Brian Solis on association member engagement
This month's issue of Associations Now asks "5 Questions for the Next 5 Years," with answers from a bunch of smart people in the association industry. Here on Acronym, we've reached out to a few smart people outside the association industry to offer a short answer to some of the same questions.
Answering a question today about community and member engagement is new-media expert and futurist Brian Solis, author of Engage, a guide for businesses to build, measure, and cultivate success in the social web.
Acronym: Today, association members are easily able to engage and build community with their professional peers outside of associations. How should associations be rethinking their membership engagement and recruitment strategies?
Solis: "It's actually quite the opposite. Today association members are not easily able to engage and build communities with their professional peers outside of associations. The easy part is signing up for accounts on social networks and finding people with whom to connect. The hard part is creating a presence online that's not only worthy of connection, but also one that establishes the foundation for leadership and inspiration.
"More importantly, it's fundamentally required to understand that communities don't cultivate because of focusing on the growth of the three F's (friends, fans, followers). Communities are cultivated through investment: the continued introduction of value, meaningful responses, and the creation and curation of useful content. Essentially we earn our relationships and grow the size and shape of our communities as a result of our actions and our words. We earn what we deserve and are measured by intensity of our social graph."
Great food for thought. Please offer your thoughts on this question or Brian's response in the comments.
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Comments
Of course I'm biased because I'm obsessed with community management, but the way I read this is that online community management is an essential part of associations' future value proposition. Brian makes a great point--yes, there are ways out there for people to find each other online, but they are crowded and noisy and disparate. Associations can be the haven where professionals who want to connect with peers online can do it in a structured, inviting, enriching way. But notice that Brian says "Communities are cultivated through investment: the continued introduction of value, meaningful responses, and the creation and curation of useful content." Associations must invest in community managers to introduce value, meaningful responses and quality content into their online communities if they want them to be the hub of their members' online activity. And that doesn't necessarily mean that hub is a white-label, members-only platform--"community" isn't necessarily a single, private location online; it's the sum of an organization's online presences.
Posted by: Maggie McGary | October 7, 2010 8:45 AM
I don't have any disagreement with Brian or Maggie and in fact really like Maggie's comment: "community" isn't necessarily a single, private location online; it's the sum of an organization's online presences.
I do thought find that as soon as say engagement and community, we seem to default to a conversation about online. I believe that for associations have to think about building and engaging community broadly - it should include our traditional components and our new components. And the measure of success is the sum of those.
Posted by: Peggy Hoffman | October 14, 2010 3:29 PM