Archive for the ‘Networking’ Category
It’s 2010. Do You Know Where Your Exhibitors Are?
28 Jan 2010
by Rebecca Rolfes
Having just come back from a speech to the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributor’s Executive Council meeting, I’ve got meeting attendance on the brain. It’s down, in case you hadn’t heard. It’s way down in some industries, and not just because of the recession. Conventions, trade shows, conferences are becoming a commodity for a lot of industries. For the wholesalers, buying groups were already stealing their thunder and now are adding networking in ways that really undercut their value propositions as premier networking venues.
The business model was already pretty wonky. Matt Rowan, executive director of the Health Industry Distributors Association is trying to change the 80-20 model where 80% of revenues are eaten up by shipping, logistics, booth companies, AV providers, etc. and only 20% ends up in the association’s pockets. He’s coming up with packages for his biggest exhibitors which save them 20% and allow the association to keep 50% of the revenues. “We’ve gotten into the booth-building business,” Rowan said. That was only one example from his “power package” idea that will give exhibitors what they want: “not more relationships but deeper relationships.”
“We were slaves to the number of attendees, the number of booths, the square footage,” Rowan said. “Now the metric is how many meetings exhibitors hosted. There’s meeting space in each booth along ‘Main Street’ plus private meeting spaces around the periphery of the hall. Exhibitors want to know who they’re meeting with even before they come to town.”
The makeup of HIDA’s attendees fit the dance card approach very well. Buyers can select sellers they’d like to talk to and vice versa so that everyone’s dance card fills up and HIDA has a basis for pricing.
John Garfinkel, executive director of the International Sanitary Supply Association, has managed to maintain attendance at or near the same levels as prior to the recession by opening the doors to service providers and end users through alliances with other associations.
These are only two ideas. I’m part of a major study that will look for more.
Fast Future Research’s Convention 2020 just kicked off and will look at the future of live events, venues and meeting destinations. The study’s site allows anyone to contribute their thoughts via a Trend Wiki. The study will run through October so that meeting planners can make better decisions this year for future meetings. After we gather everyone’s input, participants will be able to vote on which trends they see as most likely. I hope you’ll join up.
Back to Basics at the Virginia Association of Realtors
21 Apr 2009
by Rebecca Rolfes
A year ago, Ben Martin, then director of communications and new media at the Virginia Association of Realtors, was an active blogger, contributor to association trade magazines, a sometime consultant and frequent public speaker. Today, Martin is the vice president of marketing and communications at the association, has given up journalism, cut back on blogging, cut out consulting and is concentrating on what his members need. “I’m so focused on member needs,” he says, “I haven’t really thought about how all this is impacting associations in general.”
“All this” is principally the recession, but also the competition that online communities present to associations and the necessary and, in some cases, long-overdue changes within them. I caught up with Martin at Digital Now in Orlando last week to find out what “all this” has meant to his association.
Q: How is the recession impacting your association?
A: Our membership doubled between the late 1990s and around 2007. We topped at 39,000. Now we’re down 14% from that, 33,500 at latest count. That’s not terrible but it is still a decline. Although it hurts association revenues, this thinning of the flock—here and at other state Realtor associations—is actually beneficial to consumers and our industry. There were a lot of undertrained and “underethical” opportunists getting into the business in the early to mid-2000’s.
Q: These are tough times for Realtors. What are you doing to provide value to them?
A: We’re trying to come up with ways to help members communicate directly with clients. The association is trying to put all the bad news in context and help them communicate to potential buyers the good news about buying now. Interest rates are at historic lows. Home prices are down 30% to 50%. We’re doing a flyer that tells that story and says that, if you can qualify for a loan, now is an excellent time to buy.
We’re also trying to tell the story specific to the Virginia market. The bad news comes from four states predominantly—California, Florida, Arizona and Nevada. That’s where prices have fallen the most, where the most foreclosures are happening and where, not surprisingly, most of the risky loans were made. The Virginia market is pretty stable and buyers need to hear that from someone other than their agent.
Q: In The Competition Within, you had a lot to say about online community and the impact that will have on associations. If you couple that with the recession and what that is forcing associations to do—discontinue unnecessary programs, eliminate outdated processes, cut staff, renegotiate contracts—what will the new association that emerges look like? We can’t expect things to go back to the way they were. Everything will be different, including associations.
A: That is certainly true but I’m so focused on member needs, I haven’t really thought about how all this is impacting associations in general. I do think that the more tech-savvy associations will emerge from this stronger, just as I think the more tech-savvy of my members will emerge from it stronger.
The VAR also introduced the Member Outreach program that allows members to invite two association staffers to visit brokerages or local meetings. A list of almost 20 possible topics covers subjects specific to the association, legislative issues, and ways to better manage a real estate office but also covers the future of the industry and social media. The service is free. This is another example of best practices that keep an association close to its members’ needs in good times and bad.
I’d Rather be on Facebook
8 Dec 2008
by Rebecca Rolfes
I’ve been following an interesting listserv thread on the SNAP site. It began with a question about whether other associations block in-office access to MySpace and Facebook.
The most surprising part of the thread is that no one said, “Are you crazy? Of course not.”
At Imagination we’re encouraging (cajoling, assigning, ordering) employees to sign up on Facebook and LinkedIn and to use them often. Our HR department checks all potential employees on MySpace so even that isn’t off-limits. (If you’re dumb enough to put pictures of yourself doing keg stands on MySpace, you’re too dumb to work here.)
But the other two are a crucial business tools these days, and any organization that thinks otherwise is going to be left behind.
There are 132 million members on Facebook, 30 million on LinkedIn. Think objectively about what that could do for you.
- Going where your members already are, i.e., these two communities, is a lot cheaper than building your own online community.
- Cruise through Facebook; you’ll find many associations—IEEE, the American College of Foot and Ankle Surgeons, the American Society of Interior Design and on and on and on. They’re there because their members, perhaps more importantly their potential members, are there.
- Monitoring what’s being talked about on Facebook and LinkedIn and becoming part of that conversation increases your visibility and your SEO. Seeding content with well chosen keywords pushes you up in search rankings. The more you say, the more you link, the better you’ll do.
- The business world is an increasingly virtual place. We all routinely conduct business with people we never meet face to face. Online communities take that to a new level and add context and personality to an exchange that is otherwise just disembodied voices on the phone.
- Assuming that all members of online communities are young is a mistake; however, online communities are a way to interact with potential future members. Young people get their community in new ways, much of it online. Attracting the next generation of members is keeping most association executives I know awake nights.
At Imagination, we’ve created editorial assignments for employees that include Facebook, LinkedIn and selected blogs that relate to the business we’re in. We’re obviously not encouraging hours spent in random posts to friends on company time but the blurring of the line between professional and personal is fuzzier and fuzzier in modern life.
It’s one thing to sign up but you can’t achieve the SEO and visibility you need unless you actually use these communities. And, as Jon Stewart says, only unemployed people have time to be on there all day. So we make the internal assignments to make sure it happens. Like anything else, you have to come up with a strategy that has measurable goals and then make it happen. Our vice president of marketing’s goal is to move us up to the first page in Google searches. We’re not there yet but it’s definitely working—15 places higher this month.
For some of our association clients, we’ve discovered groups online that mimic the association’s work, repurpose its materials but pay them no dues. You can either make that happen and reap the return or let it happen without you.
The Real Issue
To my mind the real issue, the real reason associations block access to such sites is because their employees are bored. If your work isn’t very interesting, the world wide web is a huge candy box of distractions.
I’m not saying that the people who work for me never shop online or book plane tickets or read movie star gossip at the office but they also work their butts off. They turn out award-winning magazines and websites, stay scrupulously on deadline and within budget, come in on weekends if necessary, give clients their cellphone numbers. The first two are part of their job descriptions; the latter two they do voluntarily. The work is challenging, very challenging, but they are into it. The output has their name on it and that matters very much, professionally and personally, to them.
Two of my employees created a political blog during the presidential campaign. On word of mouth and some Facebook action, they had about 5,000 unique visitors, 150 to 200 hits a day. Did they do some of that at work? Sure they did. If I were running a restaurant, I probably wouldn’t have been happy but I run a custom publishing company—as do the people on the SNAP listserv. These two employees learned a lot about how online communications work, what makes them powerful—and, at the same time, they never missed a deadline.
I don’t see this as a conflict. I see it as on-the-job training or professional development. In case you hadn’t heard, print is, if not dying, in critical care. This is the way our profession is going. This is the way associations are going. Blocking access is about as effective as keeping water in a sieve. Information flows freely and today’s media is porous.
Un-networking for Un-members
27 Oct 2008
by Rebecca Rolfes
Long ago when I worked for an association, we decided to print a time in our conference agendas that said “Networking Time.” We were quite proud of the fact that we had admitted to everyone, especially ourselves, that that was the main reason people attended, that regardless of how fascinating our sessions, how inspiring our keynote, how seamless our execution, attendees were really there to hand out business cards.
Every association makes networking part of its core value. The people you know are the people you do business with, the people you hire, the people you gather intelligence from. We all understand that that’s how things work.
So along come young professionals, the next generation of potential association members, and they find networking “smarmy,” according to an attendee at a likemind event. They don’t want the inauthentic, enforced familiarity that comes when you pay to hang out with people. They want some of the same things–to talk about what they all have in common and care about, to socialize, to connect in a disconnected world. But they don’t want to be sold on anything–on you, on your company, on your product. They might be LinkedIn and FaceBooked and YouTubed but they still want some face-to-face interaction. What they don’t want is your business card.
Likemind, founded a couple of years ago by two guys who worked at creative firms and “knew” each other via blogs, now has monthly events in 55 cities on every continent. It attracts young creative professionals to coffee shops to talk about whatever they want to talk about. There is no agenda, no speaker and no fee.
The phenomenon of the “unconference” had already removed the price tag from some events like BloggerCon in the so-called geek community. Groups like Meetup.com, for everyone from Moms looking for kids’ play dates to Red Sox fans who apparently can’t find each other in bars, and Green Drinks, which attracts those interested in environmental issues, let online communities create face-to-face un-associations.
Un-associations have no dues. They have no infrastructure. They have no agenda–not for this evening and not for the future. What they do have is members, or let’s call them un-members. And they are effortlessly global. With no barriers to entry, not even language, people just show up.
Simultaneously, you can see the great strength of associations–that like-minded people really do want to meet other like-minded people–and the great weakness–that institutionalizing that interaction creates an artificiality that gets in the way of the central purpose. A traditional association has its own self-preservation uppermost in mind. Forget the value proposition. Forget serving the members. Job #1 is staying in business, keeping our jobs, justifying our existence.
Andy Steggles, chief information officer at the Risk and Insurance Management Society, once told me that new associations, new sorts of associations without the infrastructure and the baggage of the past, would grow up to challenge the model. Ask yourself: If you had the choice to join your association or just show up someplace once a month and find people like you to talk to, would you join?
