Social media has created a communication revolution and it’s not going away. This has an obvious impact on business and many business are still trying to get to grips with it all, so here are my 5 Top Tips on social media for business use.

1. Get a plan – All too often organisations set up social media accounts because they think they should, but then their posts are just a bit random. In everything we do in business the most successful people have a strategy. That applies to social media too.
   
2. Research – Organisations have a tendency to use social media like traditional media – for announcing. But it provides us with a set of great tools to do so much more, like research, listening for feedback, competitor analysis and customer care.
   
3. Be in the room – Many organisations have got into the bad habit of thinking if they schedule posts they have ‘done‘ social media. That is a big mistake. Social media is about being social and building relationships with the right people. It’s when we build those relationships that the magic happens.
   
4. Add value. When I ask people why they have posted the things that they have, they often don’t really know. When we have a strategy we understand what it is that our customers want to see and read – and we share that.
   
5. Ensure your team understand the Do’s and Don’ts – If you employ people, get a simple social media policy in place, but more importantly train your team, paid staff and volunteers so that they fully understand the implications of what they are sharing and the consequences of bringing your organisation into disrepute . Bringing the whole team on board will also bring you many benefits.
   

Your association probably offers more benefits than it needs to. But which ones factor into the decision to join? Get in the habit of market analysis to find out.

Ask a mom and dad which of their kids is their favorite, and they’ll tell you they love all their children equally. Now ask an association executive which of their association’s member benefits is their favorite. Do you get the same answer?

Dean West, FASAE, president of Association Laboratory, Inc., suggests associations need to learn some tough love.

“When we study the number of benefits that are essential to the decision to join or engage, most of our clients are astounded by how small the number is,” West wrote in a post in ASAE’s Collaborate discussion forum two weeks ago. “Just because an association offers 25 different things doesn’t mean the prospective/current member cares about 25 things. Rarely do we identify more than four or five key benefits that influence the decision. The result is a lot of wasted effort on benefits that don’t improve member value or corresponding membership business metrics.”

Maybe you don’t have 25 kids, but the point remains: Not every product or program your association offers can be a special snowflake. In fact, many of your member benefits are probably more like barnacles accreted to the hull of your ship, slowly building drag below the surface because you haven’t taken care to clean them off.

West recommends a variety of analytical methods for prioritizing member benefits, such as “member build a membership” (members surveyed to build hypothetical bundles of benefits, with associated costs), quadrant analysis (plotting benefits by both satisfaction and importance), and total unduplicated reach and frequency (TURF).

The final method involves asking members to rank benefits and, based on those responses, analyzing which combinations of benefits will earn, or “reach,” the most members. West offered a couple examples of associations for which he has conducted TURF analysis: In one association with 24 benefits, the top nine earned 70 percent of its members; in another, with 15 benefits, the top four delivered 85 percent of its members. The remaining benefits could be, in theory, simply eliminated or at least better understood to serve niche needs that may be strategically important to the association but not crucial to the decision to join.

In short, West says associations need to improve at matching benefits to a clear understanding of member needs. “A mistake that associations make is they determine member categories based on either outmoded or outdated information,” he says, “or they base it on legacy issues—’Oh, we’re going to have a difference between Company A and Company B because we’ve always done it that way’ is an example—but oftentimes the market knows what they want out of the association, and they don’t care whether or not you bundle it in the membership as a way to get it, if it’s of value to them. So, by doing a market-driven approach, instead of creating a member category that you sell to people, you allow the market to tell you what would be a logical configuration of benefits.”

This question of configuration of benefits is important for any association, but it’s particularly crucial for associations building tiered benefits packages.

To read the full article please click here. 

This article was originally sourced from Associations Now here and was written by Joe Rominiecki. 

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has set a lofty goal: 500,000 members. Such radical growth requires full-scale re-envisioning of how the organization conducts its membership operations. Here’s how AAAS plans to get there.

In 2014, the American Association for the Advancement of Science had about 100,000 members. Then it decided to become a membership organization.

For decades, AAAS had been best known for—and primarily driven by—its publications, namely Science and its related journals. But AAAS saw declining promise in a print-centric future.

“We were at a crossroads,” says Beth Bush, chief membership officer. “Are we a publisher or are we a membership organization?”

Last year AAAS launched a transformation effort to shift its focus from print to multimedia and to provide “a wider array of useful services to members and to the broader society interested in science.” That was the strategic language in the organization’s announcement about the effort, but the membership focus was put in much clearer terms for Bush: Grow AAAS to 500,000 members.

A quintupling of AAAS’s membership would make it one of the largest associations by members in the United States.

For now, let’s set aside the question of whether that kind of growth is reasonable or even plausible and instead focus on how an association would go about pursuing it. And, just as important, how would an association need to remake itself to support “becoming a membership organization”?

The good news, Bush says, is that AAAS is broadly focused, and, under its bylaws, anyone can become a member. But “anyone” is a hard market to define, so Bush, who was AAAS’s first chief membership executive when she was hired in April, began by identifying clear market segments:

• professional scientists and engineers
  
• early-career scientists and engineers (graduate students through the first five years as a professional)
  
• students and teachers (kindergarten through college)
  
• international
  
• general public
  

Bush has spent 2015 preparing to build the AAAS membership operation around these five groups. “I feel like I’m starting five different membership organizations at the same time,” she says. Each segment will get its own staff segment director. Eileen Murphy, director of the professional scientist and engineer member segment, was the first to be hired.

“In essence, you can think of each of the segments as their own standalone business plan,” Murphy says. “As the professional scientist and engineer segment director, I am responsible for looking into what are those needs. What are the products, programs, and services that AAAS has that can be packaged appropriately for that audience?”

Bush says Murphy and her fellow directors will own their respective segments and be held accountable for revenue, expenses, and membership targets. But to avoid silos, they’ll also be measured by how well they transition members from one segment to another, particularly along the career path from student to early career to professional.

To read the full article please click here. 

This article was originally sourced from Associations Now here and was written by Joe Rominiecki. 

Are you using Instagram to its fullest potential?

If you have a visually striking product or brand (and even if you don’t!) and you’re not on Instagram, you’re missing out on one of the biggest visual trends on social media today. And considering that images are often the most engaging aspect of social posts, that’s saying something.

Whether you’re new to Instagram marketing or you’re struggling to find the ROI of your photos, we’ve got a four-step process to help you kill it with Instagram marketing.

Step 1: Pre-Campaign Data and Insights

If you want to find success on Instagram, you’ve got to do more than just publish beautiful photographs. Your strategic thinking should begin well before you post a single image.

Before launching an Instagram campaign, consider exploring all of your available data and insights. What do you know about your audience? Who are they? What is their browsing behavior like? Where do they shop? What is their lifestyle?

If you are using a social insights platform, you should be able to apply what you know about your audience on other channels, like Twitter or Facebook, to your Instagram marketing to give yourself a great head start.

Step 2: Campaign Execution

Now it’s time to launch your campaign: Snap photos, create captions, insert hashtags and engage your audience.

Be sure that your bio is completely filled out, and that you are posting fresh, new content on a regular basis. Whether you’re running a one-off seasonal campaign or a long-term brand awareness campaign, you’ll need to keep your presence active in order to be successful.

Some tips for great Instagram photos:

• Set your smartphone camera settings to “square” if available, so that all the photos you snap will be Instagram-friendly
  
• Drive traffic to your website by always including a URL in your caption
  
• Plan your Instagram photos in tandem with other posts across your social networks
  
• Encourage your community to share photos of your product, using a branded hashtag
  

Step 3: Post-Campaign Measurement

After your campaign, or (better yet) at regular intervals while it’s running, you’ll want to capture metrics that show how successful your efforts have been.

Examples of Instagram metrics:

• Number of comments
  
• Number of likes
  
• Number of followers
  
• URL clicks
  
• Branded hashtag mentions
  

What you measure will be determined by the goals of your campaign. Is it to drive traffic? Measure URL clicks. Brand awareness? You might want to look at comment sentiment and hashtags.

Step 4: Analysis

No social media strategy is complete without analysis. During your campaign, be sure to check in on the metrics you’ve decided to measure, and see whether they’re indicating growth.

You can analyze the demographic and psychographic makeup of your audience; the reasons why certain images performed better than others; what time of day gets the most engagement and more.

Analysis is a key component of a great Instagram strategy, as even not-so-successful campaigns can teach you what works and what doesn’t. By feeding this information back into your strategy for the next campaign, you’ll be in a better position to reach and engage your audience with your beautiful photos.

Try applying these four steps to your next Instagram campaign to better connect your content with your audience, and get the most out of your branded visuals.

This article was originally sourced from Business2Community here and was written by Pam McBride. 

As I've blogged about before, I see social networking for businesses as encompassing four quadrants: public social media, social CRM to collect data, social software in the workplace (intranet) and externally facing social software (an open online community). As I detailed in that post, there are many opportunities for companies to leverage multiple social networking elements, especially through an online community.

Publicly facing social sites, like an open community, are especially powerful and offer businesses the ability to interface with customers ‘where they are,’ to monitor what's being said about your brand on those sites and to incorporate that feedback into your organization's overall communications strategy. This transparency not only helps you create a better product, but ‘helps members and customers help themselves’ by allowing them to ask and answer questions as a community.

Culture Matters

Although these are powerful tools, it’s easier said than done to get an online community started. Unfortunately, you can’t just set one up -- even if it’s on an awesome platform -- and expect everyone to hop online at once.

That’s where culture fits in.

In order for your organization to reap the benefits of a community, the culture needs to evolve away from the traditional command and control way of doing business -- a mentality generally at odds with new collaborative platforms and technologies -- to one that’s more collaborative and open. It's one thing to launch a community, or establish a company presence on a public platform, but it's another to effectively integrate it into all aspects of an organization’s operations. In order for an organization to effectively deploy community across the board, the organization must, itself, become social as well.

How do you create a social culture?

I wish this was an easy, simple task, but it can take time to create a culture that readily accepts an online community -- and knows how to use it. But the good news is it can be done.

Much smart commentary has already been written about the cultural changes necessary for a business to become "social." For instance, I enjoyed this post, in which the author laid out a straightforward path for creating the culture you want.

Here’s a quick recap:

1. Decide what your goals for community are. Why do you want to start a community? Is it to connect members with each other so they can share knowledge? Or to reduce customer service costs by allowing customers to help each other? Knowing your goals will help you streamline the community’s purpose and pitch the idea in a meaningful way to future participants.
   
2. Assess your organization’s current culture towards collaboration in general, as well as social networking. Do people already collaborate naturally, or is your organization siloed, with independent working? If your community launched today, how well received would it be? Knowing what your current culture is like will help you plan the community’s launch and educate your organization so they use it.
   
3. This wasn’t mentioned in the post, but I think it’s important. When you finally launch your community, start small. Although you’re excited and want everyone involved, sometimes it’s better to start off with the few and dedicated rather than a large mix of people, many of whom are ambivalent or even detractors. As these first members begin creating a strong community culture, bring more people into the fray, and they’ll catch on more quickly than they would’ve otherwise.
   

Don’t forget about buy-in

Creating a social culture is just part of the puzzle, though. It’s important that you get buy-in from the organization as a whole -- they need to be excited about the community and see how it will benefit them as well. When pitching the community to people in your organization, tie it in with their goals. How does a community help them achieve their five year vision?

This article was originally sourced from the Higher Logic website here and was written by Andy Steggles. 

Have you ever had the situation where Board members have tried to directly instruct staff, or have questioned senior management decisions outside of the Board meeting, or have taken partial control of staff functions?

Have you viewed this as appropriate and advantageous to the organisation, or disruptive, annoying and interfering? Or maybe even both?

We come across this quite often when we are working with nonprofit Boards and senior executives. We have had late night telephone calls from Directors regarding their concern about management techniques, asking advice about what the Director should do if management isn't doing what the Director expects. We have had emergency meetings with CEOs when they are ready to resign because a Board member has been "interfering". We have seen numerous emails where senior executives complain bitterly about the Board becoming involved in "operational" matters. We have talked with many Boards about their concern that management is not managing. And the list goes on.

There is not always a clear case of inappropriate interference by the Board or Board Members. 

On the one hand, Directors have the right to access everything that goes on in the organisation (with some exceptions mainly related to privacy laws), as in the end, the Director is ultimately responsible. It is also appropriate, prudent, and necessary that a Board member take an interest in the operations and management of the organisation, and that they have conversations with staff and ask questions outside of Board meetings.

On the other hand, the Board members are not staff, and have not been retained to develop operational implementation of strategy. Board members seldom have the specific skill sets required to implement the operational strategies, which is why skilled staff have been hired.

So, what can be done to satisfy the Directors' need for knowledge and accountability, and the executive leadership and staff’s need for operational autonomy?

To read the full article please click here. 

This article was sourced directly from the Strategic Awareness Essentials website here. 

All Queenslanders can now take part in one of the state’s biggest health care surveys, which runs from 9 November to 24 December 2015. The CheckUP Health in Focus survey provides an annual snapshot of primary health care in Queensland. With an overwhelming response in 2014 from the general public, we are again pleased to announce we are opening it to all Queenslanders for 2015, in addition to GPs, specialists, practice managers, nurses and allied health professionals.

Have your say today to help improve health care for the future, visit www.checkup.org.au/hif

This information was directly sourced from CheckUP. 

A bid to standardise trading hours across south-east Queensland will cost jobs, an industrial relations commission has heard.

The Queensland Industrial Relations Commission began hearing an application by the National Retail Association (NRA) to "harmonise" retail hours in the region today.

CEO Trevor Evans said the current trading hours were put in place 20 years ago and were out of step in an age of modern retailing solutions and online shopping.

"At the moment it's split up into somewhere between 15 to 20 different zones, all with different rules, that's a nightmare and very confusing for both customers and retailers," he said outside court in Brisbane.

"So our hope is to get as close as we can back to one set of rules for south-east Queensland."

The NRA wants stores to be allowed to open from 7:00am to 9:00pm from Monday to Saturday across the region with the exception of Brisbane City, the Gold Coast entertainment precinct and the Fortitude Valley and Hamilton north shore.

Mr Evans said it would create jobs and increase consumer certainty, and the impact on independent retailers would be minimal.

"While there are one or two small businesses that would see these rules as a competitive advantage; i.e. they're forcing their competitors to close and their customers to come to them," he said.

"The fact is that this is about much more than just groceries.

"These laws impact all the tenants of shopping centres and shopping strips which are forced to close as soon as the larger stores and the anchor tenants are forced to shut."

Queensland's independent retailers at risk: MGA

The move will cost jobs, independent and small business representatives say.

Master Grocers Australia (MGA) represents 485 independent retailers in Queensland who say their businesses will be at risk if the action is successful.

MGA advocate Colin Dorber said the move would be damaging to independent retailers and their staff.

"The granting of this application hurts independent retailers it forces husbands and wives for example to terminate staff and then start working 60-70 hours a week to survive," he said.

"It takes employment out of smaller independent stores and based on the evidence the NRA are giving, won't necessarily create new jobs for people in Coles and Woolworths.

"The bottom line is it really hurts and it's not necessary.

"There's only a limited pie and Coles and Woolworths want that pie to be all theirs."

The Commission also heard from Professor Joe Branigan, the co-author of a report into the economic impacts of deregulating retail trading hours in Queensland.

His report estimated that up to 2,000 jobs could be created if deregulation was brought in across the state.

Mr Dorber questioned the survey method and details of the report findings throughout the afternoon.

The matter is set down for four weeks.

This article was sourced directly from the ABC News website here and was written by Kathy McLeish. 

The Australasian Investor Relations Association (AIRA) is proposing a “fast track” proposal to speed up the release to market of important financial results announcements and other price sensitive information during profit reporting seasons.

The initiative arises because more listed entities are issuing profit results, annual reports and other important performance announcements through the ASX before daily share trading commences.

AIRA’s Chief Executive Ian Matheson said today: “We have had a preliminary conversation with the Australian Securities Exchange about developing a fast track system to operate during interim and final results periods because of concerns that releases could be delayed by the large amount of other, non-sensitive announcements.

“A poll of our members shows that 69% of respondents are lodging their financial results to the ASX between 7:30am and 8:30am to give stock market analysts and investors more time to assess the results before trading commences. This is a critical period of the day, and some companies experienced delays in the latest reporting season.

“The survey also showed that 90% of those surveyed received acknowledgement of receipt back from the ASX within 20 minutes. The larger companies – particularly those in the ASX50 – attract considerable analyst coverage, and it’s important the analysts’ can provide informed responses to their clients as soon as possible before the market opens. That makes for a more orderly opening and is in the best interests of all investors.”

A fast track system would prioritize ASX releases so that the most time sensitive ones were made public more quickly. Less sensitive releases on issues such as substantial shareholdings, minor capital changes and change of directors’ interests would be sidelined until the peak period ebbed.

AIRA’s survey also found that, apart from more companies reporting first thing in the morning, larger ones were also releasing their financial results earlier in reporting seasons. Some 21% said they had already advanced their lodgment date or planned to do so next year. Also, 43% said they had changed their timetable or would do so next year to include release of their annual report with other financial announcements. One benefit of this is that it gives proxy advisers a longer lead time to research their recommendations on voting.

To read the full media release please click here. 

This media release was directly sourced from the Australasian Investor Relations Association (AIRA) website here. 

The Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau of Australia (IAB Australia) have jointly launched best practice principles for online advertising which is in the style of editorial content, commonly known as Native Advertising.

The Native Advertising Principles are a consumer protection tool for advertisers to reference, aimed at ensuring readers can readily distinguish between what is paid-for advertising versus editorial content in the online environment. They bring together the guidance of both the AANA and IAB Australia at a time when brands are increasingly delivering editorial-style content in digital formats.

“We are delighted to have been able to work with IAB Australia to deliver these Native Advertising

Principles. They will help ensure that people know when they are viewing independent commentary and when they are viewing paid-for content in the form of native advertising,” Simone Brandon, Director of Policy & Regulatory Affairs at the AANA said. “Responsible, respected and innovative marketing is at the heart of what our members stand for and these principles will help guide advertisers so that they are transparent and ethical in how they communicate about their brands online.”

Alice Manners, CEO of IAB Australia commented: “The rise of native advertising and storytelling by

brands is fundamentally shifting the way in which we, as an industry, need to consider advertising.

The Native Advertising Principles are an important addition to the IAB Australia’s Advertising Playbook and the AANA’s Code of Ethics and we expect they will provide valuable guidance to

advertisers and publishers alike.”

The Native Advertising Principles will require advertisers to provide consumers with a prominently

visible cue so they immediately know the content is paid-for advertising – for example, these cues

could be the use of the brand’s logo in or around the content or the use of a different design, font

or shading to clearly differentiate it from the editorial content.

“With the increasing potential for blurred lines between editorial and paid-for advertising, it’s timely

that these principles are being launched to provide guidance to advertisers and publishers about

how they should guarantee transparency for consumers,” said Matt Tapper, Managing Director

Global Markets, Lion Beer, Cider and Wine and new Chair of the AANA Board.

Ed Harrison, IAB Australia Chairman and CEO of Yahoo7 said: “Native advertising is a strategically

important format for our industry, particularly in our drive towards monetising mobile. Its ability to

provide a seamless consumer experience is exceptional, but its success will ultimately be defined by ensuring the advertisements are clearly delineated and defined for consumers.”

This media release was directly sourced from the Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA) website here.