Archive for December, 2005
December 22, 2005
Physics for Poets
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Observing an Event Changes the Event: Physics works for organizations, too. We learn more from observing our members than from asking them to explain their choices. More here.
December 20, 2005
2005 Association Inc. “Why Not?” Awards
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And here are the 2005 Association Inc. “Why Not?” Awards (as in, “Hey, I can give out awards. Why not?”). I should call them the “Utterly Meaningless, Completely Random, Off-the-top-of-my-head Awards.”
Best Rebranding. The merger of Association Management and Executive Update magazines resulted in a new magazine, Associations Now. This is admittedly a comparative award because they’d originally decided to call it “Association Leadership,” a name which sounds very old-school. (I read an association exec write somewhere else, I forget who and where, that it sounded like a name one of their committees would have thought up.) Associations Now is a much better name (and the magazine itself is off to a very interesting, and more importantly useful, start.)
Best Speaker at the ASAE Conference. Stan Slap, hands down.
Most Interesting Trend. Podcasting — not in and of itself, but the fact that associations seem so much more interested in podcasting than blogging (when in fact, good podcasts are a lot harder to create and maintain than good blogs).
Best Off-the-Cuff Remark. David Gammel mentioning in a conference call that association bloggers don’t make up so much a “blogosphere” as a “blogoclump” — thus giving us a collective name.
Best Blogoclump Blog Post. This is hard and I can’t pick one. So I’ll just call attention to three posts that I found thought-provoking: Jamie Notter on the power of incompetence; Jeff De Cagna at Association Renewal introducing the DUMB concept; and Chris Bailey on “handsy” management styles.
Best Association-Sponsored Blog. Pat Cleary’s Manufacturer’s Blog.
Most Improved Blogoclump Blog. Ben Martin, who in the year since completing his CAE certification (which his blog was started to chronicle) has cast a wider net.
Best Commenter. Jeff De Cagna, who keeps the conversation going in the blogoclump with his frequent (and always interesting) comments.
Best Web Watcher. Sue Pelletier. Where does she find all this great stuff?
Best Conversation About Something That Is Actually Going to Be Important. The unconference, which was discussed by several bloggers, but which can be summed up in David Gammel’s post here.
Best Non-Association Blogger Post About Something Related to Associations. Rich Westerfield on “Associations: Worth It Or Not?”
Best A-list Blogger Post About Something Related to Associations. Seth Godin on conferences that suck.
Most Annoying Web 2.0 Trend. You mean besides calling everything “Web 2.0″? It would have to be the fact that everything is “beta.” If it’s beta, then keep it behind the $#@%ing firewall.
Most Eye-rollingly Bad Attempt at Apologizing. Steve Rubel’s post comparing TypePad’s problems to eBay in the late 90s, despite the fact that 1) eBay had no real competitors back then (while TypePad faces many, many competitive technologies, the best of which — WordPress - is open source), and 2) we’re paying TypePad just to keep our blogs up, while eBay operated off its users’ sales — and their downtime was costing them money just like their users.
My Best Speaking Experience. They’ve all been great, but had a very fun time at an IABC panel moderated by Debbie Weil along with folks from GM and Intuit.
My Best Blogging Experience. Participating in the ASAE Conference show blog.
Here’s to an even more interesting 2006!
December 20, 2005
Email Still Matters
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Blogs don’t replace email– I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. One of the more interesting things that arose out of the recent TypePad meltdown is the number of bloggers complaining that TypePad didn’t bother to email its customers to keep them informed. This comment on Jeremy Pepper’s blog sums up the situation:
“They failed, again, to implement any customer base emails - on a wide scale - and although a bit better about posting to the support blog, they just dropped the ball again. Why they cannot learn from these mistakes is a mystery. Email could help. Offer an opt-in/opt-out support list for members to subscribe to for such instances. Six Apart seems to think that the customers should come to them (visit the blog) when problems occur. When the problem is Six Apart’s, they should be proactive and go to the customers. The blog isn’t enough.”
As bloggers themselves know, blogs are useful tools in a lot of ways, but they are not useful for timely, direct, targeted communications. No doubt email is getting more difficult with spam controls, but associations are going to need to get a lot smarter in understanding how to handle those firewall issues. Email, for both communications and marketing purposes, is not going to decrease in importance. It’s just going to get harder.
On a related note, I think print is making a major comeback. More on that later.
December 19, 2005
Whither Wikipedia
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Whither Wikipedia: The blogoclump’s own David Gammel gets dissed by Dave Winer in the latest dust-up on Wikipedia: authority or gossip? My opinion: Winer overreacted. My thoughts on how Wikipedia can restore credibility, if not accuracy: in David’s comments.
December 18, 2005
All Members Pay Cash
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Jenny “The Shifted Librarian” was asked to participate in a panel for the Public Library Association, and then told that if she’s a member of the American Library Association, she has to pay a full day’s registration fee … but non-members who are speaking get a complimentary day pass. Not surprisingly, she’s a little irate. She says:
“So while I had planned to join ALA this week using the money from the ALA TechSource blog, I’ve now been officially told by ALA itself that I should wait until after March if I don’t want to have to pay them to present at their conference. Read that again and weep.”
This ties into an earlier conversation prompted by Jeff Jarvis (“Panelists, Unite!”) and I’m sure represents a bit of a “yikes!” moment for the association in question. Policies that may seem to make sense within an organization’s bubble don’t always look so smart in the light of day … and now people can complain about them in a very public manner.
December 16, 2005
Posted by Kevin | (3) Comments | Print This Article
What TypePad Should Have Done: Raise its prices. Considerably. And invest in infrastructure. Want to be viewed as premiere in your field? Then you have to fulfill your promises. And charge accordingly.