We are doing a webinar on January 15th titled: 5 Fears Associations have about Social Media and How to Overcome Them. It is being done by Maddie Grant of SocialFish. (She is awesome by the way and has a lot of great knowledge). Maddie posted on her blog questions about what are real fears that associations have while listing what she felt were some big ones. Her post has been getting a lot of comments and is below:

"5 Fears about Social Media. You know what they are:

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Brett Wangman made a great comment on that which hit home with me, because it has been a discussion we have been having here in our offices about how to work with with open social networking systems like LinkedIn, Twitter, FaceBook, etc. Brett writes a great blog for associations as well. Brett's comment is below:

Like I said, this was a discussion that we have been having for quite awhile here in our offices and my response to Brett is below:

 "Brett- Interesting observation and one we deal with regularly as well. However, we think there are benefits to having a hybrid approach with these networks. First off, I agree with you that associations need to lay claim to what is a member benefit. Having a 'closed' SN system on their site where only their members can communicate and collaborate with other members around their industry takes away a lot of 'clutter' they have to sift through to get to the good information. However, 'closed' communities need to understand that members already have profiles on other open systems like LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, FaceBook etc. and they need to allow the content generated by members on those open systems to be part of their associations 'closed' system. If a user already has their pictures posted in their Flickr library, getting them to re-post them to the association site will be a hard sell. However, if you can provide an easy way for those pictures to be pulled into the associations’ system from their Flickr album, you will now allow a user to easily share that content within the association system- and chances are they will be more inclined to do so. People don't like change, so don't make them have to change, just give them a new way to repurpose relevant content from the tools they are already using. We think this gives associations the best of both worlds."

 The truth is that social networking platforms are bing used by many of your members. If you try and get them to keep your site up to date while they try to keep their other social networking sites up to date, yours will probably get the short end of the stick. However, by not fighting these sites, but rather working with them, your organization gets greater participation from members and your user gets to participate with less work on their part. Everyone wins!