If you haven’t seen it, there’s a cool discussion happening on the YAPstar site about what to do when you discover someone has created a group on Facebook and is using your association’s logo (without your permission). This is going to start happening more and more. It’s the kind of thing that associations need to be thinking and talking about (so hat’s off to YAP for talking about it!).
In the discussion, Maggie McGary said:
If you really think about it it’s kind of scary–social media could, in
theory, eventually come to replace a lot of the benefits associations
offer. Maybe that’s kind of a drastic scenario, but maybe not. Say your
members now belong to your association to stay on top of new
developments in their respective fields, to collaborate with colleagues
and exchange information, and to network for professional
opportunities. They can already do that through social networking and
it’s only going to become easier and more universally accepted as time
goes on. Say chapters are a source of income for your association; what
happens when those people decide they don’t want to pay dues because
they can set up the same community on Facebook and arrange meetings,
etc? Ditto needing to belong for the job boards–they have LinkedIn and
their own social networks. Breaking news in the field? They’ll be
tweeting about it and keeping each other informed. Not to go crazy or
anything–and maybe I’m just a pessimist and a cynic–but this is the
kind of stuff I think about.
I don’t see it as pessimistic, actually. It’s just change, after all. Just because what you did was considered valuable yesterday doesn’t mean it will be valuable today. So change. I see it as exciting, in fact. The more members can create their OWN value through social media (or any other vehicle for that matter), the better! It frees the association up to raise the bar or deliver new value. Don’t try to control. Just enable people in the system and keep moving forward.
Many associations are still run by people who don’t have a clue what Twitter, Facebook, and other social media tools are – much less by those people who use them. In my experience, many of the current leaders of traditional associations still pooh-pooh the idea that real value is generated by something like Twitter. To admit that represents a loss, a systems change, and the dominant culture typically resists systems change at all costs (even if to their own detriment) – this is no exception. The way to resist this change–the sheer democratization of knowledge (and in some cases, wisdom)–appears to be by belittling it. I think associations (in their current model) are dinosaurs. The command and control (and exclusionary) structures on which they are based are nothing short of irrelevant in a world connected. That’s not to say that a connected next generation of leaders can’t reinvent associations into something more relevant–and likely they won’t ask for permission to do so. Just my two cents’ worth.
Patti: It would be a mistake to say that social media usage can’t be exclusionary as well as oriented towards sharing. People have always formed cliques, subgroups, committees, whatever, where a distinction is made between “insiders” and “outsiders.” Just because social media and social networking make communication and content accessible and transparent does not mean that trust and good feelings are being exchanged among participants.
Hey Patti. I heard the “permission” theme in another of your tweets today. Hmmm. That’s a big issue I think.
Dennis: I agree social media doesn’t eliminate in groups and out groups. But I interpret “exclusionary” in Patti’s comment more in terms of control: the notion that I can exclude you from playing if you’re not a member of my group. That’s harder than it used to be, and the trend has just started. Clinging to the now dated model (and then belittling the emerging trend) is the irrelevance she’s talking about I think.
Dennis – thanks for the food for thought. I believe we might be in violent agreement (smile).
I agree that in- and out-groups also exist in the context of social media – absolutely they do. Since they are so much more transparent, the in-ness and out-ness isn’t masked at all, as I find it is in the traditional association or corporate context (that is, we will pretend it is not so, while in social media, we’ve done away with that pretext).
David Berreby’s brilliant book, Us and Them, would posit that we are constantly (as human animals) seeing the world in terms of groups, and in terms of us and them. Social media groups are no exception.
Jamie’s right to bring up the issue of control – that’s one important part of what is changing and leaving traditional association governance and operations behind – I would go a step further. Associations are built on exclusion – you are a member of our group, or not. You are a (insert industry/profession) or you’re not. That’s not a bad thing, but it is a “structure of the land” that is hard to change once the rules change. Which they are now doing, and quickly.
If some of the greatest innovations come from cross-disciplinary pollination, are associations limiting the depth and scope of their abilities to innovate by limiting the scope of their membership? Does an old model of “us” work any more?
I don’t have the answers – just questions. But I’m more and more convinced that if we don’t start asking those questions, associations will lose all relevance.
As an outside observer(former journalist, now conference speaker) I’ve long thought this would happen and more as you probably did too.
Feeling cheeky one day, I wrote a quick post about it, “How an Online Social Network Could Steal Association Members”
http://sayitbetter.typepad.com/say_it_better/2007/10/how-an-online-s.html