It’s time for the weekly grab-bag of association and social media blogs. Here’s what I found especially interesting on the interweb this week.

I Upgraded to HootSuite 2.0 Because It Works by Chris Abraham at socialmedia.biz. My Twitter stream was abuzz with this message Thursday as HootSuite, a popular Web-based Twitter service, released a new update. HootSuite lets users track multiple accounts and mentions, and the new release has a powerful monitoring feature. In the interest of full disclosure, I upgraded MemberClicks‘ HootSuite account, but haven’t gotten around to playing with it yet. It’s on my weekend to-do list!

Transitioning from Young to Young Professional by Aaron Wolowiec for ASAE’s Acronym. Aaron’s post really resonated with me — I think the dilemma he describes of young professionals trying to be taken seriously is a common one. Some of his tips are common ones (e. g. find a mentor, develop a network), but they’re suggestions we’d all do well to remember. “Being persistent” is the key.

10 Insights Gained From Spending 7,280 Hours on Social Networking Web sites by Heather Mansfield for Nonprofits 2.0. Heather is the nonprofit community manager for change.org, so she’s spent a lot of time on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. Her insights are extremely valuable and are backed up by her many years of experience.

Google rules by Jeff De Cagna for SmartBlog Insights. Jeff, the editor at large of SmartBlog Insights, asks associations to question whether their point of view lines up with Google’s core beliefs about how the company should run. Google’s best practices referenced: “Google doesn’t need to control everything,” “Google doesn’t need to be evil” and “Google doesn’t need to be evil.” Great stuff here.

ASAE’s mobile hub for the annual meeting and expo is freakin’ awesome. Direct your mobile phone’s browser to http://asae09.org/m for the mobile version. Basically it aggregates information about the conference from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other social networking sites. If you log in with your ASAE info, it connects to Twitter and will automatically add the #asae09 hashtag. Plus there’s a schedule of events and you can add stuff the “Contributions” tab to share with everyone.

Social Media Mavens: An Interview with Kodak’s Tom Hoehn by Mack Collier at The Viral Garden. Mack interviewed Kodak’s director of interactive marketing and convergence media about the company’s social media strategy and some of its best practices. There are some great thoughts here from a huge company’s “social media maven” – and many of them can be applied to smaller organizations.

Share your favorites blog posts or news articles in the comments, and have a great weekend!

“What are you doing” appears at the top of every Twitter user’s home page.

But let’s face it — we all can’t be doing something worth tweeting about all the time. My followers don’t need to know that I ate Greek yogurt and fruit for breakfast. They need to know what I find worthwhile

“What is interesting?” is the real question we should all be answering when posting things to Twitter.

“Interesting” has a whole different connotation — photos are interesting, links are interesting, jokes are interesting … the possibilities are endless.

The more interesting your tweets are, there more people will be willing to follow you. However, the number of followers you have isn’t the best way to judge success. In my opinion, it’s more important to get a decent amount of mentions and retweets — we all want people to be talking about us, if only to assure us we’re not tweeting to an empty cyberspace!

Rather than flooding your Twitter stream with “I’m sitting in traffic”-type messages, share useful links, fun photos, event reminders and cool facts about your organization. Your organization’s online presence will be more engaging and useful, and you’ll be building a great foundation for valuable relationships.

In case you missed one of the top Twitter stories of the week, Horizon Realty is suing a woman for posting a “libelous message” on Twitter. The woman, Amanda Bonnen, has since closed her account, but she only had about 20 followers. However, property management company Horizon Realty is suing her for $50,000 worth of damages.

The story became a trending topic on Twitter Tuesday. By suing Bonnen, Horizon Realty open up a huge can of worms and made her initial offensive tweet (“Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay”) known to millions of people.

The kicker to this story is that a representative from Horizon was quoted as saying, “We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of organization.”

What a PR nightmare!

As Sonia Simone wrote for Copy Blogger, there is such a thing as bad publicity. This situation is the perfect example.

Social media has completely transformed the way we as consumers receive our news. Rather than reading one or two (or three or four or five) newspapers each morning, checking cnn.com once or twice during the day and then catching up with the nightly news, we can be innundated with small updates all day long. We can choose our sources —aggregating stories from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, local news networks, Internet magazines and on and on and on.

When I was editing my college newspaper, I was one of the people who decided what went on page one. We as editors made that decision for our readers. Those days of editors making decisions for their readers are quickly ending. Now, as Simone wrote, every story is somebody’s page 1.

Doesn’t that phrase really make you think?

Horizon Realty would have been a lot better off had it simply contacted Bonnen privately and tried to resolve the issue quietly. Social media tools, specifically Twitter, have made it easier for consumers to share an opinion — good or bad — with the world. Companies and organizations can’t — or, shouldn’t — go around suing everyone who makes a complaint on Twitter, no matter how litigious our society has become.

Rather, with Twitter, companies and organizations have the ability to more closely monitor and interact with their consumers and members. The concept of customer service is evolving, and I think it’s great. Every company or association can interact with a vast number of people each day, and get their honest feedback in real-time.

Learn from Horizon realty. Your association or organization may never be under fire on the same scale as the property management company, but if a less-than-pleasant situation does arise online, don’t instantly jump on the defensive. Use the situation to your advantage and it’s likely everybody will win in the end.

Over at PR Squared, there’s a great post about why some public relations professionals haven’t been too quick to adopt social media practices. Many claim their clients aren’t ready, so there’s no need for them to have a presence on Twitter, Facebook and other social networking Web sites.

“Newsflash: it does not matter if your clients aren’t ready.  The mainstream media are ready,” wrote PR-Squared’s Todd Defren.

When’s the last time you watched a sporting event or the nightly news without a mention of Twitter? Countless athletes and reporters are immersed in the site and the so-called “mainstream media” have embraced it. (For the record, I hate the term “mainstream media” becuase I think it’s basically lost all meaning. But that’s another post for another day.)

Are your members on Twitter? Are they on Facebook? With each day that passes, there’s a greater likelihood that they’re active on one, the other or both. So why shouldn’t the organization itself have a presence? It’s easy to create a fan page on Facebook and allow members to interact there. A Facebook group is also an option — check out this great post for the pros and cons of each.

The Lupus Foundation of America, for example, was recently featured on Smart Blog for Social Media for its success generating donations via the Internet. Using Facebook, the LFA increased its donations by 790 percent. It requires constant engagement with users and members, but it’s absolutely possible to achieve results using social media.

Find out where your members predominantely are and create a profile for the organization. Personally, I prefer Twitter simply for its real-time search features and ability to quickly share information and links — things become viral very quickly thanks to “retweeting” and also due to how rapidly Twitter itself has grown.

Going back to the PR-Squared post, does it matter if your members already active online? It makes establishing a Web presence for the organization a little easier, but it could also make those late majority adopters (and laggards!) more amenable to using Facebook or Twitter.

There’s a wealth of information out there for association members, and it’s up to the organization leaders to share it all with their members in the most effective way possible — social media isn’t going away any time soon.

As I was catching up on things this morning (weekend Tweets, my Google Reader, etc…), I stumbled upon this post by Sarah Perez: Study Reveals High Levels of Twitter Use at Conferences. A group of European researchers studied behaviors of conference attendees and found that most of them (95.1 percent) already had Twitter accounts. Many of those with Twitter accounts used the messaging service to send updates about the conference.

“The Twitterers were using the medium to share the information they were learning at the present moment as opposed to posting links to information already available on the web,” wrote Perez. The researchers looked at the motives of the people tweeting and if tweeting could help enhance the learning experience at a conference.

With ASAE’s Annual Meeting and Expo coming up, this hit home for me. Of course, several Clickers will be attending the conference in Toronto (manning Booth 500 in the Technology Showcase), but I’m not one of them. I’ll be following the tweets of everyone using the hashtag #ASAE09 and compiling the information after it’s over (or, hopefully every day).

I’m hoping that a Clicker in Toronto will tweet for MemberClicks, because I want it to be obvious the company is present at ASAE. But another part of my job is communicating with and learning from other association professionals who will be at ASAE. During a recent #assnchat, we discussed creating a virtual experience for people who won’t be attending the conference. Attendees volunteered to take videos with their FlipCams, tweet during different sessions and (of course) write blog posts. Basically the only concern for “real-life” attendees was the fact that the conference is in Toronto (using cell phones to tweet could be costly!).

Not everyone is fortunate enough to be able to attend conferences, but social media (especially Twitter, because of its real-time search) is making it easier to accomodate virtual attendance. And I don’t think the number of attendees will decrease either, because a “real-life” experience is always better than a virtual one, no matter how great the videos, blog posts and tweets are.

Actually, based on all the reading I’ve done over the past few weeks on this topic, I think social media truly does enhance conferences and meetings because it’s easier for virtual attendees to interact with “real-life” attendees during presentations and sessions, rather than after the fact. Having people who aren’t actually at the conference can enhance the experience for everyone involved — everyone brings a different point of view to the table and the more people discussing, the better.

Of course, it’s up to all the in-person attendees to keep the virtual ones updated! Everyone benefits in the end, though.