BlogClump - Blogging About Associations From a Gen Xer

I got some good comments on my last post asking why associations are here? (Since that post, I did pick up Clay Shirky's book and am starting to plow through it. Good stuff so far.) Ellen made a good point about professionalism. Many employers want their employees to get professional development and will budget for conferences, training or trade shows. Associations are a key piece of that. I am not sure employers would pay for a person to go to an event created by a Facebook group. (You might get better content from the Facebook group meeting.) Maddie says content is key and that associations need to be at the forefront. I think the main issue is that associations need to provide a place, the proper tools, and the recognition so that people will give their content to associations rather than other places. Lindy wants us to be enablers of groups and be the ultimate resource in our industries and not just producers of events. Ben started this conversation last month and got a n...

I was reading Association Marketing Springboard and realized I missed BlogClump's Birthday! BlogClump turned 1 on June 14th, at which time I was on a plane to Vegas for our tradeshow. Anyway, thanks to all who made it possible and kept pushing me to start one and keep it going. You know who you are, fellow Blogoclumpers... See you at the YAPpy Hour and/or in San Diego (which is German for, well nevermind).

In my last post , Ben points us to a question derived from Clay Shirky's book (It is tops on my list of books to read right now, I just need to find the time): Now that forming groups is ridiculously easy, what's the point of "professional group organizers" like association professionals? Ok, association professionals. Time to defend our salaries. Why are we here? Why are our associations here? I will post my answers later on, but I want to hear what you have to say!

I am a big believer in social media, as most of you already know. We had good success last week launching the new InfoComm Community. We leveraged our exisiting Facebook and LinkedIn groups to help the launch. Upon checking our Facebook group today, I looked on the right side to see "Related groups" and found one called: If you can't fix it with Gaffa tape, you haven't used enough. If you are an AV person of any sort, this is kind of like duct tape for AV people. What I couldn't believe was that 55,000 people were members of this group. Now granted, I think this is the European view similar to ours of duct tape, but 55,000 members. Unreal. My question is, would an association do better with a Facebook group for their association, or starting a bunch on several specific topics/products and bringing in outsiders? Could be a good membership recruitment thing.

I know I am late to the party on this one (sorry for the delay Jeff), but please fill out the survey on social media. http://www.principledinnovation.com/blog/2008/06/01/participate-in-the-state-of-social-technologies-adoption-survey/ You have until June 30th. Hopefully this late reminder will help kick in a few responses.

What a day. All because of the weather. I need to get this off my chest. Everyone needs to start acting with more common courtesy and common sense. This was very evident in the traffic situations caused by the weather yesterday. When a traffic light is out, it is a 4-way stop, no matter what. Several times on my way to the DC United game, I hit signals that were out. Not a single one was treated like a 4-way stop when I got there. I stopped, but people next to me flew through it. Some even honked at me and passed me on the left to get through. Be smart and show some love to others. Next, when your lane merges into another on the freeway, don't speed up and fly to the end of the merge area and then try to nose your way in. Especially when it is gridlock anyway. Turn on your signal and wait your turn. Just because you came off a ramp doesn't mean you have priority over someone who has been sitting on the freeway going 1mph for the last 10 minutes. I saw some lady ge...

So I had a panic moment yesterday that turned out to be liberation. Those familiar with Outlook know that if you hold Shift+Del, it will permanently delete an item (not send it to the recycle bin for later). I do this a lot with spam so I don't have to do another step later to get rid of everything. Somehow I fat fingered the keyboard and it highlighted my whole inbox and killed everything. Poof. Gone. I look at it this way. The only stuff in my inbox were things I hadn't filed yet or deleted. It was that middle ground stuff that I couldn't decide whether it was important or crap. So now after deleting them all, I figure the important things will reappear. One already has, thank goodness. It was strangely liberating to see a completely blank inbox for a while. Alas, email purgatory known as my inbox has already started to creep again.