“It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.” -Clay Shirky

Listening through the social web is one of the core skills that we all need to develop. I’ve been doing it for years, and yet I’m always thinking up a better way, a more useful keyword, or an improved lens.

I challenge everyone reading this post to get back to basics this week, and improve your keyword searches. That means using operators like AND and OR. It means negating certain words. You might try searching in a specific site or user.  There are lots of little tricks to brush up on. To help and inspire you, here are two resources from two important listening posts: Google Search and Twitter Search.

• Google Advanced Search Tips
• Twitter Search Operators

Maddie recently wrote a post about Tweckling (Twitter heckling) and Maggie McGary left a great comment with a link to Dana Boyd’s personal experience as a speaker at Web2.0 Expo. Lisa Junker also picked up Dana’s post on Acronym. Dana had some very specific, preventable issues that conference organizers can learn from, and I think it’s worth spelling it out here.

“A week before the conference, I received word from the organizers that I was not going to have my laptop on stage with me.”

Really? Why not? What difference did it make to them?

“I only learned about the Twitter feed shortly before my talk.”

Huh? That needs to be communicated early and often. And she should have had the option to have it turned off during her talk.

“When I walked out on stage, I was also in for a new shock: the lights were painfully bright.”

Perfect. So right now, she can’t see the Twitter stream, she can’t see the audience, and all she knows is that people are laughing at all the wrong times. Ugh. Anyone would get rattled.

“The Twitter stream was initially upset that I was talking too fast. My first response to this was: OMG, seriously? That was it?”

If she’d known the problem was so minor, she wouldn’t have gotten rattled–which just made the problem worse. Who had her back? Couldn’t someone have given her the feedback she needed, when she needed it?

Twitter backchannels are an important trend. But don’t forget to prep your speakers. Even if you don’t plan to have a live Tweet-to-screen feed, you should still plan–as Maddie suggests in her post–to have someone monitoring who is prepared to step in to help.

By the way, I don’t think having a Twitter feed up during a session is a bad thing, necessarily. It depends on the audience, the nature of the presentation, and how the speakers interact with the stream. At Buzz2009, we had the Twitter stream up throughout. It was a nice way for attendees in the room to see who else was engaged from around the country. But it was not as prominent and overwhelming as the Web2.0 Expo example.

What have you guys been doing to prep speakers? Can’t wait to hear.

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Following up on Maddie’s 10 steps for building an internal social media team, and my little clarity over control post, here’s a little something for all you visual people.

On the top, you see what happens when an organization sets up their social media team as the gatekeepers of all online social interactions. Below that is a depiction of the social media team as a service to the organization, providing the framework, structure, training, and clarity for the rest of the organization to run with. When you remember that the more people you know, the more you can do, one of these pictures is clearly more attractive. (Homage to Jessica Hagy.)

What do you think?

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My other half likes to say “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” He picked the phrase up from a senior executive in his organization. So here’s my little rant for the week.

• Forget trying to find the perfect technology tool for your organization’s social media needs–you’re procrastinating. When the tool finally comes around, you’ll be so far behind it won’t help.
• Stop trying to force your old business processes onto social media tools–we’re not handcuffed by fax machines and mimeographs anymore, people. And yes, some of the processes seem that old.
• Quit scolding your fans for using the wrong phrasing, the wrong logo, the wrong approach–yeah, I know they should have talked to you first, but hey, at least they did something!
• And please, please, please quit sucking the personality out of your organization by over-producing, over-polishing, over-thinking every little detail into some kind of marketing message. It’s like dealing with Stepford Wives, and I’m over it.

Phew. Thanks for letting me get that out. I feel better. You’ll feel better, too, if you have a couple rants of your own to add.

It’s one of the things Clay Shirky said at ASAE09–control is a thing of the past. Clarity should be the goal for today.  Clarity and control are not new topics among some of my favorite association blogs. Still, the way Clay Shirky framed the issue was, well, very clear. Scott Briscoe talks a little about what Clay said at ASAE09 on Acronym, and I wanted to think about the practical side of it here.

Clarity takes courage. I just did what feels like my thousandth interview about the risks of social media. There is just so much fear out there. What if someone criticizes us? What if they say something that’s not true? How will we know what to do in response? Who are the right people to issue that response? These are questions driven by uncertainty and confusion, two conditions that clarity can remedy. Here are a few ideas about how…

1. Have some conviction. Take a stand, and be willing to back it up. If you get negative feedback, consider the source. Pushing buttons isn’t a bad thing, so long as they’re the right buttons.
2. Repeat yourself. Repeat yourself until you’re sure everyone has already heard. Then repeat yourself again. It’s your first line of defense against misinformation and misunderstandings.
3. Be consistent. Even the best communicators need to step back and reframe their message from time to time. Persistent, long-term communication along a consistent path builds a resonant story and people’s trust.
4. Mark out the path. Make sure your stakeholders–especially staff and volunteers–know what you’re trying to do and how they can help. This is where social media strategy, guidelines, education, and internal teamwork make all the difference.
5. Adapt your branding. Learn to differentiate your organization’s official voice, while still accommodating your raving fans.

What other ways can clarity make a difference? I know lots of you have stories about how you’ve done some of these things. Please share them.

Fresh on the heals of the latest Associations Now crowdsourcing experiment, the ASAE marketing section is trying it for their Marketing Insights eNewsletter. Be among the first to suggest and vote on topics you want to see covered in Marketing Insights. Volunteer five minutes for the marketing section right now. You know you want to.

Not familiar with Marketing Insights? Allow me to change that. You might have picked up that it’s the eNewsletter for ASAE’s marketing section. If you’re in the marketing section, you’re probably already getting it. Right now, it’s for members only, so you have to login to ASAE’s website to subscribe and read the full articles. (Read as much into the “right now” as you want to.) Besides posting and voting on article ideas, you and your network can contribute in other ways to the eNewsletter:

• Volunteer to write an article or case study.
• Suggest authors we should be chasing down.
• Rate and review articles from your peers.
• Dig that eNewsletter out of your inbox and share it with other folks you think will like it.

So then, all of you who are dissatisfied with the level of the marketing content that ASAE is putting out–you know who you are–this is our chance to fix it. Help! If you want to volunteer, just comment on this post.  Easy peasy, as Maddie would say.

OK, Lynn. For you. Your post was beautiful, by the way.

Maddie’s Xer Meme pushes a lot of buttons, as generational posts tend to do.  I’ve already pointed out to her that she is so far from mainstream that they’ve had to name an all new stream after her. We’ll call is maddiestream. It was kind of her to call me a “cusper.” Jamie once told me I was squarely GenX, and I vehemently disagree. In my mind I belie classification.  (And Jamie, if you say that just proves I’m an Xer, I will flame you like you’ve never been flamed.

I have two things to say about all of this. One, what’s so bad about mainstream? And two, riffing off of Jamie’s edge post, there’s no point to being edgy unless it helps you accomplish something.

I’ll start with the edgy part. I’ve never been edgy. Bitchy, yes. Anti-social, sometimes. Snarky, sure. But edgy implies some sort of disregard for the order of society that I simply never had. It’s too scary. My edgy friends used to take me to alternative rock concerts back in the day, because they thought they were more likely to get backstage with their “normal” friend. They thought it was funny to watch me “just say no” to the lead singer. Luckily, as an adult, having an edge is different than it used to be. Still scary, but different.

I’m not mainstream either. Part of me very much wishes I could pull that off. To me, being mainstream is about having something in common with everyone, and being able to use those commonalities to build relationships. I grew up very self-contained…a lone wolf, much like my father. I often imagine how much more I could accomplish if I had more commonground with more people.

So here’s the thing. Even as I work to be more mainstream–and yes, I really am working at it–I’m actually just now developing my edge. For the first time in my life, I feel like I can finally make gravity work for me. I’m learning that…

• Telling the truth can be productive if you do it in the right way.
• There is power in listening, even when you don’t agree.
• Optimism is more productive than cynicism, even when staying positive seems impossible.

What does this all have to do with GenX? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. I can’t wait for the next time we get to hang out with Jeff Hurt. Look how you inspired us! (again.)

Online Community Vendors
Five things to keep in mind
We believe in wearing out the tools you have before investing in new tools. If you’ve reached that point, and you’re ready to review white label online community vendors, here are a few things that we feel are very important to keep in mind…

1. User experience: Does the platform accommodate the way your members use the internet, or is it something you believe they’ll easily adapt to?
2. Social objects: What are your social objects? Or another way to ask the question: what will your members do in the community? The vendor you select should offer the feature set to accommodate that activity.
3. Culture and vision: How well does the vendor’s vision of online community match your organization’s vision? Is it more social and people-driven? More content-driven?
4. Outposts: If your organization has a presence in outposts like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or others—or you’re planning to have a presence—it’s important to consider how your white label online community might feed your outposts and vice versa.
5. Compatibility: You want to make sure the vendor you choose can work seamlessly within your IT infrastructure, certainly. We put this last because we bet it was already at the top of your list.

New Whitepaper (coming soon!)
Keep an eye out for Six Online Community Vendors for Associations: An Analysis, featuring Higher Logic, NFi Studios, The Port, The Social Collective, Socious, and SusQtech. As soon as it’s ready for download, you’ll find it here.