Keyword Social Media
03
JAN
LinkedIn's Challenge to Membership Organisations
03 JAN 2012 | Posted in communities of practice, knowledge, LinkedIn, membership organisation, online communities, social media | Author Alex McLachlanLinkedIn's groups provide the potential for informal communities that can pose a challenge to membership organisations.
What is the best way to respond to this challenge and how can membership organisations give their members the experience they expect?
15
DEC
The Trouble with Forums
15 DEC 2011 | Posted in business value, social media | Author Alex McLachlanForums are excellent for online discussions to support communities with common interests and I often find great enthusiasm for introducing forums when talking with companies and membership organisations. The problem though is that often they are just thinking of IT solutions rather than taking a business led approach.
The main issue is - what is the business value of the forum?
05
DEC
Multichannel Contact Management
05 DEC 2011 | Posted in contact management, CRM, social media | Author Alex McLachlanSome organisations focus almost entirely on their website as the main means of communication with contacts to the exclusion of other channels, particularly email marketing. There are two dangers to this - it assumes either that users will visit the organisation's website of their own volition if they have visited before; or that they will find the site from Google searches if they haven't visited before.
Tom Standage from the Economist gave some fascinating insights into historical parallels to social media in his keynote today at DrupalCon London - "The Future of Social Media - A Historical Perspective". The examples he gave included Martin Luther's traffic statistics in his pamphlet "blog posts" on the excesses of the Catholic Church, the "flame wars" of differing accounts of battles from the two sides in the English Civil war and St Paul as the most successful social media user in the Roman Empire with his letters, copies of which spread throughout the empire.
18
JUL
Onsite Forums vs LinkedIn
18 JUL 2011 | Posted in communities of practice, LinkedIn, membership organisation, NFP, social media, website | Author Alex McLachlanFor many membership organisations, there are very good reasons for wanting forums on their own websites rather than using LinkedIn.
Some membership organisations have very successful vibrant online forums. Some other organisations I come across have spent a significant amount of money without any meaningful take up.
31
MAY
Challenge of Wikipedia for Charities
31 MAY 2011 | Posted in charity, internet, knowledge, NFP, SEO, social media, Wikipedia | Author Alex McLachlanProviding information to the public is one of the main "charitable objectives" of many charities, particularly medical-related charities. So it was interesting to see the recent announcement by Cancer Research UK of an initiative to tidy up some of the key pages on cancer on Wikipedia.
The challenge is that for typical cancer related searches, Wikipedia comes second, whilst Cancer Research comes around eighth. Wikipedia gets many more visits as a result of the higher search result ranking (3.5m per month over its 1,500 cancer-related pages), but Wikipedia articles are not necessarily accurate or well written.
04
MAY
Social Media is NOT an add-on
04 MAY 2011 | Posted in charity, NFP, social media | Author Alex McLachlanAlthough some charities have created "social media officer" type posts, by and large they have not taken on board how social media is changing and challenging how people engage with charities.
Steve Bridger is presenting the keynote at the Third Sector Social Media Convention in June. Leading up to that, he has posed 15 conversation starters for rebooting charity. A number of these could be real game changers for charities.
1 Comment 25
NOV
User Generated Content
25 NOV 2010 | Posted in communities of practice, online communities, social CRM, social media, website | Author Rob SmithA big thank you to the presenters at last night's event Your Organisation in their Hands. It was an excellent evening which I really enjoyed. I was particularly interested in the presentation by Steve Dale and his practical advice regarding the development of online Communities of Practice (CoP).