Forget the Technology

Lindy captured the conversation regarding SM burnout which included yours truly. I agree with Lindy (and commented on her post) that as association professionals, we should experiment non-stop internally. The problem comes when we jump on the bandwagon of the newest piece of tech and burnout our members who are not in the top 1-10% of innovators. The long tail of some of these technologies doesn't provide any significant additional value.

So totally forget the technology! Don't ever pitch a wiki with the word wiki in it. Don't pitch it by showing the website - pitch the value first and get rid of all the social media talk - members don't care about social media - they care about value.

They care about:

• Open collaboration
• Continued conversations
• Automatic updates

Not:

• Wiki
• Social Networks
• RSS Feed

In a recent article on ASAE, Maddie and Lindy put it best: Words like subscribe, trackback, and permalink are standard fare on most blog templates, but meaningless to a new user.

So if you plan a 30 second pitch of a new tool, forget the tool. Focus on what it does. Members don't care what its called - and if the pitch is in the generic name itself, then you're not providing the significant unique value that only your association can provide.

This can also be true if you're planning to change or add a new tool. Take the tools out and list only the value each adds (for your members experience - not yours). Then you need to evaluate whether or not there is enough new value to justify the change.

Thanks for reading,
bob

P.S. - in the next day or so I'm going to finally update my blog template - well that's the hope anyways