Employers are Liking and Hiring Social Media Workers--Except Associations

Yesterday I spoke at Digital East about the challenges and opportunities of association social media. A lot of the information I presented came from ASAE's new report, Benchmarking in Association Management: Social Media. I still need to post my slides (not that they'll be super useful to anyone, as I went all Slide:ology and only used images, which resulted in a furious few hours the night before realizing I wouldn't be able to read from my slides so needed to basically memorize the whole thing) but a few findings from the report:

• Associations are mostly still in the "information gathering" stage of social media adoption
• Most (68%) of responding associations have either no staff dedicated to social media or less than 1/2 of a FTE devoted to it
• While social media staffing in associations is projected to increase over the next year, spending on social media is not budgeted to increase. Go figure.

I couldn't help but think what a stark contrast this is to the non-association world, as portrayed in this recent LA Times article. Contrast, for instance, the association hiring stats above with this quote from the LA Times article:

The number of social media-related jobs on Monster has surged 75% over the last year, O'Reilly said. About 155 positions are available a month, up from an average of 88 a month a year ago.

155 social media positions a month? Wow. Who wants to place bets on when there will be 155 social media positions TOTAL in the association world? I'd say the safe bet would be "not anytime soon."

Digital East

This afternoon and tomorrow I'll be attending Digital East in Tysons Corner, VA. Tomorrow morning I'll be speaking on a panel about association social media with Danielle Brigida, the digital marketing manager from the National Wildlife Federation and Stacie Saunders, social media strategist from AICPA. My topic? Social Media Opportunities and Challenges for Associations. (I'll post a link to the slides once the presentation is over.) I promise I will be speaking not only to the "challenge" part of that topic! ;)

You can follow #deast11 if you're not there--and if you are there, please find me and come say hi!

Innovation and Lone Dogs

I've been wanting to write a post about innovation since I started hearing about ASAE's Innovation Talks. But I have to say--I'm a bit burnt out on innovation. As one of the few association staffer's dedicated solely to social media and community management, I feel like I've been eating, drinking, sleeping and playing "innovation" for three and a half years now. It's definitely cool to be in a position of being able to try new stuff and watching things succeed--or not. Of being able to be in a state of constant learning, and serving as a resource to others looking to go down the same path.

But I have to say my main thought during all this innovation talk is "when does innovative become mainstream?" That is to say, as the person working on the bleeding edge, when does what the people on the edge do become just part of the regular mix? The mix that includes budget and other staff people and stuff non-innovative functions get to take for granted.

Take the job webmaster. Once upon a time, organizations didn't have websites. They didn't have web pages. Each one had discussions and meetings and votes about whether they should set up one of these new-fangled web pages. And one by one they all did. And once they set up the pages they needed someone to oversee them, keep them running, make changes to them, troubleshoot them when things weren't working right....and the position formerly known (or actually still sometimes known) as webmaster was born. As in one webmaster, the sole participant in all things "web." Then as the internet evolved and web pages became more than mere brochures and the workload around their upkeep grew, more web positions evolved. Budgets increased, headcounts increased...suddenly there were web departments. The lonely webmasters had others like them who they could bounce ideas off of, learn from, collaborate with.

What if that evolution had never taken place? Well, actually, in some organizations it hasn't...and there are plenty of horrible looking and non-functional websites out there to attest to that fact. But look at the organizations whose web presences started with one page then grew and became part of the overall fabric of the larger organization. There's a lot more there than one lonely webmaster with permission to set up a web page and then...do that ad infinitum. 

I have to say I sometimes feel like the dog who yearns for another dog to keep me company. And I know from others in my same position--or in positions that are nothing like mine but are in other ways new and different--that they feel the same way. It's one thing for leaders to allow some experimentation and innovation--but there also needs to be a process by which those innovative efforts are routinely evaluated and, if they are proving to be successful, are reclassified from innovative to just regular. Like payroll and member services and meeting planning and publications. Established departments with budgets and more than one staff person (assuming a large enough organization). Because being innovative is about more than just letting innovative projects or initiatives to kick off--it's about making sure to either cut them loose if they prove to be failures or reeling them into the regular mix if they prove to be successful. Because innovation left out on the bleeding edge to fend for itself will, in time, wither and die.

So, bottom line: association leaders, it's great to allow for experimentation and innovation, but please...don't just think it's enough to check off the innovation box; keep your finger on the pulse of your organization's innovative efforts and don't let them stay experiments forever.

Are we Being Gamed by Gamification?

I've blogged about Foursquare before and how it doesn't have much value proposition for the user...yet here I am, over a year after my "Foursquare fatigue" post and I'm still using Foursquare. Still fumbling around with my phone while trying to juggle my wallet and coffee at Dunkin Donuts so I can reclaim my mayorship. Still spending--no, make that wasting--time reloading and reloading every time Foursquare doesn't want to connect--which is frequently. Sharing more and more details about myself--not just what movie theater I'm at but what movie I'm seeing.

Why? Is it because all this effort has paid off and I've started getting free stuff? No. Is it because of the super-fun badges? Hell no. For one, they're not super-fun and for two, I hardly get badges anymore (not like I was counting to begin with or anything...). The specials Foursquare offers are negligible, at best, at least in the area I live in.

Someone asked me why I use Foursquare the other day and honestly, the only reason I could come up with was because it's become a habit for me and seems to somehow hold the promise of some great reward at some future time. What reward I don't know; what future time I don't know. I honestly could not tell you why I continue to use Foursquare...yet I do.

I get what's in it for marketers, and for businesses--but what's in it for users when it comes to location-based games like Foursquare? I know about tips and reviews but, speaking of gaming, we all know those can be gamed just as well, so I'm talking about personal value in exchange for taking the time to check in. Because I'm feeling like a chump for buying into it and would be relieved to have an answer better than "I'm not really sure" to the question "why would you take the time to use Foursquare?"

Biggest Mistake My Ass--and Other Facebook News

I know I already blogged about this, but I couldn't help but smart when I saw this headline about the Biggest Facebook posting mistake you can make. (With all due respect to Brian Carter, who I know and like, and who happens to be super smart in all things Facebook...but I remain unconvinced about the travesty that allegedly is posting to Facebook from anything other than Facebook.) While I get that yes, if your Facebook posting strategy begins and ends with connecting your Twitter account to your Facebook page and autoposting Tweets to the page as your only updates, you will not have much success on Facebook, there are ways to "autopost" to Facebook that will not result in the world ending or your page's engagement value plummeting. Especially if you are using a third party app that allows you to format the way your link appears on Facebook and include an image. And as for the idea that you'll get maximum interaction posting from the crap Facebook mobile app...well good luck with that. Currently, despite the recent Facebook iPhone app upgrade, I can't even get the page I manage to SHOW UP--forget posting to it.

Speaking of Facebook, though, the past few weeks have brought a flurry of crazy Facebook changes. In case you haven't noticed, here are some of the recent "upgrades":

• Subscriptions--I honestly don't really get this subscribe feature so I'll just let you read about it on Facebook's blog and try to make sense of it. Basically it's a way to let people read/see what you post without having to let them friend you. Whatever. Oh and they also rolled out a handy suggestion feature--reminiscent of Twitter's "who to follow" feature. Hm, it's almost like they're trying to copy Twitter...more on that to come.
• Privacy changes--honestly, I can't keep up with Facebook's crazy ongoing privacy changes so I didn't even try to understand this latest batch. I'm sure in there somewhere is at least one loophole which benefits Facebook more than it does users, as is always the case with their privacy "upgrades."
• No more updates to group members--If you chose a Facebook group over a page because you wanted to be able to send members updates, you have about another week and half to enjoy that feature; as of September 30, Facebook will be disabling it.
• Facebook/Twitter integration is apparently coming. So much for Facebook's historical hatred of Twitter and subsequent blocking of Twitter features; in the wake of Google+'s increasing popularity, Facebook has decided that Google+, not Twitter, is the enemy, and they're suddenly buddy-buddy with Twitter.

Did I miss anything? 

Should Vendors be Industry-Specific?

Even though it's been over a month since ASAE's Annual Meeting, I continue to get occasional emails and regular mail from vendors who exhibited at the expo. Did I mention that I had a blast in St. Louis? ;)

Something I've been thinking about since then is whether businesses that cater to associations need to be focused exclusively on associations, or whether it's possible to provide a good product and good service to both associations and for-profits. I guess I mean association tech vendors specifically. There seems to me to be such a vast difference between associations and for-profits when it comes to technology that I tend to think that an association technology vendor needs to be specifically focused on associations in order to both get the tech right and be able to adequately support clients.


For instance, association management software (AMS) is, obviously, specific to associations. Ditto for online community platforms that integrate with AMSs. Ditto again for learning management systems and who knows how many other tech products that are specific to the association world, and for which for-profits would probably have little use. However, it seems like several association tech vendors are now either dabbling in or just plain moving more towards focusing on the corporate/for-profit space. I can understand this--there's a LOT more money being earmarked for social tech in the corporate sector than there is in the association sector. Corporations are hiring for social media and community management jobs in droves while associations are...well, not. I get that this is where the money is and if you're a business, that's where you'd want to be.

But what if where you are is actually in the association space? With clients who often have very small staffs and look to you for support and guidance. Can you adequately market to/support/provide a great product to both associations and corporations?

I honestly mean this as a question that I don't know the answer to but am curious about...

Do the Benefits of Using a 3rd Party API to Post to Facebook Outweigh the Cons?

Photo by katerha

I keep reading posts about how you shouldn't post to Facebook using a 3rd party APIs because it kills your EdgeRank. Supposedly Facebook penalizes 3rd party APIs' EdgeRank (the "secret sauce" that determines how often your Page's updates show up in users' news feeds) and collapses 3rd party API updates. While I'm sure that there's merit to these arguments, I also don't think writing off social media management systems (SMMS) is necessarily a good idea, or even an option for large companies or for agencies managing multiple brand accounts.

Benefits of using SMMS include:

• Ability for multiple people to post from one central dashboard.Yes, you can now have multiple Page admins on Facebook, but SMMSs offer the ability for multiple admins to manage posts in a more robust way than one-off posting directly to Facebook.
• Workflow tools--post scheduling, draft/approval modes, and ability to assign issues to certain admins are all valuable workflow tools.
• More robust moderation/blocklist capabilities--Facebook offers rudimentary moderation and profanity blocklist functionality, but for regulated industries like pharma, insurance or finance, more robust controls may be necessary. 
• Post scheduling--yes, I know--social media is supposed to be real-time and not scheduled, but in reality, that's not how a lot of businesses work. From needing to schedule posts to cover non-business hours to just needing a schedule to stay on top of posting, being able to view both upcoming and past posts via a calendar can be enormously beneficial. Managing social media accounts is a juggling act and whether you have one person managing all company social media accounts or a bunch of people managing one account, calendaring is, in my opinion, highly valuable.
• Data analysis and reports--Facebook's Insights leave a lot to be desired in terms of data aggregation, engagement analysis, and activity reports. Yes, there are tools you can use to augment Facebook's lackluster insights, but in my opinion they don't compare to the functionality SMMSs offer. The ability to see the number of clicks per post, total reach and/or engagement combined with Twitter, Linkedin and blog posts, and other advanced metrics simply doesn't exist using just Facebook's insights.
• Unique features--I use Thrive as an SMMS and it offers a super cool feature--the ability to create a custom action link on posts without links. You know how, when you post to Facebook, "like," "comment" and "share" links appear below the post? With Thrive you can add a customized action link such as "donate" with a link to your nonprofit's donate page, or "shop" with a link to your company's online store, "take action" with a link to your organization's advocacy page--whatever action/landing page you want. I'm sorry but it's just cool, and you can't do it posting directly from Facebook.

So sure, there's merit to the arguments that using a 3rd party app to Facebook could potentially affect your Page's EdgeRank. However, when those arguments are coming from EdgeRank Checker--sorry, I'm skeptical. Especially when their argument against SMMSs include this:

"Posts that are scheduled typically struggle to have high engagement. This is most likely due to the nature of a scheduled update. It’s difficult to create unique engaging content several hours or days in advance. Any negative impacts of scheduled posts are most likely correlations with poorly developed content....Automated content typically performs horrendously, due to lacking human touch and craftsmanship. These types of updates struggle for engagement as is (even if they were manually posted onto Facebook). We highly advise against any automated content on Facebook."

 Sorry but that's just BS, IMHO. You can think of updates off the top of your head and have them be crap, or you can schedule posts a month out, linking back to evergreen content on your website, that result in a ton of traffic back to your website. Obviously, there's an element of "real time" to Facebook updates, but there are plenty of pages that achieve high engagement via posts that are created well ahead of time and scheduled. I don't buy this argument at all--and my experience managing Facebook pages over the past 3 years bears out my skepticism. Content that is scheduled through a 3rd party API doesn't mean that content is "automated"--it can be as carefully curated as content posted in real time directly to Facebook. The platform from which you post doesn't dictate the quality of the content you're posting.

What's your experience been with posting directly to Facebook versus posting from a 3rd party API? Have you noticed a decline in engagement after switching to an SMMS? Or do you think this whole EdgeRank/3rd party API thing is overblown?

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 making any investment at all in the most important aspect of the community: staff. 

If I were a white label community platform vendor, I'd be concerned about this--really concerned. Why? Because for every association that signs a couple year contract and launches a community platform with no staff dedicated to the effort, the likelihood is very high that the association will, in a few years time, declare the platform and/or vendor to be a failure. I get that vendors care about selling product...but I maintain that they should be equally concerned about ensuring that the sale and relationship will last more than a few years--the time it takes an un-staffed community to languish and die. By not emphasizing the importance of dedicating staff resources to the new technology, vendors are pretty much ensuring that, a few years down the line, the expense of the technology will be on the chopping block come budget time because there's no activity in the community.