Acronym

Ha! You actually clicked on this link, did you? My apologies; sometimes I feel like we are all heading down a little bit of a silly road, flush with "5 ways to do this" and "10 ways to do that," with some awesome keywords that get clicks and sound so neat in the homogenized soup that is the mainstream social internet. Ugh.

Anyway, as you know from some of my past posts, I've been working on the rollout of a new website over the past year. We've learned a lot along the way, and below are some ideas I want to let you know about or that I am randomly pondering, and I want to hear from you on stuff you are doing or pondering related to the web these days, as well. (If you don't respond then I will maybe cry a little bit.)

• We are learning at my association that an online community is hard work, and that what works is usually not even close to what we thought would work. For example, we have a great discussion forum that no one discusses on, but people love to post their own videos and pictures on the same site, and they love contests where they can win stuff or send in funny pictures.
• We are finding out that a social media component to web advertising and sponsorship packages gets a lot of interest from agencies and people we are trying to sell to. It's a nice value add and helps seal the deal sometimes. And we are learning that selling comprehensive packages complete with in-person, print, email, web, and social components take longer to sell but are of more value to our core sponsors and advertisers.
• SEO is so boring and yet so important, and I think we should all invest in someone to do strategic SEO for our associations if we can.
• Web strategy is the equivalent of association strategy. The two must exist together and not in separate vacuums, and we should contextually frame much of our overall strategy with the web in mind, due to its influence and importance (e.g. "How do we leverage the web to achieve X or advocate for Y?")
• Associations should be using the web and social media to innovate when it comes to committees and how they discuss, make decisions, and accomplish work. Is anyone doing this, because I'm not! Most of our committee meetings are via a conference call or, on special occasions, we'll use GoToMeeting.
• ROI discussions on social media I think miss the point; do you calculate the ROI on a stapler or for your email account or for that cocktail party? I think we are all trying to measure things too much in order to justify our own existence; these tools should help free us from this measuring overkill and allow us to reconnect with people, which is what associations are all about in the first place, right?
• Video is the way we should archive our association history, moving forward … like those old family videos!

Thoughts?