The Blogoclump

Prior to doing a presentation yesterday, I sat in on the program immediately prior to mine — the “Abilene Paradox” — A DVD program described as “Jump in the car and hit the road to Abilene. What you’ll find is a road littered with anger, frustration, blame and failure. It’s a journey during which deeply held, logical values fall victim to group dynamics, a road that takes you to group consensus where there is none.” It teaches how to “avoid false consensus, overcome the fear of speaking out, encourage effective decision-making within a group.”

In the film a family ends up in Abilene for dinner, a long, hot drive away, because no one said they didn’t want to go - as they assumed everyone else wanted to go. Then discover when they get home that no one wanted to go.

Roundtables were asked to discuss dysfunctional group buy-in to decisions at their own associations and why it happened. And, no surprise, everyone had examples — here’s a few –

1. Committee afraid to hurt the feelings of the chairman who liked an idea so much, so they met for nearly two years to discuss the idea because they liked him (not the idea);
2. Group agreed with the loudest voice;
3. Immediately called staff “obstructionist” for suggesting negatives - so rallied around that;
4. One committee member talks incessantly so everyone voted yes so he’d stop talking and they could move on to something else;
5. The bigger the group the less likely people are to speak out;
6. Didn’t want to make their friend mad, so complained about issue before and after the meeting/vote but said nothing during discussion part of vote;
7. Social events that no one enjoys or attends continue because “we can’t be the ones who vote to kill it”;
8. Want to be on a committee, but don’t want to show up. Like having it for their resume or to get meeting materials - but not the actual participation part;
9. …. and many others.

And we wonder why we can’t explain our jobs to anyone? Anyone on their way to Abilene?

Read & discuss at CindyAE's blog.

Six ideas for you to think about.

Read & discuss at jeffpi1@gmail.com (Jeff De Cagna of Principled Innovation LLC, the association community's leading voice for innovation!)'s blog.

In the midst of the discussion about live conferences, there was a reference to the quality of presenters at many educational conferences.

When I present, my goal is to offer a lot of content and a good performance. Both are important and each enhances the other. Unfortunately, many presenters only deliver one of those.

Last year at ASAE, Ron Rosenberg did both (I don’t like hyping individuals, but his presentation was really good. It even made me overlook a manipulative gimmick he used).

If a weak, but knowledgeable, presenter is speaking, be sure to assign a strong moderator to ask questions and lead the speaker through the material, if necessary.

Whether the session is viewed live or remotely, presenters should be expected to be informative and interesting - and to engage the audience.

A speaker is the source of the information, not merely the messenger.

Read & discuss at AEM's blog.

I was going to write a serious post about my strategy for getting the most out of the ASAE Annual Meeting, similar to what I wrote last year. But then I had an unexpected flash. With one whole annual meeting under my belt, I now have the tools to give first-timers some advice—fresh from my own experience—for how to get connected and not feel like a n00b. So I’m sharing some important stuff you won’t necessarily find in the program. My, what a difference a year can make.

Follow the Twitter backchannel. Seriously, folks, the Twitter backchannel gives you the keys to the kingdom. Several content leaders are avid Twitterati, including…

• Patty Digh
• Jeff De Cagna
• Jamie Notter
• Ben Martin
• Maddie Grant
• Andy Steggles
• Lisa Junker
• Greg Fine
• Bob Wolfe
• Mickie Rops
• Brian Solis

We might also hear from Chris Jennewein, Jessica Medaille, and Jennifer Ragan-Fore. Not only will folks be reporting on sessions as they happen, but you’ll have ample opportunity to meet up with Twitterfolk in real life. Need an easy way to get started on Twitter? Follow asaecenter08. Then follow all their followers. For further instructions, follow me (lindydreyer) and I’ll point you to some more cool folks to follow.

Crash the bloggercon. It’s a real session this year, so you won’t actually have to crash it, as I sort of did last year. (I was late, too. How embarrassing.) On Sunday at 1:30pm, the association community bloggers will be getting together to talk about…well…blogging. This session is definitely worthwhile, especially if you’re looking to meet super-smart, engaged association pros. I don’t know what’s planned this year, but I’d expect conversation to bounce between…

1. using a blog to enhance your personal brand
2. blogging for professional development
3. blogging for your association
4. tips and tricks every blogger should know.

Follow the listservs. Seems like every group is having a happy hour…and they’re announcing the times and location on the ASAE listservs. You’ll want to attend and meet the people who share your specialty.

Read up on The Decision to Volunteer and make the Decision to…Lounge. Oh yeah. It’s a new research study that attempts to explain why people volunteer. I’m waiting for my copy to arrive so I can read ahead and report back to y’all. There will be a session all about it on Monday at 2:30pm. And, oh yes, I will definitely make the decision to lounge at some point.

Attend an 80s/90s dance party. [RSVP on yapstar.org | RSVP on Facebook] You’ll bond with some of ASAE’s biggest fans while busting out the retro grooves. ‘Nuff said.

On a side note…if you want to really impress your boss and colleagues who attend, tell them a secret. They’ll be amazed at how connected you are.

Read & discuss at Lindy Dreyer's blog.

I am presenting two sessions at ACCE’s Convention in Pittsburgh, PA, this week. My first session explores how to formulate and implement web strategies that create value for the organization while the second looks specifically at doing so with social media. Both sessions are on Friday morning, back to back, while the Convention itself kicks […]

Read & discuss at david@highcontext.com (C. David Gammel)'s blog.

First news of today’s So Cal earthquake broke on Twitter. Holding this spot for Wikipedia link

• (first link)
• (second link - dedicated Wikipedia entry)
• (third link - dedicated Wikipedia entry surpasses 100 edits within two ours of event)

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

Read & discuss at Ben Martin's blog.

Just heard about this in my NTEN Office Hours chat today.

“Curriki, a play on the words ‘curriculum’ and ‘wiki’, is a nonprofit organization that is building the first and only Internet site for Open Source Curriculum (OSC), which will provide universal access to free curricula and instructional materials for grades K-12.

We are focusing initially on developing an online repository for K-12 curricula in the areas of mathematics, science, technology, reading and language arts, and languages. We want this repository to attract everyone from educators, students and parents, to programmers, instructional designers, authors and public officials throughout the world to contribute or freely access quality learning materials.”

Check it out here. Here is the FAQ. Any school education-related associations listening? You should get in there and take a look. Interesting concept, I plan to watch to see where it goes.

Read & discuss at Maddie Grant's blog.

Jeremy Epstein contributed a must-read article about measuring social media ROI to this month’s ASAE Marketing Insights e-mail newsletter. You have to be an ASAE member to read the article, so here’s a highlight.

“…beware the traditional marketer in social media clothing. She cannot give you a quick and easy ROI response to your social media efforts using traditional direct marketing tools. What a marketer can do is to put on his quantitative hat and look for correlations between these metrics and the ultimate goal and then refine as necessary. By measuring the health of the customer-client online relationship and not focusing on moment-in-time transactions (e.g. traffic or hits), you can begin to develop an ROI measurement for your social media efforts.”

And here’s a link to Jeremy’s excellent blog post entitled “Beware the Traditional Marketer in WOM/Social Media Clothing.“

Read & discuss at Lindy Dreyer's blog.

So last week, in my NTEN Office Hours Chat room, Lindy and I discussed names and themes and concepts for a possible social media project; can’t tell you any more about that for now, guess you had to be there to get the skinny!

We were also joined by @Tweetdeck, who answered some questions about, you guessed it, Tweetdeck, which is a really sweet Twitter application in public beta which allows you to see tweets in columns (all, replies, directs). You can create groups of people and have those grouped tweets appear in columns, and the best thing of all is that it’s fully integrated with Summize (I mean twitter search) so you can do a search for a keyword (say, “association”) and set tweets that come up in that search to appear in yet another column. It really really rocks.

So this week, today in fact, yet again my chat is at 2 pm EST. Any startups or betas want to ask me and whoever is hanging out with me about what we think of their product? @Awayfind? Metanotes? @Freshbooks? @Lijit? Now’s your chance… Actually that’s not true. You can ask me whenever. But this is more fun!

Read & discuss at Maddie Grant's blog.

Now that I am working on start-ups and capacity building, I see how barriers to entry become resilient barriers to change. Lack of capital and critical mass should be the most serious obstacles to start-up, but it’s really a lack…

Read & discuss at Ann's blog.