What could be more meta than a conference for community managers to talk about community management? How about an association conference for association community managers to talk about managing association communities? Ok, sorry–I’m in post-conference stupor after my first-ever SFPE annual conference (Society of Fire Protection Engineers) and also still thinking about the Higher Logic Super […]
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 […]
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, […]
Online Community Spurs Inter-Association Collaboration
Perusing Twitter yesterday, I happened to see an SLP (speech-language pathologist) tweet a link to this ASHA Leader article. It’s a great article about a grassroots movement among SLPs and other healthcare practitioners to figure out a way to reduce stress on clinicians and foster patient-centered care in long term care facilities. It’s also a […]
31% of Associations Have Online Communities. Where are the Association Community Managers?
I just read a post about an upcoming membership marketing benchmarking report, specifically detailing the part of the report that addresses social media use by associations. The report surveyed 700 associations and, according to the summary of the upcoming report, among associations with over 20,000 members, 31% reported having a private social network. Hm, I […]
So You Think You Want to be a Community Manager?
Even though this article is recent, the fact that community management is one of the hottest jobs around isn’t news–after all, 2010 was the “Year of the Community Manager” and the past few years have been all about talking about the hottest job around–community manager (aka social media manager or about a dozen other titles). […]
Community Manager Appreciation Day
Photo by elkokoparrilla, on Flickr Unless you are a community manager (and maybe not even then) you probably don’t know that today is Community Manager Appreciation Day (CMAD). Well, guess what? It is! Two years ago Jeremiah Owyang suggested that the fourth Monday of January be a day to “take the time to pause, recognize, […]
Associations: Launching a Community? Who’s Managing it?
This past year I’ve seen the number of community managers skyrocket….except in the association space. At the same time, in the association space, there seems to have been an explosion of orgs launching white label community platforms. Obviously this costs money–a decent amount of money…yet many associations investing in the technology don’t seem to be […]
Pharma Companies: Hire a Community Manager Instead of Deleting Your Facebook Pages
A few months ago, I blogged about Facebook’s impending decision to make life hard for pharmaceutical companies. According to today’s Washington Post , these changes will be going live tomorrow, forcing most pharma pages that have previously had closed walls to open them to allow comments. What isn’t clear in the article is whether this […]