Membership

Wednesday Buzz: Recruiting Passionate Members As Marketers

Leverage the importance of word of mouth by encouraging your members to volunteer their voices. Also: Dreamforce is big this year. Really big.

Coordinated member marketing may be big and flashy, but the word-of-mouth variety still has its role.

And if you can convince members to do this job for you, it can be a massive leg up. Tony Rossell, senior vice president of Marketing General, highlights the value of treating your most fervent supporters as volunteers who can help market your association’s membership in a more formalized way.

“Some members may be more than happy to focus on engagement—helping new members get involved in the association,” Rossell writes on the Membership Marketing Blog. “Other members might be great at following up with their friends and colleagues to get them to renew.”

Of course, the hard part of this might be answering why they should be involved in this way, but Rossell’s piece smartly highlights this point as well—by suggesting it’s important to focus on the value that the association has brought to the member, or, as he puts it, help them “get in touch with their own story of how membership has influenced their life and success.”

Read Rossell’s post for more insights.

Event to Keep an Eye On

The Salesforce corporate conference Dreamforce, starting Wednesday, isn’t an association conference—it’s bigger.

The massive software-as-a-service (SaaS) firm has 171,000 attendees coming to this year’s event, giving San Francisco a significant temporary population bump this week. Expect the hashtag to be pretty busy this week. If you want to follow along, you can watch it live on the Salesforce website.

The most prolific tweeter at last year’s Dreamforce, social media consultant Alex Plaxen, was profiled in Associations Now earlier this year. Check out the interview over this way.

Other Links of Note

Interesting discount strategy: The National Tactical Officers Association is now offering a $25 “digital” membership. How did the group cut the price of an individual membership by $15? Easy: These members pay less in exchange for reading the member magazine online.

Google introduced a ton of new products yesterday, including a direct competitor to the iPhone, a virtual reality platform, and a competitor to Amazon’s Echo speaker. Lifehacker has a few of the highlights.

Yahoo’s been taking some pretty big bumps lately. But as Inc. contributor Erik Sherman explains, some of the public-relations errors are unforced—and associations can learn from them.

(iStock/Thinkstock)

Ernie Smith

By Ernie Smith

Ernie Smith is a former senior editor for Associations Now. MORE

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