With all the election happenings, I’ve been a little delayed with the recap from last week’s Social Media Club DC event.
Here’s a quick description:
Social Technologies in Associations and Non-Profits: Understanding the Present, Exploring the Future
“As associations and non-profit organizations begin to implement social technologies in their work, we are learning valuable lessons. Drawing on research findings, strategic insights and the actual case examples of two leading organizations, this session will explore the current state of social technology use in associations and non-profits. It will also examine future applications of these tools.”
The event was organized and moderated by Jeff De Cagna of Principled Innovation LLC and featured Qui Diaz of Livingston Communications, Peter Hutchins of ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership and Peter Dietz of Social Actions.
The speakers all shared great points about the use of social tech in associations, if you have any questions at all, these are your people. I’d like to focus for a bit here on a few findings from research conducted among associations:
- - Associations are mainly still in the experimental phase when it comes to social media/ social technologies.
- - Many of the associations who do blog focus on issues relevant to them, but some do have blogs which focus on the association.
- - Some associations are using social networks and some are using wikis internally.
- - Almost half (48%) of social tech conversations are being driven by the Marketing or Communications Team.
- - 13 % of conversations are being driven by people working on Membership.
Jeff’s general thought on this: As far as adoption of social technologies go, associations are moving forward. Groups are now trying to develop social media policies (who on staff should blog, including volunteers, featuring external content, endorsing external views). We need to bring it (the use of social tech) out of this marketing focus area and spread it across the company.
Jeff touched on something that associations really should pay attention to, the Facebook effect. Much in the way facebook and other social technology have empowered the masses, they are empowering your members and changing expectations of membership. People are creating their own groups on social sites and, in some cases, are using official association logos to recruit members. What are the major issues here?
- These “members” aren’t really linked to the organization. They don’t pay dues and aren’t connected to association happenings.
- You aren’t a part of the community!
I’ve done searches and surprised a few clients with myspace pages, facebook groups and twitter mentions that they had no clue about. If you (or your account team) is not already monitoring your online presence, please start or find someone to do it for you and let you know what’s going on.
There’s no reason to try to jump in and take control of every conversation going on, but there’s also no reason to NOT know what people are saying about you, your brand and/or association.
