AAUW was invited to attend the Digital Now conference at Disney World, Florida. Most attendees are association executives, and we were asked to do a demonstration of an innovative idea we have for creating a “community orientation” center on our website (more on that later as the idea blossoms). Linda Hallman, our executive director, couldn’t attend and asked me to go in her stead. Let me think — Disney World and learning about ways to better engage our members with social media from top experts?? Gosh, let me think for half a sec — sure!
The first day is complete, and I have 17 pages of notes full of exciting techniques to share with our own annual convention attendees in St. Louis in June. Can I wait until June? Well, I was also asked to tweet about the event, which I have done, much to the shock of my fingers typing madly on a small Smartphone. If you click that Twitter link, it will take you to the AAUW Twitter page where you can read my numerous posts (yes, I went “Twittermad” for a bit — there was just so much information to share).
Some of the key takeaways I have from this first day (Thursday):
- Associations need to enable members to engage with other members online.
- Any group that can reach people with different views on the same subject is sitting on a gold mine — value, not money.
- Every URL is a latent community.
- Types of social media usage:
- Sharing — the use of Flicker, for example, for sharing photos
- Collaboration — People have to synchronize what they are doing to be a community. Wikipedia is an example here.
- Collective action — This means a group of people who stand or fall around their committed action. Sound familiar? AAUW!!
- A little history of large-scale media revolutions:
- Printing press –> phone –> movies –> radio/TV
- Table –> Internet! It provides native support for group conversation and also connects all other media. Except it’s not six people around a table but 60, 600, 60,000, 6 million, etc.
- From Clay Shirkey: “The most important collective use of the Internet is not the computers but the minds of users.”
- Obama’s use of web pre-election: He channeled people’s interest into real-world action on a scale not seen before.
- Over and over, I heard of the need for creativity, the call for action, and of the courage it takes to venture into the unknown on behalf of our members. One speaker quoted Mark Twain: “In 20 years we’ll regret more what we did not do than what we did do.”
I, of course, made sure to sit at different tables during sessions and breaks. I talked of women’s issues, of the fact we make, still, only 78 cents to the dollar a man makes, of Lilly Ledbetter, of the need to urge for the passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act. What still amazes me every time I talk to a group of people (men and women) who don’t have AAUW in their lives to keep them informed is that almost everyone doesn’t know about these facts or action opportunities, although every woman in the group, no matter her age, could tell a story of discrimination. So keep spreading the word beyond our community, and I’ll do the same. More about the conference tomorrow on AAUW’s Twitter page — check in for interesting tidbits about leading-edge thoughts.
