The Opt-in Panopticon

Posted on April 29, 2009 by David

A story is making the rounds about a Swiss woman who was fired by her employer after they saw her active on Facebook while she had told them she was too ill to work with a computer and stayed home.

Regardless of the facts of the story above, it does illustrate a new dynamic that we are all wrestling with as a society: how to balance our personal, private, and professional identities online.

Welcome to the opt-in panopticon, where you chose to make your online activity easily observed by others.

A panopticon is a type of prison design proposed by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The design allowed every prisoner to be viewed from a single point, which creates the perception among prisoners that they are always being observed, even when they are not. The design is still influencing prison design today.

In the context of social media, we are moving to an online environment where we are all prisoners and guards in the panopticon. The more you use social media to reflect your current status and actions (think Twitter or Facebook status updates) the more you are placing yourself into a self-imposed panopticon. You never know who might be following your actions so you must behave as if everyone is following them. This includes: friends, family, spouses, children, employers, employees, clients, members, IRS agents, you name it!

This is certainly a rather negative analogy and ignores the benefits of social networking and other participatory media. However, it is a genuine factor to be aware of and prepared for.

Some things to consider for yourself and your staff or volunteers:

Educate staff and volunteers to this new dynamic and how the separation of personal and professional online is increasingly hard to maintain;
Set expectations for representing the organization online;
Be forgiving. The next variation of Warhol’s famous aphorism may be that we will all be stupid online for 15 minutes. If you fire everyone who makes a mistake online you’ll have very few people left!

What do you think? How might this impact your organization and how you work with your staff and volunteer leaders?

What if Cuba Opens Up?

Posted on April 22, 2009 by David

I’ve been a bit stunned by the recent events between the U.S. and Cuba. President Obama lightened up some restrictions and Raul Castro made statements that they are willing to talk and everything is on the table.

It still may not come to pass but it’s a bit more feasible today that trade and travel may open up significantly between the two countries. Fidel Castro walked back Raul’s statement today but it’s still a very interesting possibility if not inevitable.

As a thought experiment, let’s say this does come to pass in the next couple of years. What will be the impact of open trade between the U.S. and Cuba? What opportunities will it create?

A few things I can think of include:

Knowledge transfer on almost any business or professional topic you can think of;
Cuba expertise;
Start-ups;
Acquisitions;
Privatization of government operations;
Huge flow of people both ways on business assignments;
Tourism and travel;
Infrastructure (from roads to water to telecom).

I would anticipate South Florida becoming a staging point for all things Cuba, creating a huge local boom in the economy. A colleague pointed out to me that Tampa was historically a major port for Cuba trade and could become so again, bringing investment to that area.

For my association colleagues, what might an open Cuba mean for your members, profession or industry?

Pitchforks and Torches 2.0

Posted on April 16, 2009 by David

We’ve had several examples of the social media tools du jour being used to propagate outrage at an incredible rate. Too fast for organizations that are actually paying attention to respond quickly enough for the people concerned about the issue. A couple examples:

Amazon got into hot water about deranking gay and lesbian titles in their catalog;
Dominos Pizza had a rather disgusting prank video posted (link goes to NYT story, not the video!) by some employees that made the safety of their food somewhat suspect.

And that’s just this week!

Both issues were genuine concerns for the public and each company’s customers. Both corporations have responded via policy, PR and online. And yet the online world, with the epicenter on Twitter, created a great hue and cry with incredulity that neither company had responded to the issue within an hour or two of them going big time on Twitter. If these topics had just stayed on Twitter it might be such a big deal but they were quickly was covered by blogs, online news sites and eventually the national media.

Corporations, even those that live online such as Amazon, simply can’t respond that fast even if their culture and policies would ultimately do the right thing.

Something must change to defuse these kinds of issues. Asking Twitter users to give the companies some time to respond is highly unlikely to work! Therefore, the solutions has to lie within the company. Overall, organizations will have to improve how the speed with which they react and engage online even if they don’t have a formal response yet.

The process may go something like this: Listen -> Identify Issue -> Engage and Acknowledge via SocMed -> Determine Action or Response -> Communicate Decision -> Enact Change -> Communicate Impact of Change.

The trick: all of that up to Engage and Acknowledge needs to happen the same day and the rest following very shortly thereafter. The question to consider with your senior team: how can you prepare your organization to react this fast to emergent issues online?

Slaying Sacred Zombie Cows

Posted on April 15, 2009 by David

I have added an article to my site that was originally published in a Society for National Association Publications newsletter: Slaying Sacred Zombie Cows. This piece expands on an earlier post where I first mentioned these pernicious sacred zombie cow programs and how we have a unique opportunity to kill them off now.

Changing From Face-to-Face to Virtual

Posted on April 2, 2009 by David

I’ve heard a few stories lately about organizations changing an upcoming event from a face-to-face meeting to a virtual meeting online. Here’s the thing to keep in mind when contemplating this kind of change:

Changing a face-to-face event to an online-only event is like an athlete changing from running shoes to diving flippers.

You can still go fast but you better be jumping into water right after you put those flippers on. If not, you will do a face plant within seconds.

Virtual events have many strengths but they are fundamentally different kinds of activities than in person meetings. The hallway goes away. The random connections go away. The sense of place is very different. Commitment to being present during the proceedings is much lower.

Sure, social media can help some but it is not the same. Why do you think so many social media people just went to the SXSW conference?

The question to ask is if you can still achieve the same goals of your face-to-face event with an online event? In many cases, you cannot. You’d be better off trying to achieve something completely different online if your in person meeting has to be canceled.

David Gammel's Web Strategy Report, Volume 2, Issue 3

Posted on March 31, 2009 by David

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Thoughts On Strategy: Changing Web Strategy without a Redesign

Did you know that you can adjust and implement your web strategy without a complete web site redesign? It’s true!

That’s just what Kevin Holland at Air Conditioning Contractors of America did when he shifted a webinar series from individual registration events to a monthly subscription. A few tweaks to their content and functionality and they launched a revamp program that is easier to market and creating a greater return for the organization. You can read Kevin’s write up on what they did here.

My boldest clients are forging ahead and repositioning themselves to be prepared to provide maximum value when better times inevitably occur. Even if your budgets are tight this year you can still make modest changes to your online presence to bring it in line with your operational goals without starting from square one. (In fact, this is ideal since you get the most return on your investment if it’s feasible.)

Your next question is probably, well, how do I get there? Here are three steps to take:

1. Review your primary web site outcomes and audiences.

Your web site exists to serve higher level business goals. Have those goals changed? If so, are there different outcomes your site should be contributing?

The audiences for your site are driven by your overall market. Has that market changed? Are the people behaving differently? Are there entire new people or groups that have dropped out? Determine what has changed about your existing audience’s needs, desired and perceptions as well as new audiences you should add into the mix.

Getting a handle on changes to your online outcomes and audiences enables you to take the next step.

2. Which strategic web site outcomes serve those business needs and audiences?

There are seven potential strategic outcomes for any web site. (You can download a white paper on these strategies here.) The trick is to pick the right mix to best serve your desired web site outcomes and anticipated audiences. Compare your current strategies to your outcomes and audiences. How should the mix change to better serve our needs?

If your outcomes are the same, how can you shift strategies to better serve them? The ACCA example above is a great sample of shifting strategy in pursuit of the same outcome.

With those answers, you can then go on to the next step of making changes to your site.

3. Adjust the content, design and functionality of your site to better support your strategy.

A good web strategy helps you decide what content, design and functionality will best serve your needs and create the most value for your organization. While avoiding a full redesign, consider what tweaks and changes you can make to what you have that will incrementally move you in the direction set by your updated strategies.

At all costs, avoid what I like to call ‘big projectitis’ where the web site is placed into stasis while you wait for the budget and capacity to free up for a full redesign. It’s unnecessary and counter productive in the extreme.

Be bold! Shake things up and try something new to goose the value your site is contributing to your efforts. If you don’t do it, who will? If you would like to discuss likely areas to improve your site, drop me a line.

Case Study: Expanding Webinars Beyond the Event with Podcasts

I have been conducting a lot of webinar events over the past six months or so. Lately I have tried something new that I want to share with you in this issue of the newsletter.

Boston Conferencing invited me to conduct a webinar for them on increasing participation in association social media programs. I recorded a short piece of audio promoting the event that BC placed on their site and that I posted to my site as a podcast. The week before the event, a person I know on Twitter who had signed up for the event let me know they were looking forward to a particular part of the content listed in the promo. The event was such a success and drew so many questions that I was unable to get to that bit of content by the end of the program.

I promised, live at the end of the webinar, to record that part of the content and post it as a podcast to my site. We also had dozens of unanswered questions we couldn’t get to, so I answered those in a podcast as well. Both were posted on my site, promoted on Twitter and attendees were notified by the organizer to access them.

The podcasts probably took less than an hour total for me to put together. The benefits of creating them include:

I kept my promise about the content we announced we were going to deliver;
Every question was answered;
People who didn’t attend the event could sample some of it via these podcasts and follow a link to get the archive if they wanted more;
Approximately 50 people signed up for my newsletter, which they saw after coming to my site for the podcasts.

You can achieve even greater value for your online educational events by applying similar techniques. Be nimble, be creative, and don’t hesitate.

I’m now receiving regular requests for Q&A podcasts from people who didn’t even attend the event. Nice buzz!

You can find all of the podcasts mentioned in this article here.

High Geekery: Two Cool Tools and One Great Process

Here are two tools I’ve learned of recently that are very useful in their own right but even more so when used together.

First up, is UserFly. This service lets you track how someone interacts with your site, down to the level of where their mouse is pointing and how they scroll the page. Each session can be replayed as a movie, making it very easy to see how they used your site. In my experience, viewing real people using your site rapidly identifies numerous improvements. With UserFly, you can do this with anyone coming to your site without scheduling an appointment or them even being aware of it. (Be sure the terms of use on your site covers data collection and analysis.)

Next, is an interface mock-up tool called Balsamiq Mockups. Mockups makes it dead simple to create mock-ups of application interfaces for the desktop or web. This kind of activity is great when determining how to brainstorm interface design before developers code it. This often saves a lot of time and expense because it takes seconds to change the interface in a mock-up while it can take hours after it is actually coded in an application.

Here is how to leverage the two together. Review several UserFly sessions on a critical web application (such as a membership application) with your programmers and designers. Note where users tend to hesitate or generate errors or simply give up. Based on those issues, work together with Mockups to sketch out a new interface that solves those issues. Get agreement right there on the changes you’ll make and then your technical folks can go forth and make it happen. This could dramatically improve key parts of your site while shaving a few weeks off of more traditional processes.

Offerings from David

Webinar Archive Available!
They Built It and We Were There
Is your social network anything but? Do your blog entries draw more crickets than comments? Are you tweetless on Twitter?

If so, purchase the archive of my webinar with Boston Conferencing on how to best achieve participation and member value with association social media programs. This session will zero in on topics such as:

How you can use social media to engage with members anywhere online, not just on your own site
How to use social media to create valuable outcomes for members and the organization
The power of social media when used as a long term engagement strategy
The top three ways to accidentally kill an online community and the one key requirement for success

Purchase the archived audio and slides here.

New Service
Achieving Breakthrough Results with Social Media
I am launching a new service for membership executives who want to create breakthrough results with social media for their organization and members. You will receive an e-mail announcement about the service next Monday. Stay tuned!

The Dangerous Seas of Machine Translation

Posted on March 27, 2009 by David

Wes Trochlil pointed me to an article in which he was quoted that has suffered from round trip machine translation. The original article was in English, translated to something else and then back to English in this version. According to the article now, Wes has received his first naval commission, becoming Admiral of Effective Database Management.

Round trip machine translation such as this exaggerates the errors but shows very well why automated translation simply doesn’t cut it for critical content. It’s good enough to get a sense of what the text is about but if your content is important enough to translate for key audiences then it is important enough to do so with qualified human translators. They may be assisted by automated software but still add their critical value to the process.

If this topic is relevant to your web efforts, check out my article Web Design Implications for Translated Web Sites.

Marketing Annual Meetings Webinar Q&A

Posted on March 26, 2009 by David

I gave a webinar presentation about marketing annual meetings on Monday as part of Avectra’s Academy. The full archive of the audio and slides is available for free on the Avectra web site: Marketing Strategies and Tips to Drive Annual Meeting Attendance.

I have also recorded another podcast covering some additional questions from the session that I wasn’t able to cover. I also go back over some questions I thought were particularly important.

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Finally, here is a link to Kevin Holland’s post the served as one of the cases I covered in the presentation.

Enjoy!

C. David Gammel, CAE

Helping associations pursue goals that matter.

Author Archives: David