Aptify

Social Media is something I write about regularly on this blog. This post is all about how to use social media as a “data source” to enrich your association’s “member intelligence”.

Social media has two major formats today – public and private. Public social media includes Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, and many others. These forums are broadly used, have a wide array of user types, and your members are out there using these services today. Private social media tools help you build a community that is branded around your association and give you more “control”, but at the same time are separate from where these members are naturally congregating (on the public networks). Each of these formats can provide your organization with unique benefits and our view is that the ideal solution is to use both appropriately.

I suggest that associations adopt a two-way integration strategy with both public and private social networks. The following methods of integration are starting points and there are many others you can employ to further enrich the experience:

• Data to pull from the Social Network into the AMS
  • Status Updates – whenever a member updates their status or sends a tweet, this information can be brought into the AMS
  • Changes in Employment – if a member changes their job, that is a key piece of information to pull into the AMS
  • Likes/Dislikes – these social tags are key to understanding the member and are really important to pull in, AND analyze.
  • Relationships – knowing who a member knows is key – and pulling that into the AMS has a huge array of benefits including in marketing, grass roots lobbying, fundraising and much more.
• Data to push into Social Networks from the AMS
  • Status Updates – whenever a member has a meaningful interaction with the association, ask for permission to push a status update to their social networks – for example a member signs up for a meeting, tweet this out through their Twitter account, update their Facebook/LinkedIn status as well with a link back to your site. Of course, make this clear to the member and something they must opt in for.
  • Association Group Memberships – many associations have groups in LinkedIn and pages in Facebook. Automatically adding a member to those groups in the public networks is something that will add value for the member and the association.

You might be wondering how to go about doing this. That is a more detailed topic but suffice it to say for now that the technical requirements for doing all of this are actually well within the grasp of most systems. Some AMS products have this type of functionality built in but even if yours doesn’t you will be able to find a path to achieve these benefits if you make it a priority in your integration planning.