I was innocently checking my Google Reader subscriptions (I have waaaaay too many, and should probably scale back), when I saw the latest post from ASAE & The Center’s Acronym blog: “RIP: Membership?,” the title read.

Basically, the post said (with surprise?) that associations’ membership model of old is either evolving or dying.

I thought that was kind of a no-brainer. I sort of thought the model had already died.

I guess if there are people out there still willing to pay dues, you can’t proclaim the model 100 percent dead.

But our world in 2009 is very different from our world in 1999. The ways people congregate, share information and even meet one another are totally different than they were 10 years ago.

I don’t disagree with the post’s author, Scott Briscoe, that the death of the model has serious implications for associations. I’m also not sure what the answer is, either. In my opinion, social media is just part of the solution. I think people have just gotten so used to the “free” culture — why should we pay for information when we can get it for free?

There’s been some discussion in #assnchat (every Tuesday at 2 p.m. ET) about how associations can better disseminate information to their members.

In order for the association to be as valuable as possible (i.e. to keep giving members a reason to pay dues), I think the entire body — staff, execs, members — has to be involved in gathering and sharing information. It can’t necessarily fall just to the staff to collect and curate beneficial information.

This topic and variations of it have been popular in #assnchat lately. I’ve shared some key takeaways below. (Please note these are not all my ideas. A transcript of the chat is available here.)

• Thanks to Web 2.0, members can be content creators and gatherers
• The association’s staff should provide the platform for sharing information and should also play a role in curating content
• Collect news feeds from different sources and send a daily e-mail update to members
• Implement a leaderboard, where members earn points for making contributions (see iremfirst.org). Should there be some sort of reward or prize for being a top contributor?
• Associations could create a Twitter hashtag for content or link submissions
• Use e-mail as a contribution system and submit the feed via RSS
• Use Twebevent to embed video and host a Twitter chat around it
• Use a specific Delicious tag to collect content
• Have a topic of the month and take guest blog submissions from members. If needed, host a webinar to teach members how to write a blog post
• Publish Web 2.0 content highlights and give recognition in the association’s magazine

One note: I don’t think it’s necessarily wise to rely solely on a tool such as Twitter to achieve your goals. Twitter hasn’t proven itself to be stable enough to be sustainable for conversation (heck, practically every other #assnchat has problems). I like Delicious, even if sites such as Digg are actually more popular.

Social media can help bring an association closer to its goals — which should not include preserving the old membership model. Rather, embrace a new, more collaborative environment. With a little innovation (OK, that’s quite the buzzword lately, but it is so applicable), an association can redefine the membership model — members will still be willing to pay dues, but they’ll also get a more fulfilling experience.