This is a guest post by Andy Steggles, and is a sneak preview of a new book Andy is writing called Social Networking for Nonprofits. Andy kindly invited us to write a chapter for the book, so we’re excited to see it when it comes out!

Life Time Value 1.0 vs. 2.0
(engagement, engagement, engagement)

When most people think about the average life time value of a member they quickly try to calculate the average length of membership and multiply it by the average dollars spent per member in a year. While this is the traditional method, it’s also a very narrow way of viewing value. A member may have never attended a conference or event and simply paid their annual dues, but this doesn’t mean they don’t provide any other value to the community. LTV needs to be more holistic and embrace not just dollars spent but value provided.

LTV 2.0 is an emerging area which provides a more inclusive way of measuring who our most valuable members are. For example, I may have renewed my dues every year for the past 10 years with an average renewal price of $200 per year. LTV 1.0 would give me a value of $2000. However, this doesn’t take into account the 5 years I have served as a chapter officer, a further 3 years on a committee or perhaps the articles I’ve written for the association magazines and newsletters. Now let’s take this a step further and consider the emerging social tools available such as blogs, wikis or file sharing. When we look at these different engagement opportunities, we are not just talking about writing a blog, we’re talking about all the associated activities such as rating, commenting, reading, sharing etc. Creating is just one attribute surrounding a blog but there are many more which can be measured and ultimately rewarded.

Let’s suppose we have all our engagement areas identified. How do we quantify the engagement? One solution is to assign point values to each engagement activity and as every member performs an action, allow the system to dynamically record the associated point values. By collecting all the points from both your social platform as well as the more traditional engagement activities (chapter officer, committee volunteer etc.) the society will finally be able to run reports to recognize their most valuable members in general but also for specific activities. Recently I’ve toyed with the idea of assigning a point value to the dollars spent (or conversely assigning dollar values to points earned). The idea being that you can quantify the value of members across the board using a single metric vs. a mixture of points and dollars. I haven’t seen anyone do this yet but it is just a matter of time I think.

Next, how do we recognize the most engaged members? Now you may have selected a social platform with engagement metrics and have an AMS which can provide similar functions and you are finally able to run reports… what next? For the first time we can really start identifying and recognizing members who have contributed in non-financial ways. This is also an opportunity to encourage engagement by providing true recognition.

For example, each month you could feature your top three most valuable members in a page of your printed magazine publication. Similar to how ASAE features a “day in the life” of a member and/or features industry blogs, why not feature/highlight your most engaged members? Another opportunity is to assign threshold values for engagement levels i.e. 200 to 400 points equals a Bronze level of engagement. 401 to 500 is silver etc. you can then feature people who have recently broken into a new level of engagement for the first time. For example, at what level might you give away the prestigious lapel pin which recognizes industry contributions?
Consider assigning digital ribbons or taking advantage of social badging opportunities from your social platform. For example, if you view my profile on the www.SNAMA.org website, you’ll see how digital ribbons have been incorporated to provide a new type of recognition: www.snama.org/andysteggles

Not all recognition has to be online. Think of other more typical ways in which you can recognize and thank members: Perhaps present a certificate to the different members at your annual conference or have a new award for the year’s most valuable member etc? Roy Snell from the Corporate Compliance association recently introduced CE credits for blogs which met specific criteria.

Think about the possibilities of utilizing such measuring techniques and how you could utilize the results to recognize and reward members. We already know from books such as ASAE’s “Decision to Join” that the more engaged our members are, the more they are likely to renew – ultimately improving retention and the bottom line.

Here are the slides from a presentation we did last week with Jamie Notter at ASAE’s Social Media Workshop.

What Social Media Means for the Way We Work

Social media tools are not only changing the way we do specific association management work such as member communications or marketing, they are also changing at a deeper level how we work on a daily basis. Internally, if done right, social media is fundamentally changing specific behaviors, processes, and organizational structures by breaking down hierarchies and silos. Externally, we find ourselves on a steep learning curve as we figure out how to operate in a world that blurs our personal and professional personas and demands that staff at all levels be empowered to speak for the organization. This session will help you understand the challenges social media will present to traditional ways of doing things in associations and how to effect that kind of change from the inside out.

First, we asked everyone to write down their number one biggest challenge for getting started “back at the ranch”.

We predicted that everyone’s challenges would fall into one of three buckets: behaviors (individual self), processes (internal relationships), or structures (organization as a whole). Jamie summarized some of those likely challenges:

1. Individual challenges:

• Managing time
• Difference between work and personal
• Managing relationships (different mix of virtual and face to face)
• Communicating better (you represent the company)

2. Internal Process challenges:

• Competition about message and time. Different departments have different priorities
• Decision making. Who gets to decide and how decisions are made will be challenged by social media
• Knowledge. Archipelagos used to work but now can derail efforts.

3. Structure and Culture challenges:

• Leadership. Authority and hierarchy is challenged. People who didn’t have power now do, so will your organization accept that?
• Leadership again. Capacity has changed. We used to funnel information to smart people at the top, now capacity needed more at all levels.
• Transparency. People will know more about you sooner. Can your organization handle that?
• Failure and Risk. The calculus for these has changed dramatically, but no one has told our leaders yet.

Next, we explained that regardless of what tools you use and what social spaces you are operating in, social media “work” really boils down to one thing: how you are going to manage the process of listening and responding. We led the participants through a group exercise to discuss the pros and cons of centralized versus decentralized monitoring.

Centralized: A single department responsible for monitoring, reporting, coordinating responses from official spokespeople.
Decentralized: Interdepartmental cooperation for monitoring, reporting, coordinating responses from multiple spokespersons.

We included a handout (a real one, with actual sentences and stuff! Hehe).  Check it out.

Our conclusion? CLARITY OVER CONTROL.

Many associations will go through a phase of trying to exert some control; the centralized model is a perfectly legitimate way to start, however ultimately you’ll reach less people and limit your success. Small staff associations have a HUGE advantage here, because they already know how to share all the internal work of the organization and how to be clear about roles, responsibilities, workflow and what it’s all for (the mission).

Going forward, you can work towards a decentralized model by providing clarity.

Clarity means that everyone knows:

- what the objectives are for having a social media presence
- who will be doing what, inventory of activity and responsibilities
- how people will communicate about what they hear on the social web
- how and when responses are handled, escalated when necessary
- how new projects can happen
- how online activity relates to offline activity
- what particular business timelines are relevant

Going back to the original three buckets, clarity for individuals means you’ll know:

- what’s my role?
- how do I build relationships personally and professionally?
- how do I measure the progress of the activities I’m managing?

Clarity from an organizational standpoint means we’ll know:

- what the benefits are for our association as a whole and/or for the industry
- what particular risks we must always bear in mind (HIPPA, antitrust)
- who our members are and how this helps us communicate with them
- how we can teach members to use social media and bridge the digital divide
- what value proposition we have that we want our members to share freely

Clarity over control ultimately means that everyone, staff and all stakeholders, can be empowered to share the love.

The workshop had lots of other great stuff too.  Here is the full list of sessions and accompanying handouts, and here’s the Twitter search stream for #smw09.

Veterans Day is coming up. Want to show your appreciation? Help give military families trees for Christmas.

Christmas SPIRIT Foundation Launches TweetUp4Troops

In conjunction with this effort, you may have already heard about Tweetup 4 Troops – local events happening to help the cause. Here’s more info on that. Hope you can help.

You’re invited to join Social Media Club DC (SMC-DC), Young Association Professionals (YAP), NextGenWeb, and Thankfulfor.com at a happy hour to celebrate the DC metro technology and social media community and to support Tweetsgiving.

Join the DC group for event updates and get tickets here: http://epicchange.org/groups/washington-dc/home/. If you can’t make it, please consider making a small monetary donation to support DC’s final tally! Tickets start at $5 each, with an option to donate more. ALL TICKET SALES GO TO EPIC CHANGE.

WHY:
Tweetsgiving is a global celebration that seeks to change the world through GRATITUDE. Last year Tweetsgiving raised over $10,000 to build a school in Tanzania. We have a lot to be thankful for, and hope that the DC area can contribute funds to implement a technology lab at the primary school where last year’s TweetsGiving classroom was built. For more information please visit: http://tweetsgiving.epicchange.org/story/

In addition to raising funds for Tweetsgiving, we will also be accepting small donations of items for a local DC women’s shelter. Please bring items to donate, anything will do! Think of small items like socks, gloves, scarves, hats, towels, sheets, utensils, cleaning products, school supplies and craft items, food storage items, toiletry items, etc.

Please purchase your Tweetsgiving tickets here – all proceeds will go towards Tweetsgiving.

During the event, you will also have an opportunity to share what you are #thankfulfor. It will be a great #Tweetsgiving for all!

SPONSORS:
We are also looking for SPONSORS to make this event a success. Sponsorship money will go towards food and drink at BlackFinn DC, so the more the merrier! All additional funds post-event cost will be donated to Tweetsgiving as well. We have a variety of pricing tiers, so please e-mail us at tweetsgivingdc [at] gmail.com if you would like to sponsor this event! We can’t do it without you!

Thank you to our sponsors:
PLATINUM LEVEL
Rock Creek Strategic Marketing

GOLD LEVEL
YAP (Young Association Professionals)

SILVER LEVEL
New Media Strategies

BRONZE LEVEL
JESS3
Bradshaw Vineyards

LOGISTICS:
Date: Tuesday, November 24th
Time: 6 pm to 9 pm
Location: BlackFinn DC
1620 I Street NW
Washington DC 20006

Parking garage next door ($8 after 5 pm and open until midnight)
Metro: Farragut West (Orange/Blue) or Farragut North (Red)

Please contact tweetsgivingdc [at] gmail.com with any additional questions.

http://www.twitter.com/tweetsgivingdc
http://www.twitter.com/thankfulfor

TICKETS: http://epicchange.org/groups/washington-dc/home/

We conducted a great webinar (if I say so myself) this week for NADP, the National Association of Dental Plans, on The Power of a Corporate Blog. Blogging is, of course, a topic very dear to Lindy’s and my hearts, as we would be nowhere without the juju from having built up our personal reputations and got to know our community through our personal blogs; and of course that process eventually enabled us to start our consulting practice and aggregate our blogs into our very own corporate blog.

A good blog is, in our opinion, the absolute best way to establish an organization’s status as a thought leader in its particular industry and its corporate reputation, online and offline. A great blog can even the playing field so that a small organization has as much Google juice or more in their particular niche than a much bigger player who does not have a blog and does not have a community of evangelists. The power of a blog is that you are providing ways in which people who believe in what you are doing can spread your message and your brand value much further out into the world than you could through any other kind of traditional marketing alone.

Here are the slides from our webinar; below are some accompanying links we mentioned in response to questions we received during the webinar. We talked about how to practice, launch, and feed a blog. Enjoy!

Blog Resources

· SocialFish Moderation Policy

· Sample Disclosure Best Practices

· FTC Blogger Guidelines

· More about FTC guidelines

· Blog Writing Tips Bookmark (2 PDF documents that you can download)

· RSS In Plain English Video

Here are the slides from a recent presentation we did for the Mid-Atlantic chapter of the Market Research Association.

Essentially, we talked about:

- How social media provides several kinds of data:

• Passive – keyword monitoring, sentiment analysis (positive, negative or neutral brand mentions), website analytics, etc
• Active – collecting fans and followers and seeing who they are and who their connections are (social influence/social capital), A/B testing, focus groups/feedback loops, etc

- Lots of tools available, free (Google Alerts, Twitter search) to expensive (Radian6); Analytics tools (Google Analytics, Omniture, Postrank)

- Examples of research in action:

• Zappos’ GetSatisfaction site – shows sentiment, has good back end data
• MyStarbucksIdea – crowdsourcing ideas – product development, community voting = qualifies the data
• Any user profile can be used to collect lots of new info about people – custom fields, who they are connected with, what groups they are joining

Check out Slide 11 in particular.  We didn’t actually have time to go into the “questions that drive us” because we were busy having a great discussion with the Market Research group and ran out of time, but these are questions we’d like YOU to think about as you’re measuring your social media progress.   Getting the data is easy.  Pretty charts are easy.  Nice spreadsheets are easy.  But what are you going to DO with this data?  Think about not only measuring progress against objectives, but using it for actionable business intelligence.

Have a good examples of how you’re using social data? Let us know, we’re always looking for good case studies or examples to use in our presentations.

“Nuff said. 

So my Twitter Lists feature has just been enabled, and I spent a couple of days going through the people I follow on Twitter and organizing most of them into groups, in such a way that might be useful for YOU if you’re just starting out on Twitter, or just looking to expand the group of people you follow (which likely means some of these will follow you back!). Rohit Bhargava has a really good post on what Twitter Lists are all about from a marketing/business perspective.

If you click on the links, you’ll see the actual stream from these lists. There’s an easy button to follow everyone at once from a particular list, or click on “following” on the right sidebar to see a full list of who’s in each one, then you can pick and choose.

Here’s my list of Association Tweeps. You’ll definitely find friends in here!

Here’s my Nonprofit or Gov 2.0 list. Ditto.

Here’s my list of “One-Percenters” – these are smart social media people I get a ton of great links from. A lot are friends now.

Here’s “The Big League” – these are the really fab people everyone follows, Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis, David Meerman Scott, Charlene Li, Chris Anderson, Dan Pink… but I’ve narrowed down the list (in my head) a LOT since the early days when I followed all the big names. Some people are great writers but crappy Twitterers – these people are great at both. There are currently less than 30 people on this list and I aim to keep it that way.

Here’s my “Awesomesauce” list – mostly for fun, miscellaneous yet super cool Twitter accounts like @MarsPhoenix, @BakedIn, the @APStyleBook, @themediaisdying, @unsuckdcmetro, @Google, @ussoccer etc. that pretty much defy any other classification but are worth a follow in you’re into that sort of thing. (Greg Lavallee is in this list because he is still the one tweep who makes me laugh all day long. Patti Digh is in this list because she is awesome and we have this weird thing where we’ll happen to glance at a clock every day at 11:11 – not on purpose – no matter what we’re doing or where we are, and we tweet each other about it. In case you were wondering what that was all about.)

Here’s Team SocialFish, just a small crew so far and some are honorary for now while we percolate some stuff, but we’ll add to this list as we get our internship program set up.

Anyhoo… hope this is somewhat useful! Would love to see some of your favorite lists in the comments! Also check out Listorious for more. If you don’t have this feature yet, don’t worry, it won’t take long – a whole ton of people got them the same day I did so I bet this will be rolled out pretty quickly to all now.

This is a recent presentation by Thanks For Playing blogger Elizabeth Engel and Caroline Fuchs. Check it out.

Found this great slide deck via Web Worker Daily. I particularly like the Dr Seuss references… Check it out.