Association Marketing Springboard

Maddie spoke at the Avectra Roadshow in Washington, DC today. She joined Andy Steggles of RIMS, Ted LaBarbera of AAAA and Rob Miller of Avectra. The session was called What Associations Must Know About Social Networking.

At one point, a very important question came up. To paraphrase...

What do we do when our communications and marketing departments are unwilling to let us open up our online space and lose control of our message to user generated content from our members and the public?

A Whole New Role for Marketing and Communications
We've been trained to control the message. To create the right copy and use it over and over again. To have a consistent look and feel and message. To police our brand and our messages. But that was before mass, asynchronous communication became ubiquitous. Yes. Ubiquitous.

In our new role, we need to share control. For a lot of us, that means we need to expand our training to understand new media and how it's changing communications. We need to learn how to monitor our brand and reputation online...how to join rather than police conversations...how to build community and encourage word of mouth. It's our job to keep fear from slowing our organization's social media progress. How? By understanding the medium and preparing ourselves and our organization for the age of new media.

It's a big job, but someone's got to do it.