A few months ago, Beth Brodovsky, a long-time Twitter friend made via trusty #assnchat, invited me to join her for her podcast Driving Participation to chat about the challenges of being a communications pro at a small staff association. To me, one of the biggest challenges of wearing all hats communications/marketing/web/social media/editorial is graphic design. It’s like “one […]
Why Associations Should Be Planning Their LinkedIn Exit Strategy
Ah, LinkedIn…where would my blogging be without your Groups feature? It’s been a few months since I’ve written about why associations shouldn’t rely on LinkedIn Groups and speculated about whether LinkedIn is in the (albeit slow) process of phasing out the groups feature, but a few recent things have ramped up my suspicions and made me think that […]
What Associations Can Learn from Reddit’s Volunteer Moderator Revolt
According to MGI’s 2015 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report, more and more associations are tying member retention to private online communities, citing that “for associations reporting more participation in their private social network, 53% report an increase in membership over the past year, compared to 22% whose membership declined.” Not bad, right? Not to be all […]
Pros and Cons of Periscope for Associations
I just returned from Association Media & Publishing’s Annual Conference, which was awesome. I learned a ton, met some great new people and enjoyed being back in the association media community. I was also lucky to hang out with cool friends like Monica Bussolati, who thought we should experiment with Meerkat and Periscope to livestream parts of […]
What Online Communities Can Learn About Events from DashCon
If you read this blog, you already know I’m kind of obsessed with the topic of online community, particularly where associations and online communities intersect. I’ve written before about how online communities present a real threat to associations because they allow people to connect around a common industry or interest without all the governance stuff, […]
My Cyber Awakening
As I mentioned in my last post, I recently started a new job, a large part of which is covering tech and cybersecurity issues. After five years of obsessively focusing on social media and community management, it’s an interesting change and fun to be learning so much. At the same time, though, it’s kind of […]
What does the collaborative economy mean for associations?
I’ve been reading and thinking about the collaborative economy for a while now, and of course can’t help but wonder what it means for the association industry. Never heard of “collaborative economy”? Jeremiah Owyang defines it in this post: “the Collaborative Economy enables people to efficiently get what they need from each other.” Going by […]
How to Showcase Online Community Wins for Membership Marketing
Reading this article about Sermo, an online community for physicians, reaching 260,000 members, a part that jumped out at me was this one: “Over the years, physicians collaborated on tens of thousands of cases and although many successes go unreported, over 50% of iConsult cases posted are “Solved on Sermo.” Our average solve time is […]
What Your Association Conference Looks Like on Twitter
This is a bit nerdier than usual, but I thought this was a pretty cool representation of what an association conference looks like on Twitter via NodeXL, a free open source template for Excel that lets you explore network graphs. I am working on my Excel-phobia and can only dream of being able to create […]
Why Online Community is About More Than Community for Associations
There’s been a flurry of attention over a recent Associations Now story about how Doximity, a private online community for physicians, is outpacing the AMA in terms of membership. I started to reply to one of the comments in the original story, but then my response got so long I figured I should just write […]