I think, in the fourth month of 2011, it’s safe to say social media isn’t going anywhere – in fact, it’s only getting more prevalent. Social media is great for small staff associations because it’s cost-effective and doesn’t have to take up too much time. So how can you use (cost-effective and/or free!) social media tools to drastically improve your conference?

1. Establish an event website (separate from your association’s website) and link to it from your association’s Twitter feed, Facebook and official website. Encourage attendees to use a specific Twitter hasthag and let the organization know if they’ll be blogging about it. Make it easy for people to share information about the event online.

2. Use location-based services (such as Foursquare, Facebook Places, Gowalla and Loopt) to offer rewards and bonuses to attendees. These tools easily integrate with the big two (that would be Facebook and Twitter) and little rewards (such as a gift card) can go a long way.

3. Twitter allows events to become bigger than they are by publicizing content online as it happens. (The real-time aspect is key, in my opinion). Encourage attendees and staff members to use the official event hashtag. If possible, set up a huge monitor and display tweets with the hashtag so everyone can follow along with the online conversation in real time.

4. Gauge interest in a livestream. Can you broadcast a few sessions on UStream for non-attendees? People watching a livecast can ask questions via Facebook and Twitter and truly be a part o the conversation.

5. Be sure to post handouts and key learnings on your official event website. Keep the event going even after it ends. Continue using the hashtag for a few weeks and promote attendees’ post-event blog posts.

Take a look at some of these awesome events that will take place this summer! Some are geared specifically toward small staff association professionals, but I think all of them are worth considering, no matter how small your organization. Social media isn’t the only hot topic this summer — these events and sessions are fantastic resources for any association professionals who aspire to be lifelong learners.

Young Professional Lunchtime Learning: Got Ethics?, Thursday, June 3: A free!, virtual program geared toward young professionals and asking tough ethical questions and discuss how to come to a clear decision when given an ethically gray situation. ASAE’s Young Professionals and Ethics committees will come together to decide upon the best actions to take when confronted with an ethics dilemma.

Association New Media Summit, Tuesday, June 8: In just a few weeks, the folks at Peach New Media will host a daylong event and you can attend in-person in Arlington, Va. or watch the live webcast. Take a look at some of the questions that will be addressed!

- What’s hot now in online learning and what are the upcoming trends?
- What are the hurdles and resolutions for associations getting into social media?
- How does new media change our role from “educator” to “curator”?
- What revenue generating opportunities are available via online learning programs?

Buzz 2010: Social Media for Associations, June 16 / July 20 / August 18: Brought to us by the lovely SocialFish and Smartbrief, this year’s event will be a three-part breakfast series featuring amazing speakers Charlene Li, Mark Storey, Wendy Harman, Alexandra Levit and Olivier Blanchard. The series is geared toward association professionals who steer their organization’s social media strategy and policies. Last year’s event was a great success, so try and attend one (or all three) of the 2010 events!

Small Staff Idea Swap – Principles of Good Governance, Wednesday, June 30: A free, in-person event in Washington, D.C. geared toward small staff association professionals! Advancing good governance is crucial for all associations, but can be especially challenging for smaller organizations. Take a look at these great talking points:

- Determining the governance needs of the association, i.e. What does the association and its staff need from the governing body.
- Addressing the “principles of good governance” – what are they and where are the models.
- Getting your Board’s attention and engaging them in improving governance.
- What is the best process and sequence of steps in getting to effective governance policies, process and structure.
- How does the maturation stage and size of the association affect the role and function of governance?

Creating the 24/7 Small Staff Association: An Online Conference, Tuesday, July 13: In our world of constant communication, it can be difficult for organizations (especially those with fewer staff members) to actively engage and connect with members. This three-day audio/web event will cover free and low-cost online tools, how to write copy for the Web, mobile technology essentials and more – all geared toward small staff associations. This one isn’t free, but after looking at the awesome full schedule here (PDF), I definitely think it’s worth attending.

This definitely isn’t a complete list of events, just a few noteworthy ones. If you know of any others, especially for small staff association professionals, feel free to share them with us!

Are we all published authors now?

Wednesday, the Library of Congress announced (fittingly, on Twitter) it will acquire all public posts on Twitter. Yep – all of them, since Twitter’s inception in 2006. The total number of tweets is somewhere in the billions, and Twitter says 50 million tweets are posted each day alone.

Since 2000, the Library of Congress has been collecting information and data from the Web. According to its Web site, it currently has more than 167 terabytes of information from the Internet stored – much of it political, such as legal blogs and candidates’ Web sites.

What does this mean for associations, and for all of us who use Twitter for personal purposes?

Well, unless your tweets are protected, they’ll be preserved for all time in the Library of Congress, for future scholars to study and learn from.

Now, I don’t really think future scholars are going to be interested in some of the trite things I share on my own Twitter account, but taken as a whole, our collective tweets are probably fascinating. Twitter lets normal people give a commentary on local, national and international events. It’s a barometer for what we’re all talking about and how we feel about the news. Remember the situation in Iran last summer? Citizens used Twitter to get information out about what was going with the election.

Although Twitter’s real-time search is fantastic and useful, its archives don’t go back further than two weeks or so, which can make searching for old tweets complicated.

Consider all of the documents your association keeps for future reference. All the tweets with your event’s hashtag? You’ll have access to them for more than a few months. I think that’s pretty worthwhile. You’ll be able to see what attendees liked, what they didn’t and get quotes from people for future marketing materials.

Would your organization ever take advantage of this information? What do you think about tweets being preserved in the Library of Congress? Will this affect what you post publicly on Twitter?

Rumors had been swirling among tech geeks for months (nay, years!) and Wednesday, their suspicions were confirmed with the announcement of Apple’s iPad, a hybrid iPod Touch/laptop. Although it doesn’t have the iPhone’s ability to make phone calls, it  has a ton of other capabilities, and could rival Amazon’s Kindle with its iBooks application and through contracts with publishers.

There have been mixed reactions about the iPad. Some are enthralled; some don’t quite understand the purpose. “It’s a bigger iPhone that can’t make calls,” I’ve heard.

However, keep in mind this is just the first version of the iPad, and if the product takes off, there will surely be many more versions to come. Apple is setting the stage for a very different type of computing experience.

I think the iPad could truly have some amazing implications for small-staff associations down the road (and so does our Director of Product Experience Kevin Patrick!).

I’ve written before about cloud computing, and this product could take that to a whole new level – especially because it syncs perfectly with Macs, PCs, iPhones, and iPod Touches through Apple’s MobileMe Storage. As technology moves to Web-only, devices such as the iPad will become even more mainstream because, as Jobs said, you’re literally “holding the Internet in your hands.”

The iPad and its subsequent versions could be extremely beneficial for small-staff associations. The amount of hardware needed at events would drastically diminish. For smaller meetings, all check-ins could be done instantly just by passing the device around the room.

I’d be willing to bet than many association management software companies are in the midst of developing iPhone and other smartphone apps for their products, especially amidst the buzz about mobile technology for associations in 2010.

But the iPad will also have access to Apple’s App Store, and will be able to run about 140,000 of them right away. Apps can also be synced with the iPhone or iPod touch, which could greatly streamline communication among staffers.

Although the iPad clearly won’t replace laptops (at least for awhile), the possibilities are still numerous. People who travel constantly and prefer not to carry their laptops could greatly benefit from owning an iPad, and I think the iPad dock, which includes a keyboard, is pretty spiffy.

In all honesty, I think the real “magic” (to quote Steve Jobs) of the iPad will come later, especially once developers begin creating apps for it. Additionally, I’d love to see Apple add a camera and video-chat capabilities (which would be amazing for small associations working remotely), as well as multitasking.

The release of the iPad is just the beginning. Right now, I think the device would be most beneficial at events – no matter how big or small. Exhibitors could easily run demos with iPads. It would make blogging-on-the-go a snap. Multimedia could be used in presentations more easily, and attendees could use iPads for receiving event updates and news.

Samuel J. Smith wrote an excellent post about the iPad for events and I agree with many of his points. Be sure to check it out – I especially love his idea for creating e-versions of meeting newsletters and exhibitor guides. Multimedia could be included in those, as well.

How would your association use an iPad? What are your initial thoughts about the device?

(All iPad images via Engadget.)

This is the final installment in a 12-part series called “Beyond The Big Three,” which highlights social networking sites other than Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. There are tons of other social media outposts on the Web, and they’re great places for associations to curate content. The previous 11 installments can be found here. Thanks for reading!

I had to search through the archives to make sure I hadn’t already written about FriendFeed — I could have sworn I had! If you’re not familiar with FriendFeed, it’s a really cool tool that lets you post status updates, photos and links (and more!) across multiple social networks, including Facebook and Twitter.

What makes FriendFeed different, you might ask. It combines feeds from other outposts — such as Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Twitter — to create one complete stream in one place. And it lets you access that stream in multiple ways.

If you already have a Facebook, Twitter or Google account, you don’t even need to create a separate account for FriendFeed. You can use any of your login information for the previous sites, which is pretty convenient!

When you add fellow FriendFeed users as friends, you receive a customized stream that includes their Twitter updates, Facebook updates, videos and links. You can view your stream directly on FriendFeed’s site, through Facebook, via e-mail or via RSS (in a reader such as Google Reader).

Similar to Facebook, there is a “Like” button for your friends’ items, as well as the option to comment.

There are a few different ways to post something on FriendFeed. You can simply update from FriendFeed.com, and direct your update to whichever outposts you’d like. You can also post via e-mail (which works well for attached photos). And FriendFeed has its own version of Twitter’s “re-tweet,” as well. Each entry has a “Share” link beneath it, and clicking that will bring up a box with a few options for sharing it.

So how can associations use FriendFeed?

The site supports “Groups,” which multiple people can subscribe to and receive information from. For example, if your association began a FriendFeed account for the organization and a corresponding group, members could join the group and receive updates from one another and the association simultaneously. Everyone in the group can share things with one another, and leave comments that all members can see. Groups can be public or private.

FriendFeed could be a great way for members to interact while still experiencing the “stream-style” of information, which is becoming increasingly popular. It even reminds me a little bit of the mobile hub ASAE and The Center created for the Annual Meeting back in August — combining everyone’s comments about #asae09 in one place.

But meetings and events aren’t the only times small-staff associations could potentially use FriendFeed. The site is an ideal way for members to interact and share information about the industry. Imagine a “mini-Twitter,” in which only members’ and the organization’s updates appear and everyone can interact within it. Pretty cool.

Rather than just using FriendFeed during your events, though, members can share information all the time — FriendFeed allows them a central location to collect all status updates and one condensed feed from which to view them.

Check it out and see what you think. How could your organization use FriendFeed?