Finding Great Idea #200 at ASAE11

This piece is cross posted on ASAE’s Acronym Blog.

When I came in search of Great Idea #200 for “Building Meeting Attendance and Revenue” at #ASAE11, I walked into the St. Louis Convention Center not realizing that over these few days I would witness our massive industry accept the big shift. Oh, how it pains this Gen X’er to say it. But here I go…

Associations no longer control knowledge and content.  We no longer control monetizing that knowledge. And, we no longer control how people convene!

As Sheri Jacobs (@Chicagogirl27) tweeted the other day, association members are telling us: “we want what we want when we want it in the format we want it. easy enough”

Well, not so easy. I watched time and again what felt like senior association managers giving confessionals about how they are worried they don’t have the resources to manage a shift to our new world of knowledge sharing  — and frankly even worried about their relevance now that they don’t control the information. Good news for all of us is that being association professionals has prepared us.

Dave Lutz and Jeff Hurt of Velvet Chainsaw (@VelChain) summed it up for me: We are now the curators of knowledge and information and the hub of where people come to talk about it.

We don’t post tweets with the hash tag #associations, we post tweets with the hash tag #ASAE.  What could be more valuable, and validating, at this moment in time?  If your association is not a leader on Twitter, please make this your first priority when you get home. Your current and potential members are already talking about the cutting edge of knowledge without you in this space.

Great Idea #200 is not just an idea, it is the framework in which the next 199 ideas will bubble up from the ASAE community for each of the 199 Ideas series. I for one, look forward to contributing!