Associations, build your online community before someone beats you to it
That’s the advice Kare Anderson sent me in an e-mail, and I think she’s right. With so many for-profits and third parties getting into the social networking space, associations who lag behind in building a place for their members to interact online will likely find someone else beat them to it. Kare points to this site for HR professionals and recruiters as one example. As with most cyber things these day, I’m afraid this is one of those “you snooze, you lose” propositions.
Related Topics: Technology
December 6th, 2006 at 1:06 am
MyNSA.org is the member-only destination we created for the National Speakers Association in 2005. The development was driven by the members and includes a news and blog feed section members can configure to meet their personal needs. For organizations who are fixing to think about creating an online community consider these tips we learned during the project.
- Let members control their online environment.
- Give them a say in content selection and creation.
- Increase membership value by creating compelling “bonus” content available only through the online community.
Provide multiple formats for sharing content including:
- Blogs - Moderated topics with interactive comments.
- Wikis - Collaborative workspaces where users generate and edit the content.
- MoBlogs - Blogs that contain images from camera phones.
- Photo galleries of HSP (Happy Smiling People)
The key to creating a successful online community is to eliminate the delay between the creation and publication of member knowledge and best practices.
December 6th, 2006 at 8:18 am
Do you have more information on social networking. I think you may have posted on this before and I wasn’t paying attention. I am curious now and will search on my own, but am particularly interested in social networking and any relationship with the growing giving circles movement. I realize this is a little out of the realm of meetings, but I can make it fit. Giving Circle members have to meet and I wonder if they are doing it f2f or virtually.
Chris Galvin
December 6th, 2006 at 10:15 am
Good points, Jerry! Thanks for chiming in with your advice.
Chris, here are some posts/articles about social networking. While they mostly are connected to meetings in some way, there should be some juice in there for you:
MySpace for Hand Surgeons
Turbo Networking
Blog that Meeting
Why You Should Care about Web 2.0
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