. But what do you notice? 0 for 6 on what anyone had for lunch. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm not saying people don't tweet mundane things about their lives. I personally just tweeted that I had a splitting headache - not particularly useful info for anyone. But perhaps that explains why I feel like ranting about something right about now.

Here's how I experience Twitter - Twitip summed it up perfectly as the 90-10 rule for successful Twitter networking.

"90% of what you share on Twitter should be made up of personal insights and thoughts along with a heavy dose of helpful links, while 10% should be made up of messages that more directly benefit you."

This is advice, but it's not a hard and fast rule. It's also, in my opinion, a naturally developing parameter for how most of us actually do use Twitter, even if we've never heard of this rule. Of course there are days when the percentages won't be 90-10. Of course there are people who consciously don't follow this at all. But generally speaking, as professionals who use Twitter for work and play, this rule does work. And so what does that mean? It means for every "I have a headache" or "Chicken KaPow for lunch at Thai Tanic" or "Must go to bed now", there are many, many more useful tweets, with links to interesting sites, or links to blog posts, or general discussion about specific issues, or conference tweets, or news, or citizen journalism, or whatever.

Do or do not, says Yoda - just quit bitching about it.

That's all, I feel better now, thanks! Have a great weekend! :)

On aggregators and change: I haz a conundrum

2009-03-27T10:55:00.004-04:00

In this post on the SmartBrief Blog, Merrit Colaizzi talked to Guy Kawasaki about his popular blog aggregator site, Alltop.

This question caught my eye.

With the demise of newspapers-as-we-knew-them, what role do you think news aggregators like Alltop and SmartBrief will play in the future of media (and social media)?

[Kawasaki] This is a complex question. Are we hurting these publications because people come to our sites and find the nuggets that they want without having to page through entire papers or sites? That is, are we hurting their page views?

Or are we helping them by sending them more traffic as our readers discover articles they never would have seen before? Clearly we both need these publications to survive because an aggregator needs something to aggregate.

I don't have an answer to this chicken-and-egg question, but it seemed funny that I saw this just after this blog post from Ben about unsubscribing from all his blog feeds. In the comments to Ben's post, I had a bit of a stress attack about the fact that I had culled a bunch of individual association blogs from my Reader and just subscribed to the A-List Bloggers aggregator instead. After having done this, I realized I had just lowered everyone's subscriber number by one - which doesn't seem like a big deal, but philosophically, to me, it was a big deal. It's like by subscribing to a blog I'm showing my support more than just by reading random posts. (I suppose retweeting and/or linking are levels of "sharing the love" which goes one step further too, but that's probably for another post).

It just seems like as soon as you get comfortable with something (e.g. subscribing to blogs in a Reader), the quantity of content becomes overwhelming so you try something else to control it (eg blog/news aggregators) but then soon it becomes time to move on to something else (e.g. using Twitter as a Reader and not subscribing to individual blogs any more) - which normally doesn't bother me at all, it's kind of a natural process, but it seems like every once in a while (like in this instance) I need to stop and think about it and wonder if I'm doing "the right thing". I'm not saying there is a right thing, there is certainly not just one way to do anything in social media, but it's a little conumdrum I thought might be interesting to leave hanging here on a Friday for you. :)

NTEN Water Cooler Chat 3/26

2009-03-26T13:38:00.001-04:00

Your friendly neighborhood Socialfish will be "IN" the NTEN Office Hours Communications Chat Room every Thursday (that's today!!) at 3 pm EST. Got burning questions about social media strategy? Or just want to hang out and shoot the breeze and get a break from work? Now's your chance!

Last week, we discussed Smart Brief on Social Media and how you can send them a tweet (marked #sbosm) with a good blog post of yours and they may include it in their e-newsletter. We also talked about how crowdsourcing your blogroll actually renders it meaningless. We sighed about Facebook, concluded we'd wait and see (I stayed out of that one - but just FYI, Lindy likes the new FB!) and we talked a bit about Friendfeed and how we have not quite figured it out yet (but I'm working on it!)

Whether the conversation is deep or just a nice break from the dullness of your daily routine, though, we're all about sharing. Pick our brains, we'll tell you our take on things.

Click HERE for the chat room if it's not working well embedded below.

[chat room removed after chat]

Who does socmed at your association?

2009-03-26T09:30:00.003-04:00

Check out this great discussion on YAP.

What do you think? Are you seeing associations hiring younger people specifically to have social media as part of their roles, or do you seem them hiring with more of a management-level strategic focus?

Crowdsourcing the world: Dopplr's Social Atlas

2009-03-21T11:29:00.001-04:00

Dopplr is basically a travel site where you can share your trips with your friends. Here's my public page.

More on Dopplr from Blonde 2.0:

"...Two trends converge around Dopplr to make it unique. The first trend is that of user presence and declarative living. Like Twitter or the status function in Facebook, Dopplr gives users the opportunity to declare where they will be traveling to in the future and share this information with their connections. This is a great way for users to find out if any of their friends will be traveling to the same places that they will be traveling to.

Another feature that makes Dopplr different from other travel services is that it takes all of your travel data, quantifies it and then sends it back to you. Marko [Marko Ahtisaari, Dopplr's CEO] tells me that they just sent out an annual report to all of their 2008 travelers with pictures of all the cities they traveled to, data about where they spent their time, who they coincided with during their travels, and for opt-in users, carbon footprint data about the environmental impact of their travels.

Marko says that its users are composed of a group of people who travel most all around the world. They create “the social atlas of the world, built by smart travelers.”

Since the social web is all about fostering relationships in real life, a site like Dopplr can help you find people to get together with when you are traveling. Social media mavens and association people are similar (when not one and the same) in that you can build fantastic relationships with them online but not get to meet or see them in person very often, as they're all spread out all over the place.

Anyway I got this email last week from Dopplr, which I thought I'd share because it's just SO COOL.

Dear Maddie,

We're launching an important new set of features on Dopplr that we're calling the Social Atlas.

The first part of it lets you build a record of places you've been in your home city and cities around the world, like quality restaurants and hotels - as well as other things you've explored.

The idea is that our collective travel knowledge will inform and improve the travel experience of all. Any places you've marked will be visible to the people that can see your travels on Dopplr.

In addition, your choices will be aggregated, anonymised and visualised into part of a unique overall picture of a city visible to all Dopplr users.

How can I help?

We've tried to make the process of marking places as easy as possible. Wherever you see a place you can click on the green "+" next to it to say you've been there. Click a second time to say you've been there and liked it. If you want to undo all of this, just click a third time.

Eventually the Social Atlas will be on mobile devices, part of a Dopplr mobile application which we'll be launching very soon. [...]

Check it out - here's the overview page for DC.

Here's the page for Toronto, where we'll be for ASAE's annual meeting in August.

Click on the "Eat", "Stay", "Explore", "Q&A" tabs for more specifics for each place.

So you might say, well how is this different to any ratings site for hotels, or restaurants, or travel sites in general? First of all, have you tried any of those sites lately? I've had a nightmare several times trying to find good places to eat via Google search on my phone, where all the search results I get are old or bad. This happened in Miami, until Twitter came to the rescue. Secondly, I think the fact that there's a "friend" recommendation layer beyond just the aggregated recommendations is huge. Of course, it's all only as good as the participation on there, so go check it out.

[Aside - I bet national organizations could find lots of good uses for this too as one way to get people thinking about their conferences and connecting beforehand.]

Fun times!

Awesomesauce is...

2009-03-19T19:12:00.000-04:00

NTEN Water Cooler Chat 3/19

2009-03-19T13:22:00.002-04:00

Your friendly neighborhood Socialfish will be "IN" the NTEN Office Hours Communications Chat Room every Thursday (that's today!!) at 3 pm EST. Got burning questions about social media strategy? Or just want to hang out and shoot the breeze and get a break from work? Now's your chance!

Last week, Chris Bucchere and Dave Sabol very kindly hosted for us. They report back that the following supercool things were discussed:
- SxSW and my.SxSW,
- Building in-house social networks (some of the tools and platforms that are commercially available - HigherLogic, Sharepoint, Jive, Ning, etc.),
- Twitter etiquette (what does it mean when a "brand follows you" and what are good strategies for associations that want to have an Association twitter account),
- this great interview of Marc Andreessen by Charlie Rose
- and a bit about the AFP Association for Fundraising Professionals.

W00t! Thanks guys!

Whether the conversation is deep or just a nice break from the dullness of your daily routine, though, we're all about sharing. Pick our brains, we'll tell you our take on things.

Click HERE for the chat room if it's not working well embedded below.

[chat room removed after chat]

Technology Enables Community

2009-03-19T09:23:00.000-04:00

I really really love this beautiful post by Brian Solis, which he just wrote upon his return from SxSW this week.

The lessons learned here are prevalent to all who use the social tools to facilitate interaction with friends, associates, influencers, tastemakers, brand ambassadors, and your community.

The real story is the human network and the Social Economy that fosters the conversations that serve as its currency - on and offline.

But it’s not just about the tools...it’s about the emotional and psychological connection between people and our investment in the personal traits that others find irresistible.

Relationships….RELATIONSHIPS…count for everything here, and they’re measured by the mutually beneficial rewards that all parties experience over time. We invest in each other and harvest the fruits of our collaboration and interconnection.

I follow you on Twitter!

We’re Facebook friends!

I “like” you all the time on FriendFeed!

I subscribe to your RSS feed!

It may seem surreal, but it’s fascinatingly real and momentous.

We’re forging new and relevant links online. It’s the metamorphosis from online to offline that validates and certifies connections and symbolizes true opportunity to develop genuine relationships.

We’re putting faces to avatars while in person exchanges of emotions and sincerity replace emoticons.

Read the whole thing. I wasn't at SxSW, of course, but that's not the point. The point, which I totally "get", deep down in my bone marrow, is that all of these online social interactions are about getting to know real people, making real friendships, real connections. Face to face and in real life. Especially for those who are naturally shy, who might find it hard to just start talking to a stranger at some networking event. Which is actually most of us, I think. Social media tools and social networks and social spaces enable us to get to know each other, over time, in a very real way which is only enhanced and makes for true happiness when it culminates in meeting someone face to face for the first time.

Technology enables community. I say it a lot. A good friend told me that a hundred years ago when I first started this blog, and it's been my mantra ever since. Posts like Brian's serve as a good reminder that (even while we bitch about Facebook, and moan about the time suck, and stress about monetizing, and pull our hair out trying to figure out the ROI...) this is what it's all about. I don't want to ever forget that. Thank you, Brian.

Awesome use of Twitter: The American Evaluation Association

2009-03-17T12:39:00.003-04:00

Check this out.

I got permission to reprint this email from an ASAE Technology listserve discussion:

Twitter does have some uses that might be seen as slightly unconventional.

We use it basically as a very easy content management system for bulletin items - but most people never realize that the content is fed through twitter.

To explain more, we have installed twitterbar [a Firefox Add-on] on key staff computers. That allows them to send twitter updates at will with almost no interruption in their workflow (it integrates with the URL window in their firefox browser). Then, staff can send an item to twitter when they come across a resource or new member content, etc. We call it Esoterica for Evaluators.

This serves two purposes - it is a useful tool for sharing information about resources and what our members are doing/producing. An unexpected - and extremely useful - side effect has been that it gives staff a concrete action, that is well perceived by members, when someone requests that we share something (including things that we didn't use to have a place to post). We get intermittent requests, from members with valid content to share, asking if we can help to spread the word (new forum on linkedin, new online evaluation guide available, extended blog content). Staff can now respond with a concrete immediate action rather than waiting for the monthly newsletter (and some items don't rise to the level of a newsletter article).

Yes, we do have a very active listserv, and many members post there, but the value of this approach is twofold: 1. The association is perceived as taking an action in support of the member, and 2. It is saved for posterity, and less buried, than listserv content.

You can actually access the twitter-fed content in four ways:

1. On our webpage at http://eval.org/aeaweb.asp: If you looked on this webpage the user would never know that the content was driven by twitter - other than that we do include "Follow Updates on Twitter" at the bottom for those who wish to do so (this could be removed).

2. One can subscribe to the RSS feed (see the link at the top of the page).

3. One can actually see it on the twitter page for that content http://twitter.com/aeaweb

4. One can follow it on Twitter.

I also want to thank colleagues at ASHA for their assistance as we were conceiving this project.

Susan

Susan Kistler
Executive Director, American Evaluation Association

In short, they have a few staffers using the Twitterbar for content in, and they just use the Twitter RSS feed for content out. They will archive for their own purposes.

Additional awesomeness - check out their page explaining what RSS is and why you might want to subscribe to their feeds.

Nicely done!

SocialFishing...

I've moved!!

Online Community Vendor Spotlight: Social Collective

Literally cryin' my eyes out at how cool this is.

NTEN Water Cooler Social Media Chat 7/30

Online Community Vendor Spotlight: ThePort Network

ASAE09's hub tool rocks.

Quote of the week: Get the culture right

Do you use social media for Professional Development activities?

On aligning social media strategy with your association focus

NTEN Water Cooler Social Media Chat 7/23

Online Community Vendor Spotlight: Socious

Quote of the week: Authenticity is Saying Things Right

Personal vs professional social media identities

NTEN Water Cooler Social Media Chat 7/16

Thank you SO so much

Quote of the Week: Listening Internally

Buzz2009 Twitterfountain

20 objectives for organizational use of Twitter for events

Only a few spots left for Buzz2009!

NTEN Water Cooler Social Media Chat 7/2

Web design using principles from psychology

Top Ten Must Read links of the week

New Media - Old Risks

NTEN Water Cooler Social Media Chat 6/25

How to Think Like A Social Media Marketing Genius

Twitter Search in Plain English

Trying to take a break.

NTEN Water Cooler Social Media Chat 6/18

What's all the Buzz about?

On personal vs corporate branding

BlogPotomac 2009

NTEN Water Cooler Social Media Chat 6/11

Is Twitter "information overload and interaction underload"?

Associations and voting

Authenticity means...

Quote of the week: Audience vs Community

NTEN Water Cooler Social Media Chat 6/4

Self-explanatory awesomeness

Small pebbles make big waves: 15 tips for fundraising on Twitter

Community series on Acronym

NTEN Water Cooler Chat 5/28

Good concrete example of how to start listening on the social web

Web 3.0 = Data Web 1.0

The Hidden Risks of Social Media – It’s Not What You Think

NTEN Water Cooler Chat 5/21

Creative Commons explained

More on Social Media Policies

How easy is it to get to your employees?

The 2 Paradoxes of Identity in a Digital Age

Changeblogging news

An assignment: See the world as Google sees it

NTEN Water Cooler Chat 5/14

Cluetrain-Plus-Ten: On Social Media Policies

31 Days to Build A Better Blog - Part 2

On Social Media Metrics

NTEN Water Cooler Chat 5/7

Quote of the Month: Beth Kanter on Metrics

Energizing Events Through Social Media - NTC Session Stuff

I think I'm going to take notes like this from now on.

Top Twelve “WTF?” Moments From the NonProfit Technology Conference

NTEN Water Cooler Chat 4/30

8 Steps for Building Community on Twitter: Tips for Membership Organizations

San Francisco Here We Come

140 Health Care Uses for Twitter

NTEN Water Cooler Chat 4/23

What viral video can do for you

Reasons Why Some Social Networks Fail

31 Days to Build A Better Blog

NTEN Water Cooler Chat 4/16

Check Out Association Jam

Tagging As a Community Building Tool

Good Tweet <<>> Bad Tweet

Feed Hell

The Leadership Meme

10 Ways Associations Can Be More Like Twitter

NTEN Water Cooler Chat 4/9

Reader Help Requested: An Association Blog Dilemma

What's YOUR story?

Want to Swim like a SocialFish?