“Marketing is anything that helps or hinders sales or use of products and services.”

These words are from Terri Langhans, whom I heard speak at an ASAE conference a while back. This is her definition of what “marketing” is, and I think it’s dead on.

Marketing is not a function limited to the marketing department, the membership department, or some marketing program. Marketing is everything we do as an organization that helps or hinders our members and customers. Where does this apply? Everywhere. Some simple examples:

• Does your online presence help or hinder sales or use of products? Is it easy, difficult, or impossible for your members and customers to join, renew, register for events, and buy products from you?
• When someone calls your organization, are they serviced quickly and appropriately by pleasant staff? Or are they passed off with “I don’t handle those questions, you’ll have to contact another department”?
• Does your database and your data help you to better serve your customers, and better communicate with them? Or does it get in the way of providing outstanding service?

Simply, marketing is everything you do. So you need to be sure you’ve got systems and processes in place to manage all of these “touchpoints.”

So how are you and your organization doing with your “marketing”?

This concept is attributed to Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail. I think there is no disputing this concept. Here are some examples in the database and data management world:

• Data is cheap and easy to collect, which means we may now easily have an abundance of data. That abundant data now requires wise management. Wise management is scarce.
• Producing and selling software that can be called “association management software” is now relatively easy to do. There is an abundance of AMS products on the market. (A google search on “association management software” [with quotes] will return over 64,000 results.) However, not every software product is the same. With all those choices, there is a scarcity of expertise that really knows the market and the players and can help associations make a wise decision about the best product for their organization.
• Email marketing is virtually free. There is an abundance of cheap and easy-to-use software products that will allow you to broadcast your message to anyone for whom you have an email address. But this abundance of “free delivery” means there is a scarcity of communication that actually gets through. This requires you to be more effective with targeting your communications to people who want it, and to provide that information in the format that they want to receive (e.g., email, blog, twitter, etc.).

There are many other examples of abundance creating new scarcity. The question is, how is your organization handling these new scarcities? Do you have the resources to deal with them, or can you locate resources that can help?

I’ve posted a new white paper on my website, entitled “The Three Primary Data Management Systems Within Associations and How They Are Related.”

When working with clients, as we discuss things like the association management system, the financial management system, and the website, I’m often asked how these systems are related and which system should manage which data. This white paper explains the primary functions of each system and how each is related to the other two.

Of course, if you’re already on my announcements list, you would have received notice of this new article right in your email box.

Not signed up yet? Sign up here.

Do you know who your “long-term” members are? By long-term, I mean any company or individual who has been a member of your association for more than seven years.

Can you easily pull a report of anyone who has been a member for more than seven years? And can you run a report of any “long-term” member whose membership is expired but still in the “membership grace period”?

Everyone knows that keeping a member is much, much cheaper than acquiring a new member. So keeping your long-term members is especially critical. You should be able to easily determine if any of your long-term members are in danger of dropping membership, and if they are, you should have a plan in place for high-touch personal contact (this is not the time for generic renewal emails) to determine what’s wrong and how the association can address the issue.

Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer at SocialFish have put together a fairly amazing social mediea program entitled Buzz2009 Social Media for Associations. You can get all the details here: www.buzz2009.org

Highlights include presentations from Guy Kawasaki and Andy Sernovitz.

So if you’re into this whole “Web 2.0″ thing, you might want to check this out.

Want to see how your association compares to others when it comes to conducting elections? The folks at Votenet are conducting an industry survey to capture a snapshot of average voter turnouts, voting costs and processes, trends in online voting and more.

You can take the survey here: http://www.votenet.com/emails/survey1.html

I frequently hear associations asking how they can get their members and customers to provide more demographic information to the association. For example, I’ll hear “How can we get our members to provide us their organization’s staff size?” or “We’d like to know the ethnic make up of our members. How can we ask for that information without offending people?”

My answer is the same for both questions: “Tell them why it’s worth it to them to provide that information to you.” If you can’t explain it quickly and easily, and in a way that will make the customer say “Oh, that makes sense, here’s the information,” then you’re not going to get very much cooperation.

Too frequently, the answer from associations is “This would be interesting to know.” But that’s not compelling enough to make people answer. You have to determine how providing this information will benefit the respondent, not the association.

This thought process is similar for surveys, by the way. As it happens, I hate taking surveys. I’m simply not going to give anyone 15 minutes of my time to answer questions that I’m pretty sure will not change my life one bit (other than to take 15 minutes of my time, which I can never get back).

On the other hand, I will often answer one-question surveys, because they’re very quick, and I can see from the question exactly what the questionner is trying to learn. I can decide very quickly if I think providing this information will provide value to me.

So when you go asking for more information, make sure you communicate to the respondent why it’s in their best interest to provide that information.

I first heard this at a workshop presented by Alan Weiss. The turtle syndrome: Companies aren’t moving forward or backward, they’re simply pulling in their arms and legs to protect themselves.

Does this sound like your association?

It is at times like these when associations (and all organizations) need to be very aggressive about their programs, their offerings, and their marketing. When the turnaround finally comes, will your organization be prepared to go full steam ahead, or will you have to first untuck your arms and legs from your shell?

The recession will end, some time. Will you be ready when it does?

Here is Forrester Research on user how to get more value from your CRM implementation:

“The biggest culprit in keeping organizations from fully taking advantage of their CRM implementations is user adoption — a longtime scourge of successful CRM projects.”

Here I am on user adoption:

“While there are many factors that affect long-term success of an AMS, one underlying factor is user adoption. User adoption reflects how well (or not) the staff takes to using the new database.”

Here is Forrester on training:

“‘User training — that typically is given short shrift,’ Band said.”

Here I am on training:

“Training may well be the most important staff-related expense. Let’s face it, when it’s time to trim the budget—any budget—training is one of the first items to go. This is ironic because training is key to the long-term success of any implementation—yet most associations give training very short shrift.” [Editor's note: I wrote this over a year ago.]

It’s nice to see Forrester finally catching up with my analyses.

I have accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin, and I write blog posts here at least twice a week. I don’t spend too much time on any of them, but this analysis from Alan Weiss on the potential for social media to eat away at your time is pretty disturbing. His analysis:

If people visit linkedin twice a day for 15 minutes each time, that’s 2.5 hours in a five-day week. (I’m discounting weekends, though I shouldn’t, because social media wandering is clearly a full-time avocation, but I want to be conservative here.)

If they visit Facebook four times a day for 10 minutes each, that’s roughly 3.3 hours.

If they Twitter six times a day for five minutes each time, that 2.5 hours. (Or 12 times at 2.5 minutes each—you get the idea.)

If they post on their blogs three times a week (rather important to keep a blog active and interesting), and the creation and posting of the item takes 30 minutes (and I think I’m really low-balling this one), that’s 2.5 hours.

And now I’m going to add just two hours to the week, that accommodate reading others’ blogs, replying to commentary, following up social media stuff off-line, updating profiles, uploading photos, and so on.

Drum roll, please: We now have a five-day week on a conventional 40-hour basis with about 13 hours engaged in what is somewhat inappropriately termed “social media.” I understand that those hours may well extend into evening or early morning time. On the basis of a 40-hour week, that’s 33% devoted to this stuff; but even on the basis of a 12-hour day, the percentage is 22%.

So how about you? How much of your time is being eaten by social media?