Archive for May, 2006
May 26, 2006
Someone You Should be Reading: John Robb
John Robb has been blogging for the past couple of years about “the intersection of terrorism, infrastructure and markets.” I’ve been following John’s stuff since he was the CEO at Userland and was leading discussions about knowledge blogging. Many of the trends he discusses about warfare and terrorism have much applicability to self-forming groups and how they may impact associations. Hopefully that won’t involve a rogue committee bombing the electrical lines to your headquarters, however.
I suggest you add his blog, Global Guerrillas, to your subscription list.
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May 18, 2006
AMS-CMS Integration Audio Download
You may recall that I did an audio conference a couple weeks ago with Wes Trochlil on the potential and pitfalls of integration association and content management systems. The session was very well received by our attendees at the live event.
I am pleased to now make the program available as a download: Understanding the Potential (and Pitfalls) of Integrating CMS and AMS Systems Audio Product. For $99 you will receive an MP3 file of the audio and a PDF of the slides. A sample of the audio is available in this post.
And here is a special one week offer to my blog readers: use this code when you buy the product and get 40% off! This code will be good until one week from today (May 24, 2006). Enter this code in the shopping cart to receive your discount: V823R4E1 Please feel free to share the code with anyone you think might benefit from this unique program.
Learn more about the audio program.
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May 11, 2006
Phil Windley on his Unconference Experience
This ZDnet post by Phil Windley gives a good example of the value of an unconference.
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May 8, 2006
An Unconference for Association Executives
Ben has some concerns about how an unconference for associations executives could work.
I love the hallway track. The pictures, though, got me thinking deeper about unconferences. Look how few people are in those rooms! Because there are so few people around the table, and because they’re opting into rooms around a topic of interest, I also get the feeling that they had a lot in common in terms of the problems and issues they grapple with. In short, they have a high degree of shared context — those rooms are high context environments.
I keep thinking about an unconference for the association community. But it’s becoming clear to me that it probably wouldn’t work. I don’t share enough context with professionals in government relations, public relations, education, etc. to truly provide value to them, or get value from them in a high context environment.
One of the commonalities among the unconferences going on is that they typically have a high-level focus of some sort that will attract the right audience to discuss that set of issues. I get the feeling that Ben is envisioning ASAE’s annual meeting with all the topical structure stripped away. This isn’t how I’ve been looking at it. I think the traditional annual meeting format is the complete antithesis of an unconference. It is too huge of a content tent. There has to be some focus around which to gather people.
One possible idea: How about an Association 2.0 unconference as a grass-roots event? Find some donated space, put together a blog, and get people talking about how associations can increase member participation beyond the limitations imposed by the traditional models?
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May 8, 2006
One CMS to Rule Them All?
A couple of good posts this month on whether a single CMS can be used to manage both your public and intranet web sites. Short answer: usually, no. For more detail follow the links.
I agree with those authors that more often than not, a single CMS will not be appropriate for your public site and your intranet site. The requirements for each are going to be pretty different once you get past basic authoring and content management features. Even for associations, whose public web sites could be considered more intranet-like than the usual corporate web site, are going to be hard pressed to find a single tool that effectively supports both.
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May 7, 2006
Dabble DB Demo Blows Away Meeting Industry Functionality
This seven minute demo of the Dabble DB web application should put the fear into conference web site providers. In a mere seven minutes, they take a comma-delimited file of session information and create a highly usable web interface for searching, displaying and modifying the data. Seven minutes! And to make it worse (or better, depending upon your point of view), the Dabble DB is for working with any data, not specifically meetings.
Usability failure is eventually going to be the death of many companies serving the association space. The barriers to entering the web application market are so low that the current players’ interfaces aren’t going to cut it for much longer.
(Via Paul Bissex.)
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May 5, 2006
The Art of Customer Service
From Guy Kawasaki in early April, The Art of Customer Service:
If you put in a policy to take care of the worst case, bad people, it will antagonize and insult the bulk of your customers.
Read that sentence above 3 times. Put it on your wall. Give it to HR and your CEO. I believe this is a universal truth for both customers and employees. Managing via exceptions creates a negative focus with very people for whom you should be providing value.
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May 4, 2006
When Your Long Tail Gets Lost in the Mail
Kevin Holland posted an amusing story about what happens when you don’t change your Netflix address when you move.
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