Lessons from the jungle
Social media is all about collaboration—making meaningful connections online.
That’s all fine and good, but despite the abundance of cheap or free web 2.0 tools, moving your association into the social media space can be costly and certainly time consuming, so where’s the payoff?
Don’t be fooled. Social media might be all about collaboration, but one of the things that collaboration leads to is commerce.
I’m going to look at several different social media parts of a single online retailer that I like. Sure, it’s the Mother of All Online Retailers, but just because they’re ginormous and have a huge R&D department, it doesn’t mean that us little guys can’t learn a trick or two from them.
That’s the Amazon sales rank. Everybody likes lists. Search for ASAE & The Center’s own Association Law Handbook and you’ll see it’s ranked in the 1.9 millions.
Here users apply a subject—they call it a tag—to the item. This is a collective wisdom tool, enabling users to find other items they might think are interesting based on terms other users have used to tag other publications.
Now say you’ve read Freakonomics and Andrew S. Weber who wrote a review of it captures everything you liked about the book. Follow the link to his Amazon page where you can read all of his reviews, possibly finding other books to enjoy or avoid.
Still not finding what you need? You can see that Freakonomics is on a few different lists that people have created. Follow the link to Brianne Carnack’s “My Homegrown MBA” list to see the books she’d put on her syllabus. You can also search people’s lists.
I know -- even if you have 100,000 members, you don't come close to the critical mass that Amazon has. But you also don't have 1.9 million products either. It only takes a few for these tools--or something similar to them--to be useful for you. And once a few people make a few lists and start to gain a little professional notoriety as a result, more will follow.
| | Permalink |
Comments
Scott
As someone who is looking for a twelve-step program for amazon.com Prime users, I can endorse the value of customers' reviews and Amazon's continuing evolving business model.
Although associations don't have the reach or traffic of Amazon, we have something Amazon values: depth of content. Frustrated social networkers who can't get their own leaders to pay attention to the power of social media can use Amazon to practice.
By organizing members to beef up the presence of their association's books listed on Amazon, one could not only get the attention of internal leadership but also buy some time with others frustrated by the lack action. Not to mention the undying love of the association's book marketing staff.
We can all harness the power of Amazon to advance our agendas.
Cheers
Ann
Posted by: Ann Oliveri | November 30, 2007 8:22 AM
Your article's eight years late homes. Amazon's allowed user comments since 1999. There's nothing "Web 2.0" (whatever that buzzword means) about it! Go home and start over.
Posted by: N'Shawn | December 2, 2007 5:37 PM
Mom - are you using your N'Shawn alias again?
Thanks for the snark N'Shawn... Amazon hasn't been compiling reviews so that you can see all the reviews that someone has written since 1999 -- that's more like 5 years old. And the tags are relatively new, lists are a couple years old.
But not too many associations that I know of have emulated these things, and that's too bad. And the point is to look at these ideas to see how an association can build their own community with these or other tools. Just because Amazon's been doing it a while, doesn't mean there's nothing to learn from them.
Posted by: Scott Briscoe | December 3, 2007 10:42 AM