Reactive Social Media Plan: Is It the Way to Go?

So yesterday I spend almost the entire workday reading and thinking about how to make a social media plan for my association. It was a tough nut to crack because just about everything I can find out there (meaning in the great big internet) was about how to design a social media for your members [...]

Wikipedia Smickapedia

This week Wikipedia came to bother me. “All” associations should have a presence in Wikipedia, right? Aren’t we told that at conferences and in publications? Isn’t it “common knowledge” among the social media savvy? (Who knows, maybe it out of vogue now, it’s been a few months since I attended a conference). It’s on my [...]

Tea Drinker in a Coffee Word

Some of you may have noticed that I fell into a pretty deep blogging slump. I could list a host of reasons why, but the truth is I started finding it hard to think of “CAE” things to write about.
I really don’t deal with a lot of the issues I learned about when studying for [...]

New Blog On Association Leadership That You Really Shouldn’t Miss

I am pretty excited that the executive director of my previous association, Steven Davis, CAE, now has a leadership blog.
Steven is a really cool guy and a great leader himself. He was inspiring to work under and is a true association professional. I would have to say his influence is one of the reasons I [...]

Good News and Bad News

I have good news! An association hired me as their new communications manager!
Since I earned my CAE, I’ve been job hunting (looking for a position that could offer career growth). My current association is wonderful and I love the members and staff—but with the current structure there is limited growth potential. Not only is this [...]

Help Me to Help My Bloggers

Instead of sharing my thoughts, I need your suggestions.
My association’s blog is in its infancy and the bloggers who are participating are doing great and really working hard to make the new blog a success. The problem I am having is that a few of them really don’t understand what a blog is and what [...]

Don’t Hand Your Your Members a Rake When They Need a Hammer

“There are so many things to do in social media and such little time to do it because if you don’t do it someone else will and you’ll lose members and…” (okay, take a breath).
This is the subtle message I hear about social media and associations when I attend conferences, go to workshops, read articles, [...]