NEW RULES IN THE CLUB
On the home page of Mad.co.uk, the CM site coordinator Justin Kirby reports on how traditional trade associations are failing to satisfy their key stakeholders - and how social media models and tools can help.
Connected marketing is all about generating advocacy by helping businesses to give stakeholders experiences that exceed their expectations. The latter means inviting stakeholders, particularly customers, to be more involved in the life of your business - at every touchpoint.
However, it is rarely feasible resource-wise to offer a more participatory experience to all your stakeholders. It simply costs too much to be in dialogue with everyone about your call centre, products and services, sales approach, marketing collateral and even your accounting system and other infrequently-considered touchpoints that nevertheless contribute to a person’s decision to do business with you.
Instead, organisations are concentrating on identifying, connecting and collaborating with a powerful subset of their stakeholders, the opinion leaders who influence other people’s decisions.
The trouble with marketing trade associations - the industry ‘clubs’ that should be torchbearers of the latest best practice in their sector - is that they are failing miserably to meet, let alone exceed, the expectations of their key stakeholders.
Members pay fees for which they expect to be part of a body that leads the thinking in its field, raises a positive profile of the industry, debates and develops new marketing approaches, and of course provides individual members with tangible benefits, including credibility and new business contacts. The bottom line for members is “what do I get out of it?”. And currently the answer from traditional marketing associations is “not enough”. For example, one trade association-run marketing conference I attended this year promised its speakers exposure to a significant number of potential new clients. The speakers outnumbered the delegates fourfold…
Industry events are key touchpoints at which marketing practitioners and clients are supposed to connect for mutual benefit to discuss the latest developments in their field. Yet organisers of independent marketing events also have issues with the lack of expertise and relevance within traditional marketing associations. As Christophe Asselin, Group Communications and Marketing, ad:tech Europe, states: “The emerging areas of the digital marketing industry aren’t covered by the traditional trade associations.”
It would appear that marketing trade associations are either out of touch with what their key stakeholders expect or ill-equipped to deliver it. So what can be done to turn the tables?
One answer lies in this story:
The Viral + Buzz Marketing Association (VBMA) was founded in 2003 to address the lack of informed insight into, and positive recognition of, the then-emerging field of viral, buzz and word-of-mouth marketing. The Association has fulfilled its original aims during the past four years, particularly in helping consumer-driven models and techniques establish a firm, credible footing within the wider marketing community.
However, an unforeseen outcome of this success is that the trends and techniques in what is now called the connected marketing field impact best-practice management across all business functions, not only marketing. Running an association ‘top-down’ from a central control point with various levels of member participation, particularly without charging fees - which the VBMA has always been keen to maintain - was proving inefficient, and the Association wanted to avoid heading the way of other traditional marketing associations: becoming irrelevant through failing to meet expectations.
So the VBMA decided to take a leaf out of its own book and transform itself into the vbmaNETWORK, a private business group with a radical take on the way trade associations should be run in the social media age.
The VBMA founders used off-the-shelf social media tools, which could be deployed quickly and cost-effectively, to poll VBMA members for their input into the restructuring of the Association and then to streamline the new operations, from individual networking to shared regional administration, group publicity and more.
This social media approach and its related online tools have enabled the VBMA to redevelop its objectives and meet new membership demands, and will enable it to evolve quickly at any time to meet new challenges and take advantage of new opportunities.
Unlike traditional, fee-demanding trade associations which inevitably become self-serving, special-interest groups of professionals such as the vbmaNETWORK can develop from the bottom up very quickly in this way, and provide added value to participants without having to charge membership fees. People get out what they put in.
This doesn’t make the vbmaNETWORK a Facebook-style group of students and consumers. It’s still very much for people who want to connect for professional reasons. And it appears to be working - it already boasts over 400 participants from more than 20 countries, and has already played a key role in supporting business and marketing events around the world, including the recent ad:tech London.
Christophe Asselin agrees that the newly structured Association is reaching the parts that others fail to reach: “The vbmaNETWORK is instrumental not only in helping to promote the ad:tech event to a specialised and very relevant audience, but also in providing a pool of experienced client and agency speakers.”
If other trade associations - and companies in the wider business arena - wake up, the vbmaNETWORK will be just one small example of how today’s ‘conversation economy’ and its social media tools are being used to transform business approaches and operations, so that organisations can meet new expectations from their stakeholders.
