Member-to-Member

Associations: Leadership and Missed Opportunities in Social Media

"Why would I want to read blogs and learn about what some high schooler had for breakfast?"

I've heard this too many times from professional colleagues who seem to take Andrew Keen's view in The Cult of the Amateur, that all that blathering from anyone who wants to speak isn't necessarily a good thing. And as those of us who watch social media know, organizations far and wide have responded to the scary no-one's-in-control reality first surfaced by the Cluetrain Manifesto (1999) with trepidation and concern. [Cluetrain Wakeup Message to Organizations: No organization or individual is in control of their marketing conversation anymore now that customers, employees and whackos can blather very loudly in cyberspace and can influence anyone who likes what they have to say, regardless of its veracity or tact.]

Despite their hesitation, however, anecdotal evidence in my corner of the world points to the fact that organizations are beginning to experiment with models for how to move beyond the "control paranoia" to leverage the power of social media for their stakeholders. Nowhere does the potential for social media seem as great as in the marketplace for trade and professional associations, yet association executives are generally as conservative, if not more so, than other business execs when it comes to their comfort zone on sharing the megaphone. And it's for this reason that I give ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership, credit for helping take a leadership position with their members to help them figure it out. This month's ASAE monthly magazine includes a special Social Media supplement which has some excellent articles, including a cover story article by Keen himself.

[In the rest of the article (1722 words) I discuss Keen's article and look at what Associations are doing (and not doing) in social media adoption.]

The Psychology of Social Media - Some things Never Change

I've been harboring a theory for a while now that human beings don't change very much when they go online. We watch some of our communication behaviors change as we become addicted to various technologies (Twitter seems to the be the most annoying recent addition to this habit, though I'll admit I haven't tried it... see more on why below). But fundamentally, we use online tools to do the same things we do offline - kill time, learn, play, work. When it comes to social media, just like in the real world, we move between networks depending on which other friends are there, what they're doing and why we want to interact with them. If we're loyal to groups offline, we're probably loyal to them online. If we're fickle, well - we hop networks online too.

[Under the link I muse on about MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google's OpenSocial, Twitter, LiveJournal and Ning with more opinions about the psychology of the human species.]

Automating Serendipity via LinkedIn: Quantifying Social Media Efficiency

A few weeks back I sent out a question to my LinkedIn network asking if people found value in Facebook and/or LinkedIn and inviting them to join my Facebook network. The answers were really interesting and I made some new Facebook friends (see below), but I found a little gem in them that proved LinkedIn can be more efficient than serendipity (the occurrence of accidental fortune, not the open source blog system). One of my contacts helped her husband find his job through a LinkedIn contact, thereby demonstrating the potential for huge networking efficiencies that this service and other social media have to offer. Who would have thought we could ever have automated serendipity to achieve tangible business value?

Here’s the anecdote: My friend’s husband had sent in a resume for a job and waited two weeks. Nothing. So she got on LinkedIn and found someone in her network who knew the CTO of the company. She asked her friend for an introduction to the CTO. Her contact was happy to make the introduction to the CTO, who checked to find out the HR department had no record of the resume. Her husband submitted his resume through the CTO, got an interview and was hired.

This happy sequence of events could just as easily taken place through a serendipitous meeting at a business lunch or happy hour, except that it didn’t. And that’s what’s intriguing.

The serendipity of the happy hour was essentially “automated” via the wife’s LinkedIn search, making LinkedIn serendipity’s not-so-little helper. And, according to my analysis, if her husband’s new job was truly meant to be – the fates bound and determined to help him get it through LinkedIn or through a happenstance social encounter - the LinkedIn approach could still be as much as one day and 13 minutes more efficient. See my analysis below. :-)