New Site, New Look

Inspired by the awesome-looking site my friend Jessica created for her new business, and always depressed with how crappy and uprofessional looking my blog is, I decided to bite the bullet and create an actual website. It still has a ways to go and I don't actually have any reason to have a website at this point beyond, well, just having one to have one, but here you have it: maggiemcgary.com. 

I'm so used to blogging on Blogger or Wordpress that I'm not sure how I'll love blogging directly on Squarespace, but I figure I'll give it a try.  Who knows--maybe it will suck and I'll go back to trusty Blogger...or maybe it will be great. Regardless, welcome to my new "home" and we'll see where it goes from here.

31% of Associations Have Online Communities. Where are the Association Community Managers?

I just read a post about an upcoming membership marketing benchmarking report, specifically detailing the part of the report that addresses social media use by associations. The report surveyed 700 associations and, according to the summary of the upcoming  report, among associations with over 20,000 members, 31% reported having a private social network.

Hm, I thought--that's a lot of private social networks....yet, as far as I know, there are still very, very few community managers in the association world. I've blogged about this before--this is an aspect of associations that I simply don't get. As you know if you read this blog or follow me on Twitter--I'm a member of The Community Roundtable, basically an association for community managers (I consider it to be a "concierge association"--basically an association without the governance stuff and dedicated to serving each individual member--in short, I'm obsessed with it!). Of well over 100 members, exactly TWO of us work for associations (ok, three, yet those two members work for the same association). Yet, according to this report, there are a lot of associations with private social networking platforms. With the cost of launching and maintaining a private social network being what it is, I just don't get the disconnect when it comes to community management. Of course, the Community Roundtable is not the only qualifying factor when looking for community managers--I'm simply using it as an example because I think my experience there being one of only a very small handful of association community managers among over a hundred corporate employees filling that role is pretty accurate with regard to the disparity between associations and for-profit companies and community management staffing.

I get that there are many small associations. I get that resources are tight and new positions are hard to justify. But seriously--if you're an association that has the money to invest in launching a private community platform, how can you NOT address the community management part? I see it all the time in action--associations who launched a platform several years ago who are now questioning whether it was worth the money and whether it's worth maintaining the community because they're not seeing the activity and resulting revenue generation that they'd been promised by the software vendor. Guess what? Without a community manager you most likely WON'T see those benefits, ever. But as I said in the post I linked to above, I think  vendors don't talk about that aspect of the product much, if at all--they just want to make the sale. Actually, that's not entirely true--Socious has a fantastic blog and resources specifically about online community and community management. Avectra's blog is good too, although it focuses on more than community management, and they actually have a community manager on staff who does a lot to educate the ASAE community on community management and engagement. But I still can't help but wonder--isn't it in vendors' best interest to stress the need for community managers as a vital component of a successful online community platform?

I'm curious--if you work for an association that either has a private online community platform or have demoed one--how much focus has been on the need for someone with expertise in community management--be it a consultant or a staff person--as a critical element of the success of the community versus just purchasing the software and reaping the benefits basically by magic?

Why Facebook Timeline Will Continue to be Bad For Brands

What--Facebook Timeline hasn't performed as well for brands as Facebook led them to believe it would? Say it isn't so!

I am not at all surprised--here's why:

1. Timeline is a UI nightmare. Where the hell are you supposed to look? With so much emphasis on images, pages take forever to load. There are two columns--except when there aren't when an image spans both columns. And don't even get me started on the way the admin panel takes up an entire screen. My eyes don't even know where to look when a page finally loads; apparently I'm not the only one who is confused.
2. Timeline totally discourages fans from commenting. It used to be that Facebook Pages were equally about the brand and the fans--for better or for worse. Now, instead of getting equal billing and visibility on a page, fan comments are all rolled up and relegated to the tiny "Recent Posts by Others" block on the right half of the page. This is nice for admins who don't have to worry about those glaring negative comments splashed across their pages anymore, but in terms of "engagement" it's a huge step down. You want authentic engagement? It's messy and it's a give and take, not something that can or should be relegated to a tiny, easily-missed segment of the page.
3. Timeline doesn't work on mobile devices--or at all half the time. One of the biggest mysteries in the world is why Facebook, the richest company in the world right now (yes, I realize that's not an actual fact--but with its crazy valuation, cash flow is obviously not an issue), can't manage to figure out the app thing. Yes, I know they just bought Instagram, primarily because clearly there was no other way to develop a usable mobile app other than spending a BILLION DOLLARS to purchase an entire company that happens to include some crackerjack app developers. But for now, if you use Facebook via an app--as 40% of users do you are not seeing much of anything, because much of the time posts and/or comments that show up on the Timeline don't show up in the app version. Not to mention brands who have now changed their Facebook posting strategies to capitalize on the awesomeness of Timeline have done so without realizing that 40% or more of users are not seeing their fanciness--or possibly anything at all much of the time. Hopefully this has smoothed out now that all pages have been migrated to the Timeline version, but I can tell you that during the time between when Facebook announced that all business pages would be migrated to the new version as of March 30 and when March 30 finally came, managing a page was an absolute nightmare with half of your posts and/or fan comments not showing up, then showing up, then not showing up, willy-nilly. I'm sure that didn't do great things for brand's engagement numbers. As recently as today I had issues with posts not appearing correctly on the page I admin.

Those are the main reasons that come to mind for me--did I miss anything? 

What Does a Washington Post Blogger Resigning Say About the State of Digital Publishing?

While reading Sunday's Washington Post, I came across the headline "The Post fails a young blogger." This should be interesting, I thought, and read it. It was not only interesting but scarily familiar to me.

The article describes how the Post blogger responsible for blogPost just resigned because of the no-win nature of her job. Her job entailed writing an average of 5.9 blog posts per day approximating 500 words each with a goal of attaining 1-2 million "hits" a month (don't get me started on the term "hits"). She was a one-person operation, presumably making far less than "seasoned" journalists (the article makes reference to Post bloggers hoping to one day "graduate" to covering a beat). When she resigned she cited the great pressure involved in producing a huge quantity of high-quality, error-free content in such a pressure-cooker style with no training, little guidance or mentoring, and sparse editing. All I could think when I read that part was "yup."

As someone who manages the blog for a large organization, as well as runs their social media activities, I can absolutely feel this blogger's pain, and I know there are tons more just like me who share this same experience. Your job is to do something new that most people on staff don't understand and/or see value in. There is little or no guidance--after all, they hired you to show them the way with this newfangled digital/social media stuff. While traditional publications have whole staffs of writers, editors, graphic designer, if you are a blogger for an organization, chances are you are a staff of one with a lot tighter turnaround time than a print publication. There is likely pressure on you to prove that your job is not a waste of time. A clear career path that involves promotions--probably not in the cards, as your whole job is likely seen as an experiment which could be ended at any moment. Most people don't understand your job so mostly steer clear of you, unless you make a mistake--then, I assure you, you hear about it. 

In the article, the writer goes on to say that not only has this one blogger resigned, but he spoke with several "young bloggers" (because everyone knows only young people are digital-savvy enough to blog) at the Post and all shared the same sentiments about lack of guidelines and training in the face of incredible amounts of pressure to attract web traffic. Apparently several bloggers have already left and several more are thinking of quitting. Apparently the Post is just now coming out with the genius idea of cross-training journalists, giving digital journalists instruction in street reporting and traditional journalists training in social media and digital.

All I can think when I read stories like this or hear of similar experiences from my professional peers is "I don't get it." Everyone knows that the traditional publications model is dying. Print ad revenue is down and continuing to diminish, while online ad spend is up and projected to continue to rise. But the investment of time, resources and talent is still focused on the traditional model. Digital publications and staff with talents to support and grow those publications are not optional if an organization wants to be able to accommodate the digital ad spend their advertisers are budgeting for. People talk about flipping the publishing model all the time--when are people going to start looking at flipping the publishing STAFFING model to reward digital journalists instead of marginalizing them?

Karl Rove at ASAE? I Wish I Cared More

A few weeks ago, a storm started brewing over the announced opening keynote speakers for ASAE's annual conference: Karl Rove and James Carville. As I'm avidly anti-politics (I don't even vote), I immediately got fired up upon hearing the name "Karl Rove" because I know enough about politics to know he bashed my hero Elizabeth Warren, so I automatically hate him. James Carville? I admit I have no idea who he is, beyond that he's apparently the polar opposite of Karl Rove. Yes, I'm that apathetic and out-of-touch with reality when it comes to politics: I do not give a shit and wouldn't waste five minutes watching people argue on TV. Ok, well at least watching people argue about politics on TV...people on reality TV arguing about nonsense? I plead the fifth.

On one level, I think having these two clowns do a live version of what I could watch on TV but choose not to at the opening session is so reprehensible and shows that ASAE is so out of  touch with what I find interesting, relevant and/or educational that I honestly thought about not attending at all. On the other, do I actually care that much? Enough to raise a stink about it or even rant about it in a blog post? When push comes to shove, somehow I'm finding that it's the latter...while I think it's stupid and there's no way in hell I'll be attending that opening keynote, at the end of the day I mostly feel "meh" about it.

Does that mean that I'm just apathetic about politics and am tuning it out like I do any and all things political? Does it mean that my attitude towards ASAE has softened and I'm loathe to criticize them? Does it mean that acupuncture has turned me into a more temperate person who doesn't get worked up about much of anything? I honestly don't know. I am reading great, passionate posts about the issue, and all are persuasive and resonate with me, but at the end of the day, I feel oddly less upset about this than I would have thought I'd end up feeling. Or maybe it's that I'm so upset I've just blocked it out. Who knows...I guess I'll see how I feel when I'm skipping that session in Dallas.