When your association surprises you - in a good way - they've remixed their membership. When your association does something worth modeling in your own organizations - they've remixed their membership. When those two things happened to me, I just had to pick up the phone and find out more. Check out my SmartBlog Insights posting for the rest of the story on how an association shifted how they looked at the membership cycle and rethought engagement.  Love to hear your feedback!

I had the opportunity to speak with three different groups of volunteer leaders this week and in each case we talked about the challenge of increasing member engagement. What struck me was that the focus of engagement is on the “big ticket items” of event attendance or volunteer leadership (read serve on committee or board). It will be difficult if not impossible for us to increase engagement if we keep this focus so narrow.  And there is a lot at stake.

It surely seems odd that a public relations professional chapter wouldn’t be an early adopter of the new media. But we weren’t. Our members were – and are – curious though. It’s that curiosity that gave us the platform for entering into social media sphere.

• We needed a new newsletter editor. The call was answered by an innovative, exciting member … who also happened to be a blogger. Our cumbersome e-letter morphed into a blog.
• A Facebook fan started up an ISES DC group.
• She was on Twitter but didn’t see the chapter so offered to be the ISES DC Twitter voice.
• Driven to organize the planning and execution of the chapter’s major expo, the chair opened a Google Group, loaded up the documents and ran the first meeting using those shared items.

KiKi L’Italien, Delcor Technologies and I had a great conversation at ASAE Social Media Workshop. KiKi shared her awesome story about the Optical Society of America student chapters and I shared the ISES DC blog and story. Here’s a quick recap of our key points and you can check out our shared bookmark smw09 for more resources.

About one year ago, the Maryland Recycling Network gingerly began its foray in social media. We followed the best advice we found and marched confidently forward … right into failure.

Actually the failure was on the engagement front. The initiative succeeded in that it provided a valuable lesson. From the lesson is emerging a second – and we trust a more successful – launch. As we move forward here’s the lesson we learned from part 1.

Public Relations Society of America Maryland Chapter has tried it all – FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter, blogging. Success happened when they focused these on a specific event.

International Special Events Society DC Chapter found success when it followed its members – rather than leading.

Maryland Recycling Network is on Plan B. Plan A, a wiki, fizzled. That was probably good news because it led to a different path that wasn’t even in our minds.

We’re all asking for the secret to building engagement in our social media initiatives.  The path to success is littered (quite literally if you consider the many “ghost communities”) with failures.  I see the failures as being the secret to success. Our missteps have actually driven Mariner and our association management clients to learn lessons about members, grow closer to members in that process, discover new technologies, and improve with each attempt.

Associations Now is offering an opportunity and a case study with its latest crowdsourcing option. By logging in you can submit content ideas, vote on others, add comments and throw your name in as a contributor. At least check it out as a sample of how you can engage members even if you don't allow yourself to be drawn in and engage.

TwitterFriends gives you your 'conversation and link quotient' which says TwiTip helps measure how relational you are on Twitter (read more and see awesome graphs here). In a nutshell, TwitterFriends is a statistics package that tracks you and your friends.

Imagine an association version that gives members an engagement quotient. We could then see how membersare  connecting with others, how often they are connecting and in what ways. We could then begin to see what services and programs they are really using and recommending.

Possible?