The Humble E-Mail: An Appreciation

Behold the humble e-mail. With origins known mostly to Internet anthropologists, it became one of the first killer apps of the Internet era.

Marketers coveted its unprecedented direct access to individual consumers. They lusted after its potential for personalization. They rhapsodized over its near-zero costs. They exulted, “Behold, we have seen the promised land!”

Then they ruined it. Who would have suspected that an ROI of one in a million would be profitable? And who knew that “V!^8ra” could be spelled so many different ways, yet still be recognized by the human brain?

Thus, e-mail became reviled. Consultants make a living coaching us on how to avoid being its slave. It’s less cool than your father’s Oldsmobile.

But try to take it away from anyone, especially in business. If you don’t use e-mail, you may as well be invisible. (I’ve read about people trying to survive only with other communication tools; good luck to them.)

So let’s review what made e-mail so seductive:

• It is fast.
• It is simple.
• It collapses time.
• It shrinks distances.
• It is flexible.
• It is cheap.

E-mail is not perfect, but it can get a lot done. The numbers tell the story; there are few digital channels that match e-mail’s reach and breadth today.

I ponder the e-mail this week because our organization just installed and launched a new e-mail marketing and newsletter platform, integrated with our association management system. Though the launch has been smooth, we are muddling through the complexities of filters, bounce rates, and the like.

E-mail has an important place in our communications strategy, but it is not the magic bullet. By itself, it cannot replace print, advertising, or anything else. I’m not sure of its optimal place in the proverbial marketing funnel, but I think I know what it cannot do, and I am convinced that most e-mail marketing blunders occur when it is used in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

Our new project has also been a fascinating exercise in cultivating a new culture in our association. Six functional areas were using our old e-mail “platform” (and I use the term loosely) for e-marketing and large-scale e-communication. All six areas were provided access to this new platform.

It’s a powerful tool, and with this power comes great responsibility. We all acknowledged the fragility of the e-mail channel, and how easily any one of us could to ruin it for everyone else. We even agreed to a “death penalty,” which strips any content producer of publishing rights for continually violating our social contract. This kind of silo-busting is rare. It is especially exhilarating because this was created by middle managers, for middle managers, with the after-the-fact blessing of senior management.

Perhaps e-mail’s demise is visible on the horizon. Yes, we should prepare for and experiment with the next big things, whatever those may be. That’s the fun part of being in communications today. But because I have to produce results today, using today’s tools, I’ll keep using e-mail.

Hopefully, the right way.

Google Flu Trends = Social Media

Google’s experiment in trending flu outbreaks is absolutely – and I mean absolutely – amazing. I bet that any professional epidemiologist would cringe at the idea of using non-clinical data to identify disease trends, but this application boggles my mind.

Here’s how it works. Google meters its search queries on flu-related topics, figuring that the more that people search on a flu topic, the more likely the flu is occurring in real life. It does not measure anything clinical – nothing about positive throat cultures, visits to emergency departments, or any other traditional sentinel reporting measures. Just search queries.

The demo on Google’s own website shows how, using data from the 2007-2008 flu season, it can identify flu trends two weeks ahead of anyone else, including the CDC. The data for this current season – the first full season with the H1N1 virus – confirm that many people are getting sick with the flu already, months before the traditional height of the flu season.

Here’s the data about the U.S., as of Sept. 29:

State-specific data can be filtered, too.

This is a new kind of sentinel reporting for infectious disease.

If you consider that Diggs and other user voting systems, sharing content, and even search queries are all forms of user-generated content, then this is social media in its most pragmatic form, producing a product that can be really valuable.

This can be replicated for any other social phenomenon – in health care or anywhere else. What else could we measure?

Forrester: Social Media Is Now Mainstream Media

Forrester Research today released its third annual social technographics profile of online adults around the world, and there’s only one possible conclusion: Social media is now in the mainstream – at least the consumption of social media.

Social technographics is Forrester’s lens through which it analyzes what people do with social media. Do they read it or look at it, do they create it, do they share it, or are they doing something else?

In the latest survey, 73% of all US adults are “spectators,” which means they read it, or look at it, at least once a month. Half of adults are “joiners,” which means they participate in a social network like Facebook. This is double the percentage from just two years ago.

Curiously, the number of people who regularly write blogs, upload video and music, or otherwise create content remains at 24%, compared to 18% in 2007. This does not disprove the importance of social media. To the contrary, it ratifies a hypothesis of Clay Shirky’s, which is that inside any collaborative effort, there is always a tiny group of people running the engine.

These findings echo the recent social technographic survey my association conducted on our members, Massachusetts physicians, around the same time that Forrester was in the field with its survey. Even among our members – median age around 50 – social media is a regular part of their existence.

Shel Holz wrote earlier today that NOW is the time to get into the online conversation with your communities. Couldn’t agree more.

But be careful. There is still much wisdom in the notion that you must start small, get it right, attract a following , and then grow.

As Shirky told the ASAE and the Center ’s annual meeting last week, it’s a lot easier to start small, get good and get bigger, than to start large, be bad at it, and then try to make it better.

I would add, it’s not only easier, but probably a lot faster, too.

14 Takeaways From the ASAE Annual Meeting

With apologies to other bloggers for stealing this format idea …

1- The online annual meeting “hub” was a fabulous experiment. I always felt connected with everything going on. There’s lots to learn from this – starting with the value of keeping it simple on the surface, and hiding the complex technology underneath.

2- Twitter was the way to stay connected. But I found myself wanting the content to be aggregated into something more permanent and findable, so I could look at it later, without scrolling through screen after screen after screen. The next stage, perhaps?

3- Kudos also to ASAE for not letting the hub experiment get hijacked by worries that non-attendees would hijack content for free. ASAE took the long-term view, which is that it all adds great member value.

4- People really do get the strategic imperative of social media, but many remain intimidated by the chunks of time the tools seem to demand. This was especially true of those small-staff saints who have to do the HR, plan the meetings, take care of the board, work with the vendors, recruit the members, wash the dishes, and turn the lights off at the end of the day. The next step is to mainstream the productive tools that make social media as easy to use as a good cell phone.

5- The compelling connection of social media to business goals must be more powerfully articulated for the C-suite folks. The “ROI” questions are still getting squishy answers. “Engagement” is not a business metric. “Meeting registrations” are.

6- Advocacy and social media is the new field waiting to be plowed. Obama was elected partly because social media awoke and energized a dormant base. His opponents in health care reform are now using both social media and talk radio to energize and organize themselves. But are social media platforms effective for influencing the undecided middle? I doubt it. Maybe other media channels remain better suited to that task.

7- Social media is transformational, but we can’t forget the rest of the marketing/communications toolbox. One of the sessions I attended was about the defining and messaging your association’s unique value proposition. Another was about engaging and nurturing a vibrant volunteer community. These are the kind of fundamentals that determine whether an association is relevant, and we can’t take our eyes off them.

8- Some people still don’t know how to do a presentation. One session I attended had two guys sitting behind a table talking for 80 minutes flat, rambling on about a report that we could all read on our own. Discussion, dialog, and debate? Not there. I literally dozed off for a spell!

9- Long live face to face meetings! That’s where the bonds of trust become ironclad.

10- I really have to get my staff to more of these things.

11- Connecting people has become one of my favorite things to do. One of my most fulfilling moments was to introduce a friend from the council on which I serve to a vendor/good guy, and then watch their conversation open new business possibilities for each.

12- Volunteer – NOW! Serving on the communications section council for the past two years focuses my thinking, brings themes into much sharper relief, and takes the meet-and-learn benefits of any conference to an entirely different plane. It’s the difference between watching a ballgame and playing it.

13- Seeing and admiring the great work of ASAE staff gives me a good sense of how our own members feel about our staff.

14- I’m truly ready to go home, but it would have been nice to catch the Sox here at Skydome/Rogers Centre. Guess I’ll have to settle for my seats for the Sox-Yankees at Fenway this Friday … !

Social Network Usage Among Physicians is Soaring

A year ago, our medical society was one of the first associations to privately license Forrester Research’s survey tool to determine the social technographics profile of our membership, physicians in Massachusetts. Review last year’s findings here.

A key takeaway last year was that physicians are definitely part of the social media world. They weren’t leading the pack by any means, but they use social media tools at least as frequently as their peers in their group – and sometimes more often.

Given the explosion of social media tools in the past year, we thought it was already time to refresh the data and invest in another survey using Forrester’s tool. In late June, we sent an e-mail survey to a large cross section of our membership. This year’s sample was much more robust, with nearly 800 members responding, compared to the 522 who answered the same survey a year ago.

Key takeaways

• Our physicians are still strong consumers of social media content, even relative to the general public. “Spectators” account for 74% of our membership, almost exactly equal to the proportion of the US adult population.
• “Creators” are still under-represented among our members, even among our younger physicians. “Creators” are the people who write blogs, upload photos and videos, and so forth. In the general US population, the creating class comes from the young. But only 12% of our members 25 to 34 were “creators,” compared to 19% of US adults in the same age group. A year ago, I speculated that the chief reason was time – the lack of it. I still think that’s true. Our young members age 25 to 34 are medical students and residents, and are among most time-starved of any young professional group. But they do consume the content by the bushel — only 5% of this group is considered “inactive.”
• Physicians’ use of social networks – as a specific social media tool – is growing very, very fast. Thirty-two percent of members were classified as joiners – those who use Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks. That is just a shade under the US adult population of 35%. Last year, 21% were Joiners. (Learn the definitions of Forrester’s social technographic “ladder” in an online slide show.)
• The percentage of those who visit social networks rose 50%. Among physicians age 45 to 54, 26% visit social networks at least once a month, triple the number from a year ago.
• The number of those who maintain a social network site rose 60% for all members, doubled among physicians 35 to 44 and tripled for those 45 to 54.

Conclusions

A year ago, the case for focusing on social networks rested mostly on our younger members. This year, there’s a critical mass for online networks among every age group, even those over 55. Given Facebook’s growth since last summer, this may not be surprising. But until we did this survey, it wasn’t clear that this applied to our members. Now, we know that it does.

There is still a strong case for developing RSS feeds, tagging, ratings, reviews, blogs, widgets for portals (iGoogle), video and podcasts. It’s no longer a question of whether there are fish in those ponds – we know there are. Now it’s a question of business and marketing strategy – not if we fish there, but where and when.

One final note

I asked Forrester to add one more question – whether our members use Twitter. Four percent of our total sample uses Twitter regularly – about 8% among those age 25 to 34. Forrester didn’t use the answers to calculate social technographic profiles, but it is a good baseline number for the future nonetheless.

The Un-RFP and Its Unexpected Benefits

I thought I’d update you about a topic I wrote earlier this year, when we began a search process to hire a new communications consultant. I had written that I solicited expressions of interest via an RFP, and how the very term “RFP” give consultants the same reaction that “Niagara Falls” gave the Three Stooges.

Clearly, RFPs have gotten a bad rap, because there are so many bad ones out there. My posts attracted many great comments, and the resulting “un-RFP” we wrote benefited from that great feedback.

So what happened? We put together a team of eight people to review the proposals and select a consultant. They came from communications, education, membership and IT. Twenty consultants and agencies responded to the first RFP. We selected eight of them to make a one-hour webinar presentation, and answer our questions.  From the eight, we selected three to come to our offices for a 90-minute presentation. From the three finalists, we selected Ignite Social Media, a group from Cary, N.C.

What did we learn?

• There are a lot of people out there doing great work in social media, producing impressive results for their clients.
• There are a lot of great specialists in this area, but a smaller number had a compelling vision of how to incorporate social media into an organization’s total communications footprint.
• Despite this, many agencies and consultants understood the challenge we were presenting them. We felt we couldn’t go wrong with any of the finalists, so it was a matter of selecting the best fit among some really, really good professionals. It was hard to say no to those we didn’t select.
• Finally, one awesome, unexpected benefit. I deliberately created a diverse team – not just in job function, but in their attitudes towards social media. Some were believers, others were skeptics. In our selection meetings, I spoke last, so I didn’t skew the result. I had hoped that the diversity would keep each others’ extreme viewpoints in check, and we did get that.
  • And we got more. What I didn’t expect was how everyone – even the skeptics – began to appreciate the potentially world-changing nature of social media. It didn’t require a bit of selling on my part, just a willingness to step back and let the process do its magic.
  • So I learned that this process is a great way to organically grow the conversation about anything new in an organization, not just social media.

Lots of people in our business are trying to figure out the same thing. So as we embark on our exciting journey, I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

Core Competencies for Communications Professionals: Join us at ASAE Annual

For the past year, the ASAE and the Center’s Communications Section Council has been working on a list of core competencies that communications professionals in associations should master today.

As I mentioned in a post a few months ago, we were updating a document that was only four years old, but already badly out of date. Two things have changed dramatically in the last 10 years: How people learn about the world around them, and how everyone can now be a publisher as well as a consumer of information.

It would be easy enough to update the toolset for this brief moment in time, but tougher to craft something that would have a longer shelf life than a loaf of bread. What we concluded was that the basic skills still occupy a very large amount of shelf space: writing, pitching stories, research, planning, speaking, etc. Without those skills as a foundation, no one could be called a complete communications professional.

By the same token, many of the newer social media technologies are also fundamental to our skill set. But how do we capture these when the tool set is evolving so quickly? (One shouldn’t assume everything around today that’s new will persist.)

First, by acknowledging the volatile nature of the business. I mean, there’s no way the golfer Stewart Cink would have a half million followers on Twitter a year ago, even if he had won the British Open in 2008 instead of this year. Tiger Woods, maybe. But Cink? He’s hardly a household name. But that’s how quickly our business has changed.

Second, take our best shot at identifying the dominant tools today – and we defined dominance as those which seem to command the great volume of conversation. The operative term here is core competencies. Others arise every year, but in our judgment some aren’t core yet. Next year, who knows?

Finally, recognize that as the tool set grows, few things are going away, with the possible exception of faxes. Everything else still has a place – a different place than before, but still a place.

So here’s our effort. What do you think?

After you review it, we want to hear from you. We have two questions, to start with: Is there anything you would change? And how can ASAE use this document to develop new education and training programs?

Two ways: You can comment here.

And/or, you can come and talk to us at the “un-session” we’re holding at the ASAE and the Center’s Annual Meeting on Monday, August 17, (corrected) from 12:15 to 1:00 p.m. in Room 802A of the South Building of the Toronto Convention Center.

We hope to see you there!

Globe and Union Step Back from the Brink

Last night the Boston Globe and its largest union reached agreement on a contract that was only slightly different from the contract the union rejected a couple of weeks ago. The New York Times got the $10 million cut from expenses that it said it needed. Instead of an 8% pay cut, they get a 5.9% cut, in exchange for deeper benefit cuts. The biggest benefit cut was the removal of lifetime employment guarantees for 176 people.

This was difficult, but the hardest part is left – keeping the paper alive.

How to Destroy Members’ Trust in One Easy Step

I’ve run into two instances recently where vendors or association managers demonstrated a tin ear to the fragile nature of trust.

First, my example. We were trying to start an experiment with a small social media vendor. Along came the proposed contract. For the most part, it was standard-issue, except for a clause which gave the vendor “an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license” to do whatever the hell it wanted with user (i.e., member) content.

What? I am NOT going to be the guy who has to explain to Dr. Marcus Welby why his comment on health system reform ended up on, say, a movie celebrity gossip site. (Not that the vendor would have done that, but it would have been theoretically permissible.)

So I said no way; we can’t do that. The vendor initially didn’t want to change anything, so we started to walk away. Well, the vendor relented, and we started talking. Soon we understood each other, and came to a verbal agreement that suited our needs and theirs. (We’re still buttoning up the paperwork.)

I didn’t think much more about this incident until a colleague shared recently that someone else in her association came up with the idea of selling user-generated content to others. (Not sure who would buy it, but that’s a conversation for another day…) To enable this idea, they came up with Terms of Use language similar to the above. She was arguing strongly against the clause, but getting nowhere. I found myself taking her side, and quite passionately at that. Something really burned me about this. What was it?

I have to admit that until then, the consultant-speak about the primacy of trust seemed liked a lot of hoo-hah to me. A nice book, something nice to think about, but the be-all and end-all of business? Not so much.

But consider what associations are all about. Our members (and presumably staff) share a common interest, and maybe even a passion, about something. The members send in their money, we do some work together, and hopefully we do something that makes a difference. It’s a relationship of sorts – not a terribly intimate one, but a relationship nonetheless.

How do you violate any relationship? Blow up the trust you’ve built. In the two examples above, members would sign up for something. They would get a screen of “Terms of Use,” and if they’re like me, they put a check in the box and blow by that puppy in no time flat. (Reverse-engineer software? Puleeze. No problem, Bro!)

Then the comment by our Dr. Welby ends up on that hypothetical gossip site, and he’s mortally embarrassed and offended. Do you really think he would feel better if I told him, “You should have read the Terms of Use before you wrote something, doc.”

I didn’t think so.

The better solution: Have members proactively opt in to allow their content to be sold or shared. This gives them control over their identity and their content, and preserves their trust in you (it may even build trust). Establishing this as an opt-out decision treats them simply as a limitless revenue stream. In times like this, an opt-out strategy can be tempting, but it’s a losing proposition.

Why? Being a member of an organization is different from being a customer. The relationship is different, even with money involved. There are many ways to screw up trust, and treating members like ATMs is only one of them.

“How the Mighty Fall”- Jim Collins’ New Book on Failure That Inspires

I just finished reading Jim Collins’ new book, How the Mighty Fall, his first major book since Good to Great. Despite its buzz-killing title, it’s absolutely inspiring. And it couldn’t be more timely.

Collins builds his book around five stages of decline:

1. Hubris born of success
2. Undisciplined pursuit of more
3. Denial of risk and peril
4. Grasping for salvation
5. Capitulation to irrelevance or death

To root out what matters, Collins employs his familiar matched-pair methodology, in which companies that pulled themselves out of decline are compared to similar companies that did not. So IBM is compared to Hewlett Packard, Best Buy is compared to Circuit City, and so on.

For me the most valuable pages are the brief histories of how IBM, Nucor (a steel manufacturer) and Nordstrom reversed their declines.

Today, we all know IBM’s revival in the 1990s as a classic turnaround story. But CEO Lou Gerstner’s quiet, disciplined approach was sometimes scorned by business reporters, because he wasn’t seduced by the myth of the charismatic savior. He was hired to save the company, to be sure, but he carefully deflected the attention away from himself and towards the company and the task at hand. He played the game for the long haul and didn’t get distracted by unproven myths of corporate turnarounds. The contrast with the Carly Fiorina’s failure at HP is memorable and sobering.

Industries, as well as companies, follow these cycles. I thought of today’s most disruptive industry crises: automobiles, finance and newspapers. Could associations exhibit some of the same symptoms? Some might. Like most of us in the association sector, my medical society is exploring how we should do our business in the new economic order. I worry about how we will know the difference between doing the smart thing and the dumb thing. Collins’ writing have me some takeaways.

• You’d think that companies who failed were complacent. Some were, but that’s not what killed them. Collins says it the opposite: a peripatetic, undisciplined search for magic bullets. Collins clearly and passionately distinguishes disciplined from undisciplined growth.
• Hubris born of success occurs when we confuse how we do things with why we do things. Collins says we must never confuse the nobility of our purpose with the wisdom of our actions.
• “Whether you prevail or fail … depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you,” Collins writes. “We are not imprisoned by our circumstances, our setbacks, our history, our mistakes, or even staggering defeats along the way. We are freed by our choices.”

In the end, that may be the most inspiring takeaway of all.