Dear Association CEO,

Tired of social media yet? You’ve surely had many conversations, at this point, with various people in your organization, about using social media to advance your mission. Everyone–from your marketing director and your publications manager, to your advocacy guru and your conference manager–has some idea of how they should be blogging, tweeting, or creating a social network.

That’s all well and good, and (stop us if we’re wrong) you’re not disputing the myriad business advantages of starting to build a social media presence in this day and age when many of your association’s members are actively communicating using these tools. But you’re a little worried…

• You’re worried about how much time will be involved in getting all these activities going.
• You’re feeling the stress from other managers and directors who have tight budgets and too much work spread among too few people already.
• You’re concerned that with lots of people doing little experiments in a piecemeal fashion, there will be duplication of effort and wasted time and energy.
• You’re particularly concerned about lost revenue from traditional sources like your paid job board.
• And, let’s be honest, you’re not particularly comfortable with letting just any employee speak for the organization (and your PR director isn’t either). You’re keen to get some guidelines and policies in place but everyone has different ideas for where to start.

So then, the challenge your organization faces is how to evolve into a social organization. This evolution will affect individual staff, internal processes, and the structure and culture of your association. And the challenges can’t be solved in an instant. You’ll probably want to help assign them to your people to tackle one at a time (or one area at a time).

But you, as CEO, have a different challenge.

Your own challenge is not about determining how your association applies social media tools in the right way, nor how particular tactics achieve specific objectives. Fundamentally, your role is to help your staff prioritize and defend their ideas by having them tell you why and how they advance the mission of the association. You are closer to the mission, the vision, the strategic objectives of the association than anyone else. You must live the mantra of “clarity over control” – in other words, that those activities that are very directly and clearly driving the mission of the organization require less control because all stakeholders – staff and members – know why this work is important and relevant to the association. They know the strategic intention of that work and their role in making it actionable.

If you can help your staff be clear about how their social media activities will advance the mission, you can begin to lay the groundwork for becoming a more social organization. The digital age (the advent of the social internet) demands less of a “mechanistic”, top-down, controlled system and more of an organic, evolving ecosystem. Your role, as CEO, is that of facilitator within this ecosystem. You are now the master cat herder – and here’s a secret you probably already know. How do you herd cats? …You tilt the floor. You point everyone in the right direction, not just through words but through action and through intent. The world around us is shifting, and you have a crucial role to play in what these changes mean for your association and this industry.

Sincerely Yours,

Maddie and Lindy
SocialFish

This is my first post here, so I’m still getting the lay of the land as to what kinds of topics will interest K Street readers. I am an avid blog reader and definitely consider myself a “content curator”; Here’s the kind of stuff I read and write about on my blog.

So I thought I’d do two things. First, I want point you to a few PR/Public Affairs/Advocacy related blog posts I’ve found very interesting recently – and ask you to tell me if these float your boat or not. Check ‘em out.

1. HARO Gets Serious About Crowd Sourced Journalism (Convince and Convert)

I assume you know about HARO (Help a Reporter out), the email service started by Peter Shankman that matches reporters to sources. I used it for a while until I found the overload of irrelevant emails to be too much to handle – but they have finally got their act together and put together a nice looking site where it looks like you will be able to self-select what inquiries you get (as a source, obviously). Is this kind of sort-of tech news of interest?

2. Integrating Communication: PR-Driven Social Media (CopyWrite, Ink.)

The author proposes a model for marrying traditional PR duties and social media tasks. Check out the nice debate in the comments to the post. I have plenty of ideas about this (and the changing role of PR in general) – but I won’t say what side I fall on unless you tell me you want to talk about it!

3. 2010 Public Relations: Looking at the Past to Succeed in the Future (Conversation Agent)

Along the same lines, this is a fantastic guest post by Beth Harte on how to create “truly social public relations”. This is obviously a very hot topic (the Is PR Dead? debate)- let me know if you’re thinking about these kind of issues.

4. Matrix: Breakdown of Advocacy Marketing (Jeremiah Owyang)

Here’s a chart by Jeremiah Owyang where he dissects the layers involved in advocacy marketing – meaning, to him, activities “focused on the goal of spreading, and word of mouth, and viral”. What do you think?

5. Getting Started: Brands and Cause Marketing (Lauren Fernandez)

I’m putting this one in really to highlight a really great blog by a rising star in the PR world. Lauren is also heavily involved in the #u30pro (PR professionals under 30) community on Twitter and I think her crew has a lot of interesting stuff to say about PR and social media.

So please do tell me if these are the kinds of topics/analysis you’d want to read about from me!

The second thing I’d like to do is ask you to introduce yourselves in the comments. I’m new here, I’ve just walked into the cocktail party, heading to the bar first for a Makers and Coke (no lime), maybe a little nervous… someone please say hi and tell me what you’re all about! Then we’ll see if we can’t find some great connections to be made and conversations to be had…