Archive for June, 2006
June 27, 2006
When a Lawyer Designs Your Web Page
ASAE just posted the sign-up form for using their networking application for the Annual meeting in Boston this summer. This is a pretty cool little application from IntroNetworks that maps the social network of attendees, attempting to facilitate more contacts.
However. There is a rather unfriendly disclaimer posted above the join button, which includes this paragraph (emphasis added):
Attendee acknowledges through use of the System that ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership are not in the business of creating or managing online communities and it is the sole responsibility of the attendee to adhere to recommended terms of use provided by ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership.
Really? ASAE isn’t in the online community business? I don’t agree with that statement, so I guess I shouldn’t enter the network.
This is what happens when a lawyer, who is paid to play defense, is given too much sway over what goes onto your site. What a horrible message for any association to put in front their most committed and active members.
I would delete the entire statement and replace it with this: We are in the business of facilitating your member community. We welcome you to our network and encourage you to use it to maximize the value of your Annual meeting experience!
Update: Peter Hutchins from ASAE posted in the comments that they are working on updating the page and have removed the paragraph I mentioned as a first step. Thanks for listening and acting, Peter!
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June 26, 2006
Member ROI for Sharing Via the Association
John Robb posted last week about how he thought that a lot of these Web 2.0 companies are taking advantage of their most active users by not providing the ability to invest beyond their participation in the social services. My guess is that John feels they are not compensated with enough value from the services themselves compared to the value they are contributing to these companies.
This made me think that associations are uniquely positioned to address this issue. They don’t have shareholders, so value created for the organization can be channeled into creating more value for the members. This is something we should explore and talk about with our members. Sharing via your association can return more value to you and your field than it will via commercial services.
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June 18, 2006
How Spam Web Sites Are Created
Here is an informative post on how one person can create billions of pages, get them listed in Google and then plaster it with pay per click advertising to make serious money. This is the kind of thing much of the spam comments and trackbacks to blogs are attempting to create links to.
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June 13, 2006
Attention Economy for Associations Podcast
As promised, here is the podcast that Ben and I recorded this morning. It runs just shy of 17 minutes.
One note: In the recording we mention that the Attention Trust sells attention data. I believe this is incorrect in that they offer a service for storing your own attention data online but do not sell that data. What benefit this offers to the individual is unclear to me. Maybe Ed Batista can chime in here on the comments on what benefit you would receive from loading your data into one of their providers.
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June 10, 2006
Investing in the Attention Economy
Ben Martin and I will be facilitating a session at the upcoming ASAE & the Center Membership and Marketing Conference. We had a short article in an ASAE newsletter recently on this very topic as a lead-in to the session. You can read the full text of it below. Ben and I will also be recording a short podcast on this topic early next week. Check back here on Tuesday to listen in.
Hope to see you at the session!
Investing in the Attention Economy
By C. David Gammel, CAE, and Ben Martin, CAE
The amount of available information is growing exponentially, but human attention seems to be a limited resource. We each only have a finite number of hours in the day with which to live our personal and professional lives. The same is true for our members.
In fact, associations compete with each other and thousands of other organizations for the attention of their members. People are distracted by millions of inconsequential information sources and must filter them out in order to recognize the things that are most important to them.
To cope, many of our members work in a state of continuous partial attention. Often they divide their attention among several things at once, such as scanning e-mail or news headlines while talking on a conference call. Your latest carefully crafted newsletter might only receive a cursory glance before hitting the electronic version of the circular file. The implication: Your members must be able to quickly scan and discern the value of your communications if you want them to invest a higher level of attention.
This has significant implications for membership recruitment and retention. Members, for instance, base their decision to renew their memberships on the basis of their feelings of connection and engagement. That’s why it’s crucial that you get an appropriate amount of your members’ attention. Generally speaking, a prospect’s attention must be 100 percent captured for at least a few moments in order to complete any financial transaction.
The study of attention is called attention economics–a combination of economic analysis and data about the things to which people give their attention. Steve Gillmor, a popular writer and podcaster on Web technology, turned this research into a trend by gathering data on what people are paying attention to on the Internet and leveraging that data to provide better service and content.
Attention economics raises many questions for associations. How much of your members’ attention do you receive? How much do you want? What will you need to give to your members in exchange for their attention? Does an increase in attention per member mean that your revenue per member will increase as well?
To help answer these questions and further explore this topic, be sure to come to “The Unsession: How to Invest in the Attention Economy� at ASAE & the Center for Association Leadership’s 2006 Marketing & Membership Conference. This “unsession� will be highly interactive and driven by the participants. We’re limiting attendance to the first 40 participants, so be sure to arrive early!
Update: Ed Batista, Executive Director of the Attention Trust, posted some more details about Steve Gillmor’s role in developing the idea of the attention economy. Thanks, Ed! (Ed’s personal blog was just added to Tom Peters’ blogroll. Nice!)
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June 9, 2006
Why Virtual Community Failed
I was thinking today about how so much of the Web 2.0 hype centers around baking customer communities right into the product. Given that, why did all the virtual community services and consulting firms implode as the bubble burst on the dot com boom? Those companies were some of the first to go.
My guess is that most of those services were positioned as add-ons to existing endeavors. Sell widgets? You need a widget discussion board on your web site! Peripheral stuff was the first to be cut as budgets tightened and these slapped on communities were easy targets for cutting.
What seems different now is that it is about building customer/member participation right in from the start and making the communities that form an integral part of the whole system. With that approach, I think online community should be a more enduring feature even if the web takes another hit.
(Be sure to check out Ben Martin’s comments about forming vs. finding communities. I think he is right on the mark.)
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June 9, 2006
It’s 10 a.m., Do You Know Where Your Data Is?
Looks like an association just got hit by losing a hard drive containing sensitive member data:
A restored AICPA computer hard drive containing some member information (names, addresses, and Social Security numbers) was being transported to the Institute and cannot presently be located. The hard drive was damaged and had been sent out for repair by an employee in direct violation of the Institute’s internal control policies and procedures.
Despite the exhaustive investigations both within the Institute and FedEx Express, the hard drive has not yet been located. There is no evidence that the drive or its contents have been inappropriately accessed. Based on our investigation to date, we believe this is a case of a misplaced package. Nevertheless, we are pursuing a number of actions to protect our members.
Letters have been sent to some former and current AICPA members informing them of this incident and offering free credit monitoring services.
As noted above in the quote, the problem wasn’t a lack of policies. It was a lack of understanding of them by staff. All association leaders need to discuss with their staff the trust their members give to them to protect their information. Once your members feel that you have violated that trust, you may never get it back.
This also raises a question about storing SSNs. Do you really need them? If not, or you can develop a less sensitive alternative, purge them. It’s not worth the risk.
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June 7, 2006
The One and Only Purpose for an Intranet
The sole purpose for an intranet is to facilitate the work of staff in pursuit of the organization’s objectives. Nothing more, nothing less.
A good metric for this is that one of the first things that staff do when starting a project is to voluntarily create a space for it on your intranet. If the intranet is considered a prerequisite for success by staff, then you have succeeded!
I was prompted to post this after reading Nick Besseling’s rant on how stickiness is not a good goal for an intranet (I agree).
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June 5, 2006
Customizing for New Members
Michelle Frisque is thinking and writing about how to reinvent the American Library Association as part of a pilot course about inventing Library 2.0. Every association should be so lucky as to have members like Michelle, Michael, Jenny and others who are dedicated to their profession and will blog about how the association could best serve them and their peers.
Michelle also mentioned one of my articles in another post, which made my day!
Michelle recently wrote about how the ALA web site could do a better job of serving new members:
ALA is a huge organization. I remember when I first joined I found it very confusing. How do you get involved? What is ALA doing that affects me? What will my membership in ALA do for me? How do I network? None of this is easy to find on the Web site.
Something I got from Michelle’s post is the idea of customizing your association home page for new members. Help them discover the organization by highlighting information, services and opportunities on the home page when that new member is logged in. Change it every week or every day! You can phase out the special content over time or allow the member to turn it off when they no longer need it. It should be fairly evergreen content, which is great because it is relatively easy to manage once it is developed.
A few other ideas: Provide the same content in an RSS feed! Create a serial e-mail autoresponder for new members that gives them a new tip about the association every day for two week after they join! You get the idea.
(A serial e-mail autoresponder is an e-mail announcement list where all the messages are written and queued up so that a new subscriber gets each message in order at a specified interval. These have been around a long time but I’ve never heard of an association using them, oddly enough. Seems like a natural for a lot of association promotions and content.)
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