Going off the grid

It has been a nutty spring, and I'm going to take a few days off to relax and unwind. I don't expect to post to the blog much, if at all, but you may see some tweets from me here and there.

Also, I have heard that CAE exam results are hitting mailboxes. Congratulations to Kristi! If any other readers have passed, leave a comment here or email me at bkmcae(at)gmail-dot-com.

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

Top 10 Online Collaborative Technologies handouts

Here are the handouts from the Top 10 Online Collaborative Technologies session at ASAE & The Center's Marketing & Membership Conference, updated with other cool tools mentioned during the session. Here's the slide deck, though I think you'll find the handouts more useful:


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

Leadership talk

If you haven't checked out the comment thread on my recent post about leadership, you really should. The comments have more value than I could attempt to recreate by summarizing them. Oh, and you can subscribe to Certified Association Executive blog posts and comments in one convenient feed using this URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/CertifiedAssociationExecutiveComboFeed

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

Shaun White AmEx Commercial

Mentioned this television ad in my most recent mobile podcast.

I want to be a leader...

Leader
Originally uploaded by Suresh Chennai.

...I will not try to be a leader.

So much of what I'm reading about leadership these days is along the lines of "to thine own self be true." In other words, just be yourself, and people will follow you. So it occurs to me that any attempt to take transformative steps to become a quote-unquote leader is doomed to fail. Why? Because trying to become like what you think a leader should be like is not likely to also allow you to be true to yourself. In other words, the more you try change yourself to become what you think a leader should be, the less you will try to be yourself. Unless of course those two things are exactly the same, in which case, you have nothing to change. You are a natural born leader!

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

It's official!

There's now a Certified Association Executive group on Facebook. Join D-Gamm and me as the early adopters!

Oh, and I got the word that I'm to be the new vice chair of the Membership Section Council. Wewt! With this new responsibility, I guess I need to clean up my act a little. First order of business is to update that picture of me on the section council's web page.

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

It doesn't seem that far-fetched

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

IRS Releases Form 990 Draft

More billable hours for accountants...

IRS Releases Form 990 Draft: "The Internal Revenue Service released for comment and discussion a draft Form 990, the annual return required to be filed by tax-exempt organizations to report information about their operations."

Facebook is tearing up the charts

Facebook has recently vaulted into the top 20 most visited websites, clocking in at #17. See their Alexa page. Their new applications platform has really made it fun to use, and people are flocking to it.

I recently heard it said that with the introduction of the application platform, Facebook has become the social web's operating system. I'd say that's pretty accurate. I'd also describe it as a social web aggregator. I can access a bunch of social web stuff directly through Facebook. Very cool.

Personally, I hope they kill MySpace. I'm rooting for Facebook.

Tagged: Association Management Associations CAE Certified Association Executive facebook MySpace

As MMOs go, Second Life is Tenth Place

GigaOM lists the top ten Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games. With all the hype and hullaballoo over Second Life, you'll probably be surprised to learn that it comes in at number 10 with 500,000 users. I'm all for early adoption and being visible in self-forming groups, but with these low numbers, most associations will not reap the benefits of the time and money required to have and maintain a Second Life presence for a while.

As the numbers go, you're far more likely to encounter an association member in World of Warcraft, which has four million users in China and another four million in the West.

Heed Jeff's advice to focus on your association's first life, and if you need a good laugh on Friday, check out www.getafirstlife.com.

Hat tip to Ed.

Tagged: Association Management Associations CAE Certified Association Executive MMOs Second Life World of Warcraft

Stuff Nick notices about ASAE2007

I know that Nick is not normally given to rants, but he makes some very astute observations about his first ASAE & The Center Annual Meeting registration experience. Nick's first impression isn't exactly positive.

Nick mentions that ASAE asks its registrants a long, long, long list of prying questions before accepting their registration. This will be my fourth ASAE convention, so I've filled out those same prying questions four years in a row now. I know what the information is for: So I can be segmented and marketed to and so that ASAE & The Center can sell exhibits and sponsorships with the data. Fine. That comes with the territory. But why can't they store that data from year to year and then let me bypass that step entirely or simply ask me to update anything that has changed? I expect Wes & David could go on for miles about this.

I also totally agree with Nick on the salary question. I know of plenty association CEO jobs that pay only marginally more than $40K. That's one question that will help perpetuate ASAE's "inside the beltway" stigma well into the future.

I have mixed feelings about the CEO only sessions. As a non-CEO, it makes me feel a little jealous (flash mob, anyone?). As a hopeful future CEO, I'd like to be able to have conversations in a homogenous atmosphere.

Like Nick, I try to keep things positive, but it can be difficult in the face of some of this stuff. Overall, I love ASAE & The Center's Annual Meetings and I am really looking forward to this year's. The third annual Association Bloggercon will be a blast, and so will the backchannel. We have 13 and 7 respectively signed up for these two cool opportunities.

Tagged: ASAE2007; Association Management; Associations; CAE; Certified Association Executive

CAE Podcast: Audioblog fix

Here's a very brief podcast about posting audio to my blog via phone. Not sure if that first link will work in the way I want it to, so here's an alternate.

UPDATE: Heh, looks like the term "fix" is not very appropriate. I've removed both links that were posted above. To listen to the podcast you need to either use the Gcast widget in the right nav bar of my blog, subscribe to the podcast feed, or visit my podcast page at Gcast.

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

FeedYes.com is a good service gone bad

I have blogged about RSS spam, and it has once again made its way to my aggregator.

I started using FeedYes.com over a year ago, and I even gave it three plugs when I first discovered it. By way of background, FeedYes.com lets you create an RSS feed for any web page and it'll send an item to your feed reader whenever a change is made to that page. It's a pretty slick idea and pretty well implemented. I use it to track newsletter archive pages and ASAE's press room. It's perfect for web pages that don't offer RSS feeds. Well... it was perfect.


FeedYes.com slowly began inserting a little bit of text advertising here and there over the past few months. The ads showed up as new feeds, and as text. No biggie. But now the advertising has gotten overwhelming. The signal to noise ratio has got to be at least 100:1 now. And the ads have gone beyond text to banners. Very intrusive and annoying.


I'm about to drop FeedYes.com. If anyone from FeedYes is reading, I'm using Bloglines, and the sites that I track post content once a week or less on average. Would it be possible to read the number of legitimate feeds coming through and get that advertising ratio down to 1:1? Or could the advertising be inserted in-line within the feed item? I realize that free services like FeedYes need a revenue model and that monetizing feed views is one of only a few ways this could be done in an RSS environment, but I'm feeling a little abused by your current monetization strategy.


Just to bring this a little closer to home, how much unwanted advertising does your association sling at its members? What's your signal to noise ratio? The definition of spam is changing. Many people consider unwanted email, regardless of any "existing business relationship" you might have with them to be spam. You probably won't get fined by FCC, but you are quite likely to get a bunch of unsubscribes.

Tagged: Advertising Association Management Associations CAE Certified Association Executive FeedYes.com monetize RSS

Assn Bloggercon 2007 and ASAE2007 Backchannel

Association Bloggercon is chugging along, we now have 14 people registered. I know of at least one association blogger (Nick) who is coming to Chicago, but who hasn't registered. I'd like to select the date ASAP so people can make other plans. So please sign up, tell your friends, spread the word and bring your mom! I'm starting to think Bring Your Mom should be the official slogan for Association Bloggercon 2007. Any feedback?

Also, the ASAE2007 Backchannel now has 7 participants. As proof that the backchannel and frontchannel can happily coexist, we now have an ASAE staff person signed up. Learn more and discover how to sign up for the backchannel.

Tagged: ASAE2007; Association Management; Associations; CAE; Certified Association Executive

Six reasons for Assns to steer clear of Wikipedia

A few days ago, my buddy Joe Grant posted eight good reasons for association execs to consider putting content up on Wikipedia. Speaking from quite a bit of experience adding and editing content on Wikipedia, I commented that I could think of a bunch of good reasons why NOT to post association content to Wikipedia. Personally, I think the good reasons outweigh the bad, so lest you think that posting content to Wikipedia is a bad idea, here are just six things you'll want to consider carefully before you jump right into it:

1. Wikipedians. They are the community of people who are working hard to ensure that Wikipedia retains or advances its standing in the information market. This means that they review virtually every article that gets added or edited. It means that they will revert changes you make if they don't meet the standards in Wikipedia's guidelines and documentation. This means they will nominate for deletion new entries that don't meet those same standards. Don't get me wrong: Wikipedians serve a very valuable purpose and they work hard -- for free! Wikipedia would have nowhere near the respect it does without them. But don't get me wrong: They make it difficult for a novice who doesn't know what they're doing or who is ignorant of the culture to get their entries or edits to stick. Some Wikipedians have a real RTFM attitude and have a low tolerance for newbies.
2. Wikipedians generally require entries to be composed in a particular style. I remember a co-worker at my first association job showing me how to lay out a press release, just so that it was in line with industry standards. If you don't lay them out in the right style, they get ignored. Same principle applies in Wikipedia, but if your entries aren't laid out in the right style, they don't get ignored. They simply get a note added asking someone to clean up the article, and if no one cleans it up, it gets nominated for deletion. Once nominated, it's just a matter of time until it goes away.
3. Wikipedia markup language is neither easy nor intuitive. It's not HTML, and it's certainly not WYSIWYG. Virtually very time I want to add stylized text to a Wikipedia article, I have to go to the help file. Internal and external links are non-obvious. It takes time to learn and get used to the markup language. Not to mention the even less obvious markup language for inserting images or citing external sources. External sources you ask?
4. To verify their veracity, Wikipedia articles generally need to cite external sources. This basically means that your entry needs a bibliography. The sources should be unbiased and independent of the subject matter being written about, and you need to cite your sources in the proper way.
5. Wikipedians are especially sensitive to entries that sound like advertising. This is precisely where most association professionals will want to start in their Wikipedia dabbling. They'll say, "Let's put some stuff that portrays our association in a positive light (read: marketing collateral) on Wikipedia. It's an unbiased site, so anything that appears there will be taken as gospel." This is exactly what the Wikipedians are there to prevent.
6. There are Wikipedia vandals. Since the John Siegenthaler, Sr. character assassination, they change articles in subtle ways to fool Wikipedians, or choose somewhat obscure entries to vandalize. Since there's an association for everything, I'll bet many associations seem like great vandalism targets to those who are so inclined.
7. Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. That means that people can (and according to Wikipedia guidelines, should) post content that is balanced. So if you post a bunch of stuff saying that your association, industry or profession is the greatest thing ever, someone is likely to come along and post critiques to present both sides of the story. Are you open to critique? Are you willing to take the time to address critiques?
8. With all of these rules to run afoul of, which are totally non-obvious to the amateur, legitimate Wikipedians and vandals, it stands to reason that your entries will get edited or nominated for deletion. Well, how do you know if that has happened to your article? The uninitiated will probably think, "While it's important enough to this association that this content be posted here, and people will read it, nobody will really care enough to change anything I post." They couldn't be more wrong. There are legions of Wikipedians and vandals making myriad changes to Wikipedia every day. There are ways to keep track of changes to articles you created or edited, but you need to track them, and that will take time and attention.
9. Anyone can freely copy, redistribute and remix content posted to Wikipedia under the GNU free documentation license, which governs the content posted there. There are now sites that scrape Wikipedia articles and dump the content into its own pages. This presents several troubling possibilities, not the least of which is if vandalized content gets widely redistributed, you've suddenly got a fierce rumor mill or PR crisis on your hands.

So I promised six good reasons, and gave you nine (50% more for free!). I just couldn't stop. There are more reasons for associations to say no to posting stuff to Wikipedia. There are also more than eight good reasons to say yes to it. Think of this post as presenting, just like a good Wikipedia article, a balanced point of view. It will make sense to post some types of content, but it won't be a good decision or use of your time to post other types. All things considered, I think posting to Wikipedia is a good idea, but not something to just be jumped into.

Sometime, I'll follow up with a post with a recommendation on a good Wikipedia strategy that would apply to many, but not all, associations.

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

ASAE2007 update

Remember to sign up for the Association Bloggercon 2007 and the ASAE2007 backchannel. We currently have eleven folks signed up for the bloggercon and three for the backchannel. Get in there! Blogoclumpers, help me spread the word. Please!?!?!

Tagged: ASAE2007; Association Management; Associations; CAE; Certified Association Executive

Int'l Rescue Committee facebook group

Just joined Marc Sirkin's official facebook group for the IRC. I like to follow what Marc is doing.

I have to say, facebook's strategy around organizations is a lot cleaner than MySpace's model. On MySpace, the IRC is a 74 year old female. Facebook, having a method to separate organizations and people into different buckets, clearly has a much better and common sense strategy. I like how Marc can have one profile, maintain his own persona in facebook, and yet be an admin for a facebook group. This just makes a ton of sense.

By the way, facebook's groups feature is the product of Project Agape.

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

The ASAE2007 Backchannel

I'm SO EXCITED ABOUT THIS!!!

I've set up an interactive text messaging backchannel for ASAE & The Center's Annual Meeting through TxtMob.

TxtMob is essentially an SMS listserve. Everyone who signs up will be able to text each other with updates on sessions that rock, locations of exhibitors with the best give-aways, snide comments about general session speakers, where the best food is at the receptions, and perhaps details on where and when to organize a flash mob. If you're not attending the Annual Meeting, the backchannel will be a really cool way to experience it without actually being there. I will leave the backchannel unmoderated unless the number of text messages gets overwhelming.

Here are instructions for joining the backchannel. Disclaimer: I will warn you that TxtMob is far from the most user friendly website on the Internet, but to my knowledge, it's the only free service of its kind. You get what you pay for, right? So here's how you opt in...

• Go to TxtMob and set up an account.


• Once you've signed up, you'll have the option to join a group. Select ASAE2007, it'll be near the top, then scroll all the way to the bottom and click submit.


• Drop me an email (bkmcae at gmail) to let me know your TxtMob username and I'll approve your group membership.


• Once approved, you can send your text messages to asae2007@txtmob.com or through TxtMob's online messaging interface. I plan to leave the list moderated until a day or two before the Annual Meeting starts, but I'm willing to open it up sooner if subscribers prefer.

I'm not sure what the WiFi situation will be like in McCormick, but I've also set up a chat room backchannel for the non-texters.

Tagged: ASAE2007; Association Management; Associations; CAE; Certified Association Executive

The AMA's new member reception

Community Guy updates readers on his recent displeasure over the reception he has gotten from the American Marketing Association since joining about a month ago:

There's a staff there whose full-time job is helping to support and growing the marketing industry and when you accept money for membership, you have an obligation to reach out to new members/payees and make them feel like something larger than an email list.

For context, see my earlier post.

And to be clear, I have nothing bad to say about the American Marketing Association. I'm reporting on this because an influential blogger seems to think this particular association's inability to warmly welcome its new members -- well -- pretty much sucks. From my perspective, this is pretty much how a lot of associations welcome their new members, and I think that can't possibly be good for them.

Tagged: American Marketing Association Association Management Associations CAE Certified Association Executive Jake McKee Marketing Spam

The power of positive thinking is so weird

Last night I tweeted about a bizarre experience I had. Here's the full story...

Actually Rick Johnston and I experienced this together at yesterday's VSAE monthly meeting. The lunch speaker was Jerry Teplitz, Ph.D. Jerry is a speaker, consultant and author about the power of the mind, and has spoken for ASAE & The Center on multiple occasions. During his speech, he did this demonstration where he asked volunteers to come up on stage and extend their arm to the side. He pressed down on their arms, asking them to resist the downward pushing. Then he asked them to think of a sad thought. He then asked them to extend their arms, he pressed down on their arms again using approximately the same amount of force, and the volunteers' arms went down rather easily. Then he asked them to think of a pleasant thought, and repeated the pressing routine, and their arms were more resistant to the pressure.

Then he asked everyone to pair up and try it on each other. Rick and I were sitting next to each other, so we paired up. We were both pretty shocked when we experienced exactly what we had just seen on stage. Part of me wonders if he had us in a mild state of hypnosis or something.

Now, I don't know if I can draw a straight line between being able to resist downward pressure on my arm my ability to be successful through the power of positive thinking, but it sure has me wondering. I actually tried some positive thinking during my workout this morning when my ankle started hurting and I was feeling tired and a little out of breath. It seemed to work.

Can any blog readers confirm or rebut this stuff?

UPDATE: Watch the presentation I saw yesterday.

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

Association Bloggercon 2007 Registration Update

We currently have eight people signed up for Association Bloggercon 2007. Sign up today! Spread the word! Tell your friends! Bring your mom!

Tagged: ASAE2007 Association Management Associations bloggercon CAE Certified Association Executive

ASAE Board Approves Governance Changes With Few Modifications

ASAE Board Approves Governance Changes With Few Modifications:

Following a comprehensive governance study and member comment period, the ASAE Board of Directors has approved changes to ASAE’s governance system to address organizational needs and also better serve as a model for other associations.

The approved changes are essentially the same as proposed by a Governance Task Force following a March 22 ASAE board meeting. However, the task force did carefully consider more than 300 member comments before finalizing recommendations for board action. The deadline for member comments ran through April 30.

Based on the comments, the task force recommended two modifications to the original recommendations. They are:

1. That consultant members of ASAE be eligible to serve on the board through nomination and election to the nine at-large board member seats; and
2. That, after three years, the board will review all governance changes and evaluate their effectiveness.

Read more >>

Get to know Matt

Matt Baehr is the latest new addition to the association blogoclump. However, he has been blogging about wine and sports for quite awhile, so he is no blogging novice. His blog on association management hits the ground running with a post about a blog he is setting up for his trade association (and a fully stocked blogroll -- w00t!). Matt is a fellow member of ASAE & The Center's Membership Section Council and I think you'll find his musings on association leadership to be very thoughtful. He is an ambitious, innovative and highly capable association professional who's destined for great things. Start reading his blog now, so you can say, "I knew Matt when..."

Subcribe to his feed.

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