Of course it’s the Aarhus Pub­lic Libraries in Den­mark. Pretty cool stuff. I espe­cially like the line about mak­ing the library about what the youth need from libraries, rather than what libraries need from youth. [Thanks, Heather!]

Mindspot the Movie: The Library as Universe

Tags: aarhus, libraries, mindspot, youtube

Today I was part of a panel ses­sion about Web 2.0 tools for the GMC/PCMA

Greg Fine — Asso­ci­a­tion Forum

showed some of their Asso­ci­a­tion Pro­fes­sion­als through­out His­tory video
showed the map of online com­mu­ni­ties from 2007 (“gulf of youtube”)
social media is about build­ing com­mu­nity, and Greg likes this visual because it shows there are actual places and you can’t just aim­lessly wan­der around
– it lets you lever­age exist­ing net­works
– it allows us to eas­ily cre­ate and share infor­ma­tion with one another (as asso­ci­a­tions, we’re about asso­ci­at­ing)
– allows this to hap­pen in an instan­ta­neous way
– on a plat­form that peo­ple are com­fort­able with
so if we as orga­ni­za­tions lever­age these plat­forms, we make it eas­ier for our mem­bers to find us and inter­act with us
– it allows you to evan­ge­lize your mem­bers and your customers

there are gen­er­a­tional dis­tinc­tions — gen­er­ally accepted dis­tinc­tions
uses accept­able footwear for men on day one of their new job as way to dis­tin­guish between them
great­est gen­er­a­tion — wingtips
Xers — black lace-up, but moved to the boat shoe
Millennials/GenY — ten­nis shoes
Gamers — flip-flops
can’t talk to a flip-flop from a wingtip per­spec­tive
even the ten­nis show crowd may not totally get the flip-flop one
also have the 80–20-1 rule
80% of peo­ple who are on the inter­net only look/lurk and don’t engage
20% of the 80% actively engage (read RSS, have a Face­book page)
1% of that 20% are active users of social media online (blog, post to Wikipedia, etc.)
EXCEPT for the gamers, where the num­bers are reversed
only 1% are not active online, etc.

the #1 rule is that the orga­ni­za­tion totally loses con­trol in this envi­ron­ment
if some­one wants to say some­thing bad about you, they don’t need your site/platform to do it
so embrace it
do you use free or pro­pri­etary and build your own?
Greg is a big believer in free
– free
– pro­pri­etary usu­ally means sep­a­rate authen­ti­ca­tion scheme and peo­ple have pass­word fatigue now
– do you have an open or closed sys­tem (can any­one be a mem­ber or is it a mem­ber benefit)

Asso­ci­a­tion Forum makes every­thing open because if you care enough to join, maybe you’ll even­tu­ally become a mem­ber
there’s no right or wrong, but you need to be delib­er­ate about what you’re going to do

set rea­son­able expec­ta­tions
men­tioned a case where a group thought they’d failed because they only had 1,200 peo­ple on their Face­book page
but they only had 10,000 mem­bers total!

you can­not think like you — you have to think like your audi­ence
just because you don’t use it doesn’t mean oth­ers shouldn’t
oth­ers may cre­ate these sites (like a Face­book page) for you if you don’t do it
you have to inte­grate it with tra­di­tional meth­ods
you don’t just do one thing in iso­la­tion — f2f, email newslet­ters, etc. are still valid
taken all together, it makes it all more valuable

it’s like a foot­ball expe­ri­ence — it’s the future of the asso­ci­a­tion expe­ri­ence
the audi­ence in the sta­dium are the mem­bers, who paid admis­sion
within that audi­ence are dif­fer­ent lev­els (box seats ver­sus bleach­ers)
over time, our expe­ri­ences inside the sta­dium may be more valu­able than just being a member

some tools:
– Face­book
– Forum Effect (blogging)

Flickr — an online pic­ture shar­ing site that lets you tag images
showed pic­tures tagged with ASAE
user-generated con­tent (pic­tures from atten­dees)
every­body has a cell phone these days, and these phones have cam­eras
35,000 pic­tures were posted from a con­fer­ence when they asked peo­ple to take a few and then they had a down­load station

YouTube — videos
when some­one comes in to present now, they do a “5 ques­tions with xxxx speaker” video
total time invest­ment per video is one hour, includ­ing the inter­view
they also allow the per­son to use the video, too

LinkedIn and Face­book
don’t upload your mem­ber list to a third-party site to require peo­ple who join are mem­bers, because this is a vio­la­tion of your mem­bers’ pri­vacy
let any­one become a mem­ber on your page
takes five min­utes to set this stuff up

strat­egy is impor­tant!
when you’re think­ing about all of this
Asso­ci­a­tion Forum uses these sites as guide­posts to help peo­ple get to the Forum website

Brad Lewis — Pro­fes­sional Con­ven­tion Man­age­ment Association

“lux­ury expen­di­tures” — travel
is in the media coun­ter­ing these neg­a­tive per­cep­tions and the dis­tinc­tions between legit­i­mate travel and these types of excesses

PCMA uses:
– Face­book
– Flickr
– LinkedIn
– blog on Type­Pad
– YouTube

goals for PCMA:
– want to be where their mem­bers are
– need to par­tic­i­pate in the cur­rent tech­nolo­gies
– facil­i­tate con­nec­tions
– cre­ate mem­ber engage­ment, reten­tion
– brand expe­ri­ence; how can your mem­bers inter­act with you?
– enhanced expo­sure for events, pro­grams, prod­ucts, and ser­vices
– cre­ate added value
– learn some­thing new every day

their most suc­cess­ful site is LinkedIn
rec­om­mend to their chap­ters that they cre­ate sites, too
you do lose some control

PCMA has 6,000 mem­bers and more than 1,000 have joined the LinkedIn group
PCMA posts new con­tent there and posts event news
no hard sells there
eases peo­ple into par­tic­i­pa­tion in the orga­ni­za­tion
present jobs, speaker info
most of the room was already on LinkedIn
from an asso­ci­a­tion stand­point, your mem­bers can already do a mul­ti­tude of things there (and on these other sites)
one sign-on
try to make your name the sign across plat­forms
want the full name and the acronym because you don’t know what peo­ple will search on

mon­i­tor­ing and con­trol:
– wild west; just need to accept that because you can’t pre­vent it
– PCMA does delete some stuff like direct sales solic­i­ta­tions
– does take a staff com­mit­ment, regard­less of which depart­ment is assigned to mon­i­tor
– think about how you’re fos­ter­ing and feed­ing the com­mu­nity, too; that’s why you want to choose which sites are best for you and your members

PCMA doesn’t mind when peo­ple say a ses­sion was hor­ri­ble, because it gives them feedback

take action:
– work with mar­ket­ing to cre­ate a group, work with mem­ber­ship to update it
– if you’re not mon­i­tor­ing what’s hap­pen­ing, your com­pe­ti­tion prob­a­bly is
– mon­i­tor for refer­ral requests (“who knows of a good xxxx com­pany?”), even if you don’t answer back
Brad encour­ages third party responses

what it’s for:
– net­work­ing with col­leagues
– get updates
– ask ques­tions
– gain insights
– share ideas

what it’s not for:
– solic­it­ing (it’s like using the wrong fork at din­ner)
– direct promotion

aver­age age of a PCMA mem­ber is 47
one of the young kids at a table didn’t know what LinkedIn was — “face­book for old people”

Face­book
– tar­get mar­ket seg­men­ta­tion
– stu­dents (announce schol­ar­ships, intern­ships, com­mu­ni­ca­tion with PCMA stu­dent staff)
– cre­ate event
– dis­cus­sion boards (stu­dents were vol­un­tar­ily mak­ing rec­om­men­da­tions to oth­ers about join­ing PCMA)

Flickr
– annual meet­ing (linked from com­mu­ni­ca­tions, pho­tos for dailies, mem­ber engage­ment even if they can’t attend)
– social net­work­ing cen­tered around pho­tos
– share pho­tos within groups and tags

Type­Pad blog
– new PCMA Chair­man John Folks’ blog
– puts face on lead­er­ship
– way for lead­er­ship to con­nect with mem­bers and get feed­back
– start con­ver­sa­tions among colleagues

YouTube
– PCMA has a YouTube chan­nel
– some lead­er­ship hasn’t wanted to be on YouTube
– only have a few select videos but it’s a good way to put a face on the orga­ni­za­tion and tell stories

pro­pri­etary sys­tems
– PCMA did pur­chase an expen­sive prod­uct for “PCMA Con­nect“
– can trial on free before you try pro­pri­etary
– had bells and whis­tles but was a sep­a­rate destination

Learn­ings
– con­ver­sa­tion hap­pens organ­i­cally
– hot top­ics are anonymity, reluc­tance to speak your mind, gen­eral best has been more social (New Year’s res­o­lu­tions)
be rel­e­vant to the peo­ple who con­nect with you

philoso­phies and con­clu­sions
– your mem­ber pro­file will deter­mine which plat­form works best for you
– lead­er­ship accep­tance, need some buy-in
– cer­tainly trial this stuff
these are just new assets in the arse­nal, and they’re even free
– impor­tant to engage in rel­e­vant busi­ness of today

Jenny Levine (me)

here are my slides (12MB, PDF)

Tags: ala, association forum, blogs, brad lewis, facebook, friendfeed, greg fine, linkedin, mpow, pcma, twitter, web 2.0, youtube