How to hack off your evangelists

ASAE & The Center deserve a lot of credit for the way they've interacted with this blog. Since this blog is called Certified Association Executive, they could very easily have asked me to stop using the name, seeing as it is their trademarked term. But if you've read this blog for more than a few weeks, you should understand that I'm an evangelist for the CAE program, and by extension, ASAE & The Center. I think ASAE & The Center have shown a very highly developed understanding of how this blog, even though it is constructively critical of them at times, actually serves as a means to engage other people in the association community.

We can't say the same for the agents for NY Yankees closer Mariano Rivera, unfortunately.

Click through for a very insightful post at CommonCraft about how Rivera's hired goons are attempting to shut down a fan site like it belongs to some kind of illegitimate cyber-squatter. The fan site is a connecting entity for Mariano Rivera enthusiasts, so to muzzle it is precisely the wrong thing to do. Ideally, the agency should engage the fan site and/or bring the owner on to work for them. At the very least, the agency should offer to buy out the owner of the site to acquire the subscriber base and domain name. Sending a cease and desist order to the community ringleader is the right thing to do -- in Bizarro World.

People! Did we learn nothing from the Barack Obama MySpace fiasco? What are you doing to engage the evangelists in your association's community?

Tagged: Association Management; Associations; CAE; Certified Association Executive