Acronym

Okay, I have a lot more to say about this one (probably a blog post; although I'm super busy right now). But here is a quick reaction:

1. You're trying to control something that SHOULD NOT and cannot be controlled.
2. Just because you didn't find it in your listserves, etc. doesn't mean it's crud. It may be better than what you put your "good" stamp on. THAT is the essence of the long tail: there is much more out there that is good than we were led to believe.
3. It's still about you delivering to me. Old school. Where's the co-creation? Where's the mouse? (sneaky Clay Shirky reference: who got it?)

There's nothing wrong with you the association putting effort into finding valuable things and giving me, the member, access to them. I like reading journals and going to conferences! But I think that is becoming a smaller piece of value these days. The bar is being raised.

Jamie - please re-read the post... I'm not advocating controlling anything. I am advocating trying to capture some of the value that has limited reach now and attempting to give it broader reach.

Perhaps you mean that by labeling stuff good, I'm saying the association is somehow trying to control the content. That's not it. If a volunteer committee, for example, chooses to pursue three or four ideas for education sessions, they are labeling those ideas as good. They're not saying everything else is crud... that's for everybody else to decide on their own. They're simply labeling those four things good--and members are free to disagree with them, too.

I'm not sure what the first sentence of your second point means, but I made your other point in my post: "there is always subjective evaluation involved, and what is good to one person may be unremarkable to another."

And now to your third point -- a point I also made: "I think associations should offer as many decentralized opportunities as there is a call for from its constituents" and "giving them the tools to create content and collaborate." And about the "old school" swipe -- sounds to me like you're making the argument that associations shouldn't be in the centralized content game at all. If that's true, than I propose that you advocate something where it's impossible to hear the jazz in all the noise.

It really is both. Believe it or not, there are still many, many people out there who want to be delivered to. Let's say I have 10,000 members now. If 10 percent of them are active, engaged participants -- those writing and reviewing and speaking and engaging in hallway conversations -- that gives me 9,000 people who are satisfied being delivered to.

Don't get me wrong, my philosophy is that such an association only really has 1,000 members and 9,000 more core customers. And I think the goal of the association should be to grow the percentage of engaged members. But I also think that the ranks of the engaged will ebb and flow, so at one time someone is engaged, but then they're perfectly happy going back to being delivered to until the next time they are moved to engage again.

Thanks for clarifying, Scott. Sorry, I didn't intend to be mean with "old school." And yes, I agree it's okay to deliver centralized content, and associations will and should keep doing it. I just meant that I was hearing (perhaps inaccurately) a theme of: "wow, there's so much content out there, we need to make sure we tell people what's good and what isn't." I guess it was the labeling the stuff as "not quite good" or "interesting" that got under my skin. i'm not sure I see the point in doing that.

My belief (point two) is that there is far MORE good stuff out there than you guys will ever identify. When you capture all that good stuff, you KNOW that there is other stuff that should be captured, but can't because you can't read/hear/see everything. That's where I heard the control part: we, the association tell you our stuff is good, but that "middle category" we have identified on the website is just "interesting." So I might have misinterpreted that? Do you agree that the association simply can't say "ours is the good stuff, but outside of that it's probably just interesting?"

Here's my epiphany about the long tail. The reason we have "hits" is not because the top recording stars are the best, and the rest are only mediocre. Sure, there are plenty of mediocre musicians. But the reason we have hits is ONLY because there was limited space on the record store shelves. Limited time and money for marketing and promotion. You have to work hard to make something a hit, but the fact is, there's plenty of material out there that is hit worthy. Amazon and iTunes make money off the long tail because they can connect tons of people to the tons of artists that don't get promoted as hits. A few sales each, and you've got lots of sales. Long tail. But they're not getting smaller sales because they're of medium quality, and I think that is a terribly important distinction.

I think the same is true with association content, in general. It's fine to sell hits to the members. They'll want that. But I think it would be a mistake to say "our stuff is good, but if it doesn't have our stamp, then it's only interesting," and that was what I thought I was hearing in your post. Again, I'm sorry if I misinterpreted that. You know I love the contributions you make on this blog!

Sounds like I should make a few clarifications to the three categories based on Jamie's excellent comments.

First, I think we might be pretty close on the "good" category. It's ok for associations to put the proverbial stamp of approval on content as long as it includes two important messages: (1) you, the information-consumer are free to disagree with the label, (and if you do, we hope you tell us why and become part of our labeling process). (2) Just because something is labeled good, it doesn't mean everything else is labeled bad.

The middle category, shortened to "interesting." Where I was going with this category is that an association will be limited by its own resources the amount of things it can call good. Part of the idea of the "good" content is to do something with it -- articles, online discussions (I'm talking about the kind of discussion where the topic is initiated by the association as opposed to discussions initiated by members), education sessions, subjects of research, and on and on. The middle category acknowledges that there is much more information that is looked at that the association should consider doing something with than there are resources to do it. As something is considered, but ultimately loses out to something else because of the scarcity of resources, it falls into this category.

I like being able to identify this category of stuff for a lot of reasons. One, I think it does somehow elevate the status of this stuff above the lower category, the idea being that the association essentially says "hey take a look, you might think this is good stuff even though we didn't have the resources to take it forward." Another good reason is transparency. The association is saying we considered this and decided instead on that -- what do you think of that decision? If you disagree, then get involved.

The last label of stuff is best described as unreviewed and rejected, with the vast majority of it being unreviewed. It doesn't mean it's crud exactly, it means we either didn't have time to look at it, or all we saw was the rough -- take a look if you want, maybe you'll see the diamond in the rough.

In practical application, let's say a committee is in charge of picking 5 education topics for a meeting and they get 20 proposals. Let's say they quickly examined the proposals and decided to take close look at 10 of them. The 5 they choose are the "good." The other 5 of the 10 they looked at closely are the interesting ones. The last 10 fall into the last category along with the 1,000 other things on related topics that never made it into proposals.

As far as commenting on the long tail, I'm guessing your comment was getting a little longer, so you just neglected to mention it, but you don't talk about buzz, which is a big part of hits. To look at hits as entirely a creation of the label/companies/marketing I think only tells half the story. I mean, you have to acknowledge that there are some hits that overcome label/companies/marketing etc., right? How else do you describe something like The Rocky Horror Picture Show?

Thanks -- interesting discussion.