Acronym

Happy Monday!

- There have been some interesting meeting ideas up for grabs in the blogosphere lately. Matt Baehr suggests offering an "unsession" room at every meeting, while Nancy Wilson points out that reusing conference bags can be both green and a creative networking tool.

- Ben Martin ponders whether the process of becoming a board leader tends to squash productive dissent among those future leaders.

- Wes Trochlil has a great question for associations out there that are conducting surveys or other data-gathering projects.

- Bob Sutton shares a wonderful story that shows how a customer's problem can create an opportunity for even better customer service. On a related note, the 37signals blog reminds you that the customer just doesn't care whose fault it is.

- Jeremiah Owyang shows some really interesting examples of how to track a particular issue and how it's being discussed among bloggers, Twitterers, and on the web more generally. (Note that the issue in question relates to the Democratic nomination battle, but, setting politics aside, I'd think these same techniques could be useful to any association.)

- How often do you get to see association management presented as a dream job? (Admittedly, this article focuses more on the industries these trade associations represent than on the profession of association management, but still, it's nice to see some association professionals recognized in this way.)

More from the 2008 Digital Now conference. A common theme bubbled up in several of the sessions today: focusing on users.

Specifically, many of the thought leaders have hammered home the importance of thinking like your members and website visitors, listening to them for their needs, and asking them how your content and services should be structured.

Dan Guarnaccia, VP of product marketing at Sitecore, listed the seven habits of effective websites. Number one on the list? “Your members are in charge.” Later on, he talked about taking an honest look at your website and finding the holes – the places where your members look for content and either miss what’s there or find nothing at all – and patching them up.

Matt Loeb, CAE, staff director at IEEE, conducted extensive usability testing for the online portal for IEEE’s magazine, Spectrum. Members were asked to complete tasks on IEEE’s website and were monitored as they did. Their feedback? The site navigation stunk (in so many words). So they redesigned it.

In the same session, Gary Rubin, chief publishing and e-media officer at the Society for Human Resources Management, said he intentionally downplays the brand of SHRM’s print magazine on SHRM’s website. “People are going to our website for broad content, not our magazine,” he said. Content from the magazine and other resources is arranged by topics and categories – which is how visitors browse and search – not by what publication they came from. (Take-home test: check your association’s website. Are the names of your publications more prominent than the content in them?)

The real doozy came from Jim Bower, founder and chief visionary officer of Whyville, an educational online virtual world for kids age eight to 14. Bower argued that the human brain interprets information in three-dimensional space, and so Whyville is constructed for children to learn by moving through and interacting in the Whyville community. He said two-dimensional information (including that on a computer screen) is “an artifact of the printing press.” Whyville seems alien to most adults, but it works: Whyville has drawn 3.3 million users. Engaged users. The kids even participate in their own governance system.

The big picture: as association staff, it’s way too easy to develop deeply ingrained interpretations of everything about your organization. Don't allow this to guide how you deliver content and services to members and consumers, because they see your products in entirely different ways.

Seth Godin has a great post up today (admittedly, most of his posts are great ones) about handling customer phone calls. Here's his opening salvo: "The new rules mean that the most valuable marketing event is almost always an inbound phone call."

I'll admit that answering member calls is something I struggle with, because in my career in association communications, I've often received calls from members with questions that had nothing to do with my area of expertise--the member operating under the assumption that "communications" meant that I knew the answers to any given question they might have. I've struggled with the conflict between wanting to give great customer service and just not knowing the answer to a question. And, of course, no member enjoys being bounced all over creation while they're trying to find the one person with the answer they need.

But last week I noticed something while I was working at Springtime: The hardest questions I had to answer were the brand-new ones. Once I had told one person where the closest Starbucks was or how to get to the general session, I could answer the question easily and fluently the next time it was asked. Our meetings department gave me pretty much all the information I needed, but I had to go through the experience of answering the question once to upload it properly into my brain.

I'm wondering: Would it be worthwhile to cycle all of your staff through a few weeks of answering member phone calls? It would certainly be hard work for all concerned, but would it help your staff get a truly fluent familiarity with the questions your members tend to ask--and therefore help them to provide better customer service when called upon to answer those questions again?

I have been invited to a AMA conference for "medical communicators" - seems like a great opportunity to network with my counterparts from around the country, and it's even on 'my' coast - which heightens the appeal. So, I've told them I'm planning to go. In fact, I've told them four times, and counting.

Three separate sources in the organization have sent me emails inviting, then prompting me to reserve a spot. The first message, from someone I’ve met, wrote "Respond to this message to let us know you're coming, and you'll get a discount." So, I did, and he confirmed it, twice.

The next message, from someone else, sent two weeks later, said "Respond by the early-bird deadline to get your discount."

Confused, I wrote my contact to ask whether I needed to pay by that early-bird deadline, or just reserve a spot, which I had already done. Twice.

He apologized, and assured me that my place was held, and I had nothing more to do – real registration wasn’t open yet, anyway. Fine. A bit miffed, I waited to hear when *real* registration was open.

Except then I got another "Early Bird Deadline Extended!" message from the original contact on January 9, telling me about the new 'pre-registration deadline.' Which, thinking I've already responded, I skipped, until this weekend when I looked more closely at the message. This one actually links to a registration site. And the language has changed!

Suddenly I'm confused and a touch panicky - have I just cost my employer money by assuming I was all set? 'Pre-registration deadline' sounds like the date by which one must *pay* to get a discount.

So I go online this morning to register, though I may be late. Better to get it done, anyway. But there is no program, there is no fee to pay, and aside being forced to RSVP for a luncheon identified by acronym I don't know and that is not defined, there’s nothing specific at all.

I think all I’ve just done is tell them I’m coming. For the fourth time.

This is no way to market a meeting. For all their outreach, I still have little idea what I’m in for.

I don’t know yet: when is the housing deadline? When will real registration open? Now that I’ve pre-registered through their system, will it let me register again when it’s time to choose my itinerary and pay? And when exactly might that be?

Lessons: 1) ‘Save the date’ marketing is great, but keep the number of messages at that end limited – to one or two. 2) Know what the right and left hand are doing. It confuses and alienates people when they get duplicated messages that don’t acknowledge what they’ve already done to respond. 3) Don’t aggressively market the event until you’ve got the program, deadlines and details set. 4) If you want people to pre-register, make it *real* pre-registration, so that it’s possible to pay at that time. We don’t want to register twice.

During a recent training event I attended, we saw an interesting video presentation on customer service. The narrator told a number of great stories, including one about how the common practice at banks of attaching pens to chains was a terrible idea. The chains imply that the bank thinks the customer is a thief, he said; it would be wiser to provide unchained pens with the bank’s name on them, so that if the pens did wander off, they’d be advertising for the bank as they did so.

Makes sense to me. But the whole thing struck me as funny, given that the video started with 10 seconds of focus on a single dark screen with large red writing at the top: “Duplicating this video is STEALING!” Which undercut the narrator’s point somewhat.

I’m not here to argue for illegal DVD duplication, but to point out that it’s important to consider the impressions you make on members and customers. I’m sure the narrator of that video was sincere in his arguments; I’m also guessing that he never saw that “Duplication is STEALING!” screen, or, if he did, he didn’t think of it in connection with the story about pens at banks. It’s easy to do that when planning a big project—you can get very focused on details and not realize that Detail A contradicts Detail R, and that members or customers will be annoyed or even angered by that contradiction.

One example I’ve seen several times recently is that of advertising a conference as “paperless” after eliminating an on-site program or education session handouts, while not considering the amount of paper used elsewhere at the meeting. Once attendees have the expectation that the conference is paperless, they will notice every time you use paper throughout the event, and question it. You should too.

I'm heading to Tokyo for my third time next week. Being one of the mecca's for video games, I have no shortage of excuses to visit (in this case, there is the massive Tokyo Game Show that boasts ~200k attendees, and various other technical conferences I'll be speaking at).

Like many travelers, I'm always compelled to learn (more) about where I'm traveling. Sadly, given busy schedules, this usually means reading the country/city Wikipedia page (which alone is still massively helpful). In the case of Japan, I generally like to consume some of its pop-culture and so have been on a somewhat informal/personal "Japanese immersion program"...

A colleague recommended I watch the documentary on male host-club workers, The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief.

Wow, what a fascinating and disturbing story about the hard drinkin', smokin' and hair-sprayin' young men that entertain women for money. Just from an other-world culture point of view, it is quite a jarring film to watch and does a great job in peeling away the layers of the onion off the "glamorous life" facade.

Anyway, what does this have to do with member associations? Well, there's amazingly a lot of parallels to draw in terms of creating "happiness spaces" and being attuned to customer needs, etc. The central character, being the most successful host in Osaka, states multiple times that it's always/only about the customer, and never about himself - he exists to anticipate and serve their needs.

Portions of the film also made me think back to Douglas Rushkoff's thought leader session at ASAE-07 about associations being the place where members can be geeks about what they love.

In short, we should always be striving to create such great happy spaces for members - perhaps even at the expense of what we may personally prefer...

(FYI, the documentary is freely available via Google Video and runs approx. 75 minutes.)

David Gammel posted this week about an error message he came across on a website. In thinking about what the organization could have done differently to engage with folks who hit that error page, he says, “In this case, a form for an e-mail address and an offer to let you know when the problem was resolved could have been a good alternative to a standard feedback form.”

I think this is a great idea with a broader application: I think sometimes we underestimate the importance of followup as an element of excellent customer service. When a member/customer has a question that can’t be resolved immediately and hears “We’ll certainly take your input into account and consider it,” he or she may feel OK about the response. But if that member/customer hears back in three months, “We wanted to give you an update on what happened because of your feedback,” he or she will probably feel really good about the organization that took the time to check back in.

This is something that can be fairly hard to do (I would be the first to say that I should look for more opportunities for this kind of followup in my own work), but I think it can really be worth the effort.

At my last association, we used to routinely see member responses in anonymous surveys that cried out for personal responses. Typically, the member was using an open comment field to vent about something important to him/her that didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the survey at hand. (I would imagine this wasn't unique to that association.) You could tell this individual was frustrated, but there was no way to reach out to him or her.

I always wished there was some way to end a survey with, “Did you provide any comments on this survey that you would like to discuss personally with staff? If so, please paste the comment and your e-mail address here.” I’m sure there are good research reasons not to do this—certainly it would make some respondents worry that the rest of their survey responses would no longer be anonymous—but I would have loved the chance to talk to some of those frustrated members directly and address their concerns.

Customer service is a hot button these days (did you DC-area folks see JetBlue’s giant mea culpa in the Washington Post the other day?).

You might be interested in checking out two interesting blog posts on the subject:

Seth Godin diagnoses what he thinks is wrong in customer service today and proposes some changes.

Seht also points to Joel Spolsky’s blog, where he writes on the seven steps to remarkable customer service. My favorite section is actually bonus step #8: creating a customer service career path that attracts the best and brightest applicants to spend several years in customer service on their way to their longer-term career goals.

Enjoy!

ETA: David Gammel also found Joel Spolsky's post to be of interest, and has some good comments of his own.

Via Shel Holtz’s blog, I came across something new Dell has launched that has great applicability to the association world.

Dell’s new Ideastorm site allows users to propose ideas for new products (or tweaks to existing products), vote for ideas they like with just the click of a “Promote” icon, and discuss ideas that are in play.

The best part (I think) is labeled “Ideas in Action”—where Dell intends to report how they are using the proposed ideas. Since Ideastorm is less than a week old, they don’t have anything in that space yet—but I think it will be critical in terms of keeping users involved. Compare this with a typical feedback cycle where a member or customer fills out a survey and possibly, months later, sees a newsletter article summarizing the survey results and a few sentences on how the results will be applied.

Could your members come up with a storm of ideas this way?

It's a simple idea, so simple that nobody does it. What a shame.

In a lot of ways, I agree with Ben Martin's previous post that association staff are like their members. But one significant difference I can think of is that the staff is much closer to the association's products and services. Sometimes too close. You know the reasons behind how you organized your website or your conference. You know how you marketed your products and how you thought customers would buy them. You know why you chose A and not B.

So my fourth idea is to establish a mystery shopping program. Depending on the size of your association, you may need to enlist others in the program — membership to establish a phony member, IT to help monitor what happens, etc.

Because association staff is too close to the organization's products and services, a true mystery shopping program should use outside help. A few ideas of how to design it:

Find someone in your industry or profession who has never been a member and tell them you'll comp their travel and participation at your conference.

Find a member who has not been particularly active, and tell them you'll give them a whole selection of your products for nothing if they will be your accomplice.

If your areas are not technical, get a neighbor or friend to place a few orders.

And of course, plenty of consultants will be happy to help you out.

Be sure you design it as a program. Do not go into thinking you know the answers. This is research, and if you go into research with a preconceived notion of how it will go, you are liable to unconsciously design it to meet that end. In addition, give it a budget. And most important, use the results to design the next study as well as to think about how you can create a better experience for your members.