Happy Thursday, Splash blog readers! Is it just us, or has this week gone by extraordinarily quickly?

Today, we’ve got some awesome slideshows and presentations to share. We love getting insights from others’ presentations and think the three below have some great resources.

How integrated is your social media strategy with the rest of your marketing strategy?

For a few years now, social has been the “big thing,” and marketers every where have been pushing for brands and organizations to embrace it. Social media jobs are hot, and every type of agency – marketing, public relations, advertising – wants a piece of brands’ or organizations’ social budgets.

However.

A study recently released from Forrester reveals that only 49% of marketers say social is fully integrated into their communication strategies.

This is despite the fact that 59% of of online consumers are active on social media sites weekly and one-third have become a fan of a brand on Facebook or Twitter.

Although this study was focused on brands rather than organizations and nonprofits, I can’t help but wonder how those nonprofits stack up against brands. Do you think associations have been quicker or slower to embrace social?

I think at this point, everyone agrees that social plays an important role in marketing and communications. But the real trick is successfully integrating it into a holistic, omni-channel strategy.

At larger associations, create a “‘social media taskforce” with representation from every department. This way, every department will have a stakeholder in the success of social, and it will be inherently tied to marketing efforts. Small staff associations, on the other hand, may have an easier time integrating social, since they might only have one or two people dedicated to all marketing efforts.

TALK TO US: How has your association integrated social media into its over-arching strategies?

Are you a community manager at a small staff association looking to increase your knowledge of word-of-mouth and social marketing? This Community Manager Online Training Course might be for you!

Who will benefit from the course?

• WOMM-COM Module 1 graduates looking to extend their knowledge and/or begin to explore what it means to take the next step in their career.
• Current community managers looking to round out their knowledge and insure their skills are up to date.
• Executives and managers looking to better understand the community manager role and how to best leverage it in their organizations.

Community Managers often serve as the face of the organization, and can include both senior and more junior-level duties, including moderation. Depending on the size of your association’s community, moderation, listening and measurement might fall under the “community manager” role too.

Sponsored by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, The Community Roundtable and ComBlu, this course is sure to help association community managers. Register here!

Props to KiKi L’Italien for the heads up on this.

Do you use Instagram? The popular photo-sharing app for iOS and Android was just bought by Facebook a few weeks ago, and was (actually, still is) one of the fastest-growing applications out there.

What makes Instagram so attractive? The ease of sharing one photo across multiple social networks simultaneously, plus the fun filters you can apply to photos. Although some serious photographers lament the filters because photos lose authenticity, we think Instagram can be useful if filters are used with care.

One big thing to keep in mind with Instagram is its popularity among college students, as the infographic below details. If your small staff association shares photos from events or meetings, consider checking out Instagram. This useful app could help you recruit younger members.

Source

Happy Friday from MemberClicks!

1. Aaron Wolowiec shares insights and takeaways from ASAE’s Invitational Forum on Leadership and Management. The big ones? Strive to be more balance and be more deliberate about collaboration. Definitely take a look at this thought-provoking post, and share whether or not you identify with that type of collaboration.

2. Jeffrey Cufaude shares what is probably a universal truth about people: they don’t want to feel broken or feel like they are being fixed. Change agents too easily forget that you can’t expect people to respect your ideas if those same people feel you don’t respect them—not necessarily their ideas even—but them as capable, caring human beings.

3. There are things you can do to support your community manager, Maddie Grant writes. Understand that social media is a lot of admin work and – often manual – data collection. It’s unrealistic to expect one person to be able to handle all of the social communication for your association.

4. Shelly Alcorn wrote a thoughtful post about ignorance this week. For us, the most meaningful idea was, Considering our own ignorance to be a gift may not be a message we get very often.  But maybe if we embrace the idea we might actually radically change the trajectories of our associations…and maybe our lives.

5. Mark Athitakis shared insights from ASAE’s International Conference and asks, when you’re faced with a new experience, how do you respond? There are typically three options: ignore, destroy, engage. What you choose might differ depending on the situation, but always take time to assess.