Archive for July, 2005

July 15, 2005

ASAE Conference

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On Monday, ASAE and the Center for Association Leadership will be launching a blog devoted to its upcoming conference in Nashville. I’ve agreed to join fellow association bloggers Jeff, Jamie, David, Shawn, Ben, and ASAE’s Scott Briscoe in contributing to it. My suggestion to treat it like a reality show (”let’s vote a blogger off every day!”) went nowhere, although it’s possible they may vote me off, anyway.

July 15, 2005

Target. Market.

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I left a comment on Chris Bailey’s blog that got kind of rambling but I kind of like the point I was trying (but probably failing) to make and will be referring to it in the future, so I’ll go ahead and link to it here. (TypePad sure makes finding individual comment permalinks hard.)

July 14, 2005

How Many Blogs? Fewer Than You Think.

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Wondering how many blogs there are is a lot like wondering how many websites there are (a lot, but it doesn’t really matter, and most of ‘em are junk). But Steve Rubel points to a post from David Sifry indicating that Technorati is calculating 900,000 posts a day, which, even allowing for spam posts, gives a better indication of how active the blogosphere is.

When you think about it, that’s not really that big. I’d be more interested in discovering overall blog circulation, which is infinitely harder to track (but again, with recent surveys indicating pretty low self-proclaimed usage of blogs, probably comparatively small — and the overwhelming majority of those 900,000 posts will never be read by anybody but the author).

But even if the number of postings is relatively tiny as far as a mass media goes, Sifry’s post itself shows that the voice of blogs is louder than any measurement might indicate — since the real point of the article is the rollout of some apologies and bug fixes for Technorati, which has been taking a beating for its buggy service, and basically declared dead, by bloggers like Jeremy Wright and Duncan Riley. Shrill voices sound louder (and are harder to ignore) in an echo chamber. (I don’t think Technorati’s dead, but they haven’t handled their recent service failures well — they need a little more transparency on their homepage itself when their servers are overloaded. For an alternative, Ice Rocket seems pretty cool.)

July 13, 2005

Post & Cover

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ACCA’s blog was featured in the latest issue of Ragan’s Nonprofit Communicators Update, along with Pat Cleary’s blog at NAM.

I can’t find a link to the article on the web so here’s the pertinent lede:

“Blogger Ana Marie Cox, aka The Wonkette, recently told an audience of communicators that an organizational blog might be a contradiction in terms, implying that that much of what passes for business communication is bland, boring, sanitized … Cox tossed out her remarks during Ragan’s Corporate Communicators Conference, June 8–10 in Las Vegas. Perhaps she’d change her mind if she sampled the blogs of the National Association of Manufacturers and the Air Conditioning Contractors of America.”

While I appreciate the kind words about our blog (”its strong headlines and enticing leads pull readers in”), the most interesting part of the article, I thought, was this description of the inner workings of NAM’s blog:

“Cleary calls himself ‘blogger in chief’ and writes his posts while sitting in his study each night with his dog lying on the floor next to him. Staffer David Kraylik (aka ‘blogger apprentice’) sees to the technical details and also comes up with content.

‘It could be garbage, it could be brilliant—you never know,’ Cleary says. ‘We plug our ears, close our eyes tight, post it and dive under our desks.’

Here is perhaps the key ingredient to the blog’s success: Cleary and Kraylik post all the content without review or approval from the higher-ups at NAM.

Cleary says, ‘Anything written by committee will get watered down. It’s got to be entertaining, hip and punchy enough that people will read it. Nobody wants to read anything that’s canned.’”

Of course, the same could be said about anything put out by associations. Down with committee-speak!

July 13, 2005

Crank It Up

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Bob Bly wonders if thinking an HP commercial is a bad influence on children makes him a crank. Yes, it does.

July 12, 2005

It’s a Great Time to Be an Entrepreneur (In the Association Market)

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A couple weeks ago, Joe Kraus (he founded Excite.com back during the bubble and, more recently, Jotspot, a pretty cool hosted wiki/collaboration platform) wrote a post that’s gotten a lot of play in the small business blogosphere — “It’s a Great Time to be an Entrepreneur.”

Why does he think it’s great? When he founded Excite, Joe says it took $3 mil to reach launch, but only $100k to reach launch with his latest venture. He says his “top four reasons” for the reduction in costs are:

– Hardware is 100x cheaper, thanks to open source

– Infrastructure software is cheaper, thanks to open source

– Easy access to low-cost global labor

– “Search engine marketing” and the ability to better target smaller niche audiences

A pretty good recipe for easy-bake technology startups. But these same factors can play a role in making it a great time for associations as well. Because we are all “technology” companies now.

We’re in the technology business because we’re in the relationship business. And there ain’t no way to create and nurture relationships in any effective sort of way these days without being a technology company.

Creating and nurturing relationships is not solely about having committees, playing golf with a few members, talking to people on the phone, chatting with folks at the conferences and training sessions. If your membership is sizable at all, there is a very real limit to what these encounters (while useful for their own reasons) can tell you, because they may not be (and probably are not) in the least representative.

They either become echo chambers that provide a false sense of security about your organization’s capabilities, or lend an irrational weight to what those members have to say. (Ever had a colleague or staffer say something like, “Hey. I was talking to John Smith and he thought X service is bad and we should replace it with Y. We might want to look into that.” John Smith may have a good point. Or, he may not.)

Creating and nurturing relationships is about identifying — understanding — learning from — and being actively engaged in every single interaction your members have with your organization.

Sound crazy? Well, it happens every day.

Suppose, as I said in the above paragraph,member John Smith said that he thought X service was bad and should be replaced. What if you immediately punched a button and showed him a screen indicating that of the 76% of your members who indicated an initial interest in the service, 48% have participated, and 81% of those indicated satisfaction with the service immediately thereafter. Three months following use of the service, 68% still rated it highly and 42% of the total users of the service said they selected it because they had referred been referred to it by other users.

And what if your system identified users of that service as representing an identifiable interest group … and a viable market for its own niche community or even association … that you could start … before someone else does.

Yeah, I’m just making numbers up, but you see my point. Sound crazy? Happens every day …

(And the eyes of lots of association execs who think of themselves as “people” people just glazed over at those numbers. Because they’re not getting it, either. Member relationships, in the end — and the ability to serve those relationships profitably — are about numbers. Without the numbers — without understanding the interactions — you have nothing more to offer your organization than an educated guess.)

The tools available to associations now — open source! affordable! surprisingly powerful! — are overwhelming compared to the options we had ten (or five) years ago. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how many are actually taking advantage of them. I still see a lot of associations who think of technology as “the database” (and maybe “the website”) being run by “membership” or “IT.”

What a dangerous error and huge lost opportunity. You wanna compete in a world where anybody can raise $100k and start competing with you, then realize that it’s not about managing data. It’s not even about managing relationships. It’s about being managed by relationships.

It ain’t about “surveys.” It ain’t about “focus groups.” It’s about Every. Single. Interaction.

And yet …. as I read through the standard association management periodicals and such, I’m struck at how the revolution so aptly described by Joe Kraus seems to have passed the association community by.

Is anybody talking about it? Is anybody doing it?

I still see many colleagues whose associations continue to spend huge sums of money (huge!) on “association management systems” that are overpriced, overfeatured, buggy, and, god help us, proprietary. Why?

P.S. A fair question to ask is, is my organization doing it? Nope, not the way we should be. Or I should say, not yet. I have to keep a lid on some things we do for obvious reasons, but I have been embroiled in a very interesting project for a number of months now. I should be able to offer an initial report publicly in another 2-3 months (and can barely wait as I’m downright giddy about the whole thing).

P.P.S. Jeez, some of my last few posts have gotten heavy. I’ll get off my soapbox and lighten up for the rest of the week (though I do want to return to the topic of discussion Jeff and I had in comments to the last post some time soon).