Author Archives: David

Investing in the Attention Economy

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Ben Martin and I will be facilitating a session at the upcoming ASAE & the Center Membership and Marketing Conference. We had a short article in an ASAE newsletter recently on this very topic as a lead-in to the session. You can read the full text of it below. Ben and I will also be recording a short podcast on this topic early next week. Check back here on Tuesday to listen in.

Hope to see you at the session!

Investing in the Attention Economy
By C. David Gammel, CAE, and Ben Martin, CAE

The amount of available information is growing exponentially, but human attention seems to be a limited resource. We each only have a finite number of hours in the day with which to live our personal and professional lives. The same is true for our members.

In fact, associations compete with each other and thousands of other organizations for the attention of their members. People are distracted by millions of inconsequential information sources and must filter them out in order to recognize the things that are most important to them.

To cope, many of our members work in a state of continuous partial attention. Often they divide their attention among several things at once, such as scanning e-mail or news headlines while talking on a conference call. Your latest carefully crafted newsletter might only receive a cursory glance before hitting the electronic version of the circular file. The implication: Your members must be able to quickly scan and discern the value of your communications if you want them to invest a higher level of attention.

This has significant implications for membership recruitment and retention. Members, for instance, base their decision to renew their memberships on the basis of their feelings of connection and engagement. That’s why it’s crucial that you get an appropriate amount of your members’ attention. Generally speaking, a prospect’s attention must be 100 percent captured for at least a few moments in order to complete any financial transaction.

The study of attention is called attention economics–a combination of economic analysis and data about the things to which people give their attention. Steve Gillmor, a popular writer and podcaster on Web technology, turned this research into a trend by gathering data on what people are paying attention to on the Internet and leveraging that data to provide better service and content.

Attention economics raises many questions for associations. How much of your members’ attention do you receive? How much do you want? What will you need to give to your members in exchange for their attention? Does an increase in attention per member mean that your revenue per member will increase as well?

To help answer these questions and further explore this topic, be sure to come to “The Unsession: How to Invest in the Attention Economyâ€? at ASAE & the Center for Association Leadership’s 2006 Marketing & Membership Conference. This “unsessionâ€? will be highly interactive and driven by the participants. We’re limiting attendance to the first 40 participants, so be sure to arrive early!

Update: Ed Batista, Executive Director of the Attention Trust, posted some more details about Steve Gillmor’s role in developing the idea of the attention economy. Thanks, Ed! (Ed’s personal blog was just added to Tom Peters’ blogroll. Nice!)

Why Virtual Community Failed

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I was thinking today about how so much of the Web 2.0 hype centers around baking customer communities right into the product. Given that, why did all the virtual community services and consulting firms implode as the bubble burst on the dot com boom? Those companies were some of the first to go.

My guess is that most of those services were positioned as add-ons to existing endeavors. Sell widgets? You need a widget discussion board on your web site! Peripheral stuff was the first to be cut as budgets tightened and these slapped on communities were easy targets for cutting.

What seems different now is that it is about building customer/member participation right in from the start and making the communities that form an integral part of the whole system. With that approach, I think online community should be a more enduring feature even if the web takes another hit.

(Be sure to check out Ben Martin’s comments about forming vs. finding communities. I think he is right on the mark.)

It's 10 a.m., Do You Know Where Your Data Is?

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Looks like an association just got hit by losing a hard drive containing sensitive member data:

A restored AICPA computer hard drive containing some member information (names, addresses, and Social Security numbers) was being transported to the Institute and cannot presently be located. The hard drive was damaged and had been sent out for repair by an employee in direct violation of the Institute’s internal control policies and procedures.

Despite the exhaustive investigations both within the Institute and FedEx Express, the hard drive has not yet been located. There is no evidence that the drive or its contents have been inappropriately accessed. Based on our investigation to date, we believe this is a case of a misplaced package. Nevertheless, we are pursuing a number of actions to protect our members.

Letters have been sent to some former and current AICPA members informing them of this incident and offering free credit monitoring services.

As noted above in the quote, the problem wasn’t a lack of policies. It was a lack of understanding of them by staff. All association leaders need to discuss with their staff the trust their members give to them to protect their information. Once your members feel that you have violated that trust, you may never get it back.

This also raises a question about storing SSNs. Do you really need them? If not, or you can develop a less sensitive alternative, purge them. It’s not worth the risk.

The One and Only Purpose for an Intranet

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The sole purpose for an intranet is to facilitate the work of staff in pursuit of the organization’s objectives. Nothing more, nothing less.

A good metric for this is that one of the first things that staff do when starting a project is to voluntarily create a space for it on your intranet. If the intranet is considered a prerequisite for success by staff, then you have succeeded!

I was prompted to post this after reading Nick Besseling’s rant on how stickiness is not a good goal for an intranet (I agree).

Customizing for New Members

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Michelle Frisque is thinking and writing about how to reinvent the American Library Association as part of a pilot course about inventing Library 2.0. Every association should be so lucky as to have members like Michelle, Michael, Jenny and others who are dedicated to their profession and will blog about how the association could best serve them and their peers.

Michelle also mentioned one of my articles in another post, which made my day!

Michelle recently wrote about how the ALA web site could do a better job of serving new members:

ALA is a huge organization. I remember when I first joined I found it very confusing. How do you get involved? What is ALA doing that affects me? What will my membership in ALA do for me? How do I network? None of this is easy to find on the Web site.

Something I got from Michelle’s post is the idea of customizing your association home page for new members. Help them discover the organization by highlighting information, services and opportunities on the home page when that new member is logged in. Change it every week or every day! You can phase out the special content over time or allow the member to turn it off when they no longer need it. It should be fairly evergreen content, which is great because it is relatively easy to manage once it is developed.

A few other ideas: Provide the same content in an RSS feed! Create a serial e-mail autoresponder for new members that gives them a new tip about the association every day for two week after they join! You get the idea.

(A serial e-mail autoresponder is an e-mail announcement list where all the messages are written and queued up so that a new subscriber gets each message in order at a specified interval. These have been around a long time but I’ve never heard of an association using them, oddly enough. Seems like a natural for a lot of association promotions and content.)

Someone You Should be Reading: John Robb

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John Robb has been blogging for the past couple of years about “the intersection of terrorism, infrastructure and markets.” I’ve been following John’s stuff since he was the CEO at Userland and was leading discussions about knowledge blogging. Many of the trends he discusses about warfare and terrorism have much applicability to self-forming groups and how they may impact associations. Hopefully that won’t involve a rogue committee bombing the electrical lines to your headquarters, however.

I suggest you add his blog, Global Guerrillas, to your subscription list.

AMS-CMS Integration Audio Download

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You may recall that I did an audio conference a couple weeks ago with Wes Trochlil on the potential and pitfalls of integration association and content management systems. The session was very well received by our attendees at the live event.

I am pleased to now make the program available as a download: Understanding the Potential (and Pitfalls) of Integrating CMS and AMS Systems Audio Product. For $99 you will receive an MP3 file of the audio and a PDF of the slides. A sample of the audio is available in this post.

And here is a special one week offer to my blog readers: use this code when you buy the product and get 40% off! This code will be good until one week from today (May 24, 2006). Enter this code in the shopping cart to receive your discount: V823R4E1 Please feel free to share the code with anyone you think might benefit from this unique program.

Learn more about the audio program.

http://www.audioblog.com/playweb?audioid=P31bc3801ea0660e0757bb7158480fa6eYF97SlREYmN2&buffer=5&fc=FFFFFF&pc=CCFF33&kc=FFCC33&bc=FFFFFF&brand=1&player=ap21

An Unconference for Association Executives

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Ben has some concerns about how an unconference for associations executives could work.

I love the hallway track. The pictures, though, got me thinking deeper about unconferences. Look how few people are in those rooms! Because there are so few people around the table, and because they’re opting into rooms around a topic of interest, I also get the feeling that they had a lot in common in terms of the problems and issues they grapple with. In short, they have a high degree of shared context — those rooms are high context environments.

I keep thinking about an unconference for the association community. But it’s becoming clear to me that it probably wouldn’t work. I don’t share enough context with professionals in government relations, public relations, education, etc. to truly provide value to them, or get value from them in a high context environment.

One of the commonalities among the unconferences going on is that they typically have a high-level focus of some sort that will attract the right audience to discuss that set of issues. I get the feeling that Ben is envisioning ASAE’s annual meeting with all the topical structure stripped away. This isn’t how I’ve been looking at it. I think the traditional annual meeting format is the complete antithesis of an unconference. It is too huge of a content tent. There has to be some focus around which to gather people.

One possible idea: How about an Association 2.0 unconference as a grass-roots event? Find some donated space, put together a blog, and get people talking about how associations can increase member participation beyond the limitations imposed by the traditional models?

One CMS to Rule Them All?

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A couple of good posts this month on whether a single CMS can be used to manage both your public and intranet web sites. Short answer: usually, no. For more detail follow the links.

I agree with those authors that more often than not, a single CMS will not be appropriate for your public site and your intranet site. The requirements for each are going to be pretty different once you get past basic authoring and content management features. Even for associations, whose public web sites could be considered more intranet-like than the usual corporate web site, are going to be hard pressed to find a single tool that effectively supports both.