timtowle

I was telling my Friend Guy Bigwood, General Manager of MCI Group Spain, Europe’s largest events management and marketing company about how Affinity Circles had created a social network product for educational organizations and how I thought the model was interesting (see my earlier post on Affinity Circles). Associations are key for MCI, so guy asked me how Social Networks might create value for a Professional Association.

What are Professional Associations
Professional Associations exist for many different reasons (not every point, apart from the first, will be applicable to every organization):

- Promote and represent members (in some respects a Union for professionals, which historically some were).
- Promote and represent sector ; lobbying, influencing etc.
- Member education.
- Share and enable research and development.
- Education/communication to the wider public.
- Standards setting, especially when the associations represent new sectors.
- Quality seal/Element of trust that users may use to communicate their trustworthiness/authenticity to a wider public.

It strikes me that Associations are intermediaries and filters for their members to the wider world (and vice versa): They act as a hub for distributing information to it’s members and other important publics and their authority comes from the critical mass of it’s members. And the one thing that the Internet has proved to be very good at is disintermediation.

Challenges from the Internet
Assuming I was the leader of a large Professional Association the Internet would concern me for two reasons:

- Disintermediation. Bad SEO strategy and little relevant content online from my associations appears in search engines means that my association starts not to exist for many people. If I wanted to know about Neurosurgery and the best neurosurgeons in the old days I would go to the local public library, find the relevant associations, write to them and get the relevant information back. Now I search in Google where those associations may or may not come up.
- That my members will be managing their digital identities with other networks that have high digital visibility and may start to usurp my association in terms of critical mass. LinkedIn for example now has enough users that assuming those users have placed their various associations in their profile, must present a better way to search and surf of members of some of the bigger associations than the actual sites of those associations.

Objectives of associations on the Internet.

With these points in mind and knowing that the Internet doesn’t present just threats but also opportunities, I would make sure that my association embarked on a strategy that covered these key points:

- Good SEO strategy to ensure my associations position of leadership and relevancy in the search engines
- Position of leadership in helping members of my association create, maintain and control their digital identities with a 3 pronged approach:
1. Education of what their digital identities are and how they can be influenced.
2. Offering a platform where they could control completely their own profile and they could have a Blog if they so wished.
3. An advanced membership database that would, in lieu of the individual members maintaining their profile, would
   aggregate relevant information from around the net about individual them – much like ZoomInfo does (here’s Guy’s profile on ZoomInfo) This would be the best tool to motivate them to control their identities.

- A vertical search platform that acted as a key tool for the members, where they would actively add content, much like Digg, and that would become a destination site within my sector.
- Work with other networks liked LinkedIn to create and optimize the relevant group for my association within their platform.
- Create a question and answer platform (much like Yahoo! Answers) so that non-members may approach the association and it’s member to ask expert advice. I would then syndicate this content to Yahoo! Answers and Google Base and other question and answer platforms.

Essentially I would convert the Web presence of my association into an advanced Social Network that would aggregate to the wider web the members and their achievements. This way I would ensure relevance for my association in the digital world and create value for my members.