Keeping Up With The Future: Web Developments

In the early 1990s the Web was primarily being used as a publishing medium.

With the next major web development, Web 2.0, it has become a place for people to collaborate in the creation of content. Sites like Amazon, Wikipedia and TripAdvisor, encourage us to send in our feedback and comments.

We are in the age of “co-creation”. The web is the place where we can easily add value to information and help turn it into knowledge through our personal insights, judgements and ratings.

This development offers associations, who sit at the heart of professional communities, some great opportunities to add value, offer new member benefits, build community, improve customer service and generate new income streams.

Here are examples of what you can do with your web site:

1. Add functionality that allows members to co-create and add their comments and resource rankings to help signpost other members to what is useful. Help members to add value for other members.    

2. Help members see resources that others have developed or sell, swap or give away things that they no longer want. Use your web site to set up a sector eBay, community recycling scheme or place they can share material that they have developed.

3. Help connect members with other members. Just look at how Friends Reunited, mySpace and blogging have taken off!  It will also help increase your appeal to younger members.

4. Help connect members to develop their businesses. Develop a database of organisations looking for partners to collaborate or build strategic alliances. One association already doing this, includes this as a benefit of membership.

5. Help members engage with the association by providing more time limited virtual volunteering opportunities. Did you know that there are more people willing to volunteer for this type of involvement than there are opportunities available? This could be the answer for many associations that are struggling to fill posts. For a quick review of possible virtual volunteering assignments for members visit www.suefroggatt.com/virtualassignments.html. 

6. Use ‘webinars’ (seminars over the web) to broadcast your events to a wider audience. Top marks go to The Institute of Engineering and Technology who now broadcast their events around the world via the web. Take a look at www.iet.tv.

7. Invest in using the web to gather member opinions. Firstly, in your advocacy and lobbying role this will help to position you as knowing what the community feels is an issue. Secondly, it allows you to potentially create new revenue streams by tapping into the ‘wisdom of crowds’ for people interested in researching the views of your members. Thirdly, it will facilitate your sector benchmarking work.   

8. Provide members with a personalised service and let them be in control of what they receive from you by allowing them to maintain their details and requirements on-line. George Land, the Chairman, APT Solutions commented recently, “Today members expect to be able to administer their own information online. The emerging trend is for the whole web experience to be driven by the profile information stored in the membership database so you can deliver the member, a personalised online experience, signposting them towards what is of interest to them.” The time has come to stop sending members what they are not interested in and save money and trees at the same time!

9. A final extra thought is to make web monitoring an integral part of your member retention research. Measure web site consumption – how much of your web site material members browse – as one of your retention predictor metrics. If they are not using it, be proactive and use the information as a ‘velvet hammer’ i.e. you have paid for this, why are you not using it?

So what will Web 3.0 focus on? The prediction is that as we surf the web, we indicate our interests. This database of intentions will generate an economy driven by ‘clickstreams’. Organisations that can leverage this information in a respectful way, will become our trusted third parties and will be given our authority to guide us to what else – people and things - may interest us. It could provide associations that know their members interests, desires, future needs and also respect their privacy, with a great opportunity to act in this capacity.

Also expect the web to feed our demand for ‘information-on-the-go’. Mobile phones fitted with bar code readers, will be used to scan and send information to the web search engines. They will report back with more information, for example, who is the cheapest supplier and an option to place an order and pay. The experts also predict more integration of the web with other communication channels, like the TV, to make searching easier and searching will become more voice activated. This will widen participation for those that have been excluded so far because they are not PC literate. 

This is a huge area and you are ideally placed to help forward thinking members to explore the implications of these developments on their lives and business.

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