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 | Introducing...It is our pleasure to welcome you to The Association 2.0 Newsletter - our share of association technology knowledge and insights. We're making it our New Year's resolution to deliver a provocative addition to your monthly reading in the form of one or two brief articles. After each article, you'll see a "Discuss this article" link. This will allow you to continue the discussion and/or ask questions from our website. If you are not interested in receiving this newsletter, click here to unsubscribe.--The Gulo Team Where should your organization be headed in 2007?Let's start by defining what associations have worked so hard to create through membership and other offerings - communities. By definition these are: a group of people that share a common bond or interest; a closed network of strongly tied people; organized groups seeking accountability from elected officials and/or increased direct representation within decision-making bodies. A number of new websites are using community models and user innovation to become enormously popular and profitable. The question is, why aren't associations able to leverage the intrinsic value of their own membership to create similar communities and growth?To better explain how this can be accomplished, we should expand on the phenomenon of social networking. As you may already know, this trend began to come into the mainstream with blogging during the 2004 elections. Today this trend has spread far beyond blogging. Sites such as flickr.com, yelp.com, youtube.com and digg.com are allowing users to share photos, reviews, videos and other content they find interesting. These sites have a single common denominator: their value comes by leveraging user participation. These sites empower users to speak, share and spread their knowledge; they offer a platform. Associations, on the other hand, have been incubating communities since their inception and have yet to provide any non-traditional means of expanding in size. A law by technology pioneer Robert Metcalfe states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users in that network. This means that a community with only strong ties, such as an association, can only grow a maximum of n*(n-1)/2 times. However, if a community exists on the principles of weak ties, the maximum power is limited only as a function of all interested individuals. This suggests using weak ties is more effective to increase the critical mass. Broadening a community's reach can meet a higher potential and ultimately increase its worth. Structurally, this is not how most associations work. It is, however, becoming increasingly apparent that exclusively using strong ties to represent a community is simply too restrictive and ultimately limits its power. Perhaps this explains how a simple photo-sharing website like Flickr can become ten times as popular with ten times the number of members as the very largest association, seemingly overnight. What needs to change? Associations must start to develop programs and websites that harness user participation and use it to build and expand upon the existing community of members. While there are no specific guidelines or best practices to follow when attempting to adapt to the new "participatory web" (also referred to as Web 2.0), it should be strongly considered when creating new offerings. Significant changes are happening to the way people interact online; a wait-and-see attitude might leave your association behind. Discuss this article Holiday Gifts & HappeningsHoliday GiftTo you, from now until January 1st, we are giving away 6 month's of our blogging software - FREE. What better way to get your organization off to the right start for '07 with social networking. Shoot us an e-mail or call us to learn more.Holiday happenings We will be exhibiting at the Association Forum Holiday Showcase on December 12th in Chicago. Visit us at booth #242. | |
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