I was thumbing through the most recent issue of Associations Now and was incredulous at the article “What a speaker wants.” The publication interviewed some awesome association people, including Joan L. Eisenstodt, Leslie White and Jeffrey Cufaude.

I was blown away that many times, the speakers didn’t know exactly who the audience was going to be! Isn’t that the most important thing when planning a speech or session? Of course, your speaker’s area of expertise doesn’t change, but the people to whom they’re speaking do.

When you’re scheduling speakers for your next conference, meeting or event, here are some things to tell your speakers:

• Audience demographics and professional experience
• Audiovisual and room set-up information
• How flexible is the room set-up?
• Are there opportunities to speak to audience members before the even to learn about their expectations?
• Does the audience have experience with new and social technologies, if applicable?
• If any organizations have difficult names to pronounce, phonetic spellings can be helpful
• Is the audience used to holding Q&A’s at the end of the session, or during it?
• Will there be a Twitter feed for the conference?
• Will there be a Twitter backchannel used during the sessions?
• Give them information on the entire event. Background info is a must.

Some of this information is readily available, and there’s no reason speakers shouldn’t have access to it.

Check one of Jeff Hurt’s archived blog posts: How to help your conference speakers succeed. There are some great links as well as downloadable forms to guide both you and your speaker.

Image credit: Flickr

“I uh, I don’t like my job, and, uh, I don’t think I’m gonna go anymore.”

“Yeah, I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I’m working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I’d say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.”

You might recognize the above quotes from the 1999 movie Office Space. Hopefully these aren’t the real thoughts of people in your own office. But to many people, I’m sure the sentiment still rings true sometimes.

Not everyone is cut out for working in an office every day. But many jobs that follow a college diploma involve an office in some way or another. Why? Because that’s how it’s always been.

Tuesday’s #assnchat, led by Kiki L’Italien, focused on telecommuting for associations and the issues involved. I read the chat’s transcript (available here) Wednesday morning and found the topic especially relevant for 2009 (almost 2010!), especially with the widespread availability of technology that allows employees to work remotely.

Granted, offices are essential for interacting with your coworkers and conducting in-person meetings. But office space costs a lot of money, and allowing employees to telecommute can be an effective way to save cash. Small-staff associations could especially benefit from working remotely — since there are fewer staffers, it would require less coordination. For example, in Tuesday’s #assnchat, Debra Helwig said her entire association (a staff of six) works remotely.

The main issue employers generally have with telecommuting involves trust. Not every employee will thrive in a remote location. Many people need the structure of an office to stay productive — although it’s no secret many employees are not 100 percent productive all day, every day. Slacking can occur in the office almost as easily as it can occur at home!

You, as the employer, can’t control productivity no matter where your employees work. But here are some tips for those working with telecommuters:

1. Set clear expectations. If you, as the boss, are constantly worried about your telecommuting employees, set performance metrics. They can give you a clear sense of how much work is being accomplished and you’ll get some peace of mind, as well.
2. Don’t micromanage your telecommuters. If your remote employees thrive in an unstructured environment, let them work on their own time, as long as they meet deadlines.
3. Communication is crucial – even more so than having all employees work in an office. Use tools such as Skype (a free chat, phone and video service), instant messaging, GoToMeeting and Wikis to keep everyone updated.
4. Above all, trust your employees. Sure, maybe you won’t let your brand new hire telecommute right away. There has to be mutual trust established between employer and employee.

And for those employees who work remotely, I think Bruce Hammond said it best during Tuesday’s #assnchat:

“Four D’s of telecommuting that an employee must have: Discipline, Determination, Diligence, ability to deal with Distractions.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Explore telecommuting if you have the opportunity — even if it’s just one or two days a week. Don’t be like The Office’s Peter Gibbons: “I was sitting in my cubicle today, and I realized, ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it.”

(Image via Flickr.)

Happy happy Friday! I hope everyone has had a wonderful week and is looking forward to a fun and relaxing weekend. There were some great posts around the association blogosphere this weekend, so let’s get straight to my favorites!

1. Cindy Butts at AE on the Verge wrote about nine great ways to find association members on Twitter. The biggie here: whenever members sign up or renew, be sure to ask them for their Twitter user name! It’s as simple as asking for an e-mail address. And if they don’t have one, just asking the question will put Twitter on their radar.

2. Has your organization had success in increasing membership? If not (and even if you have!), be sure to check out this post at Erik’s Experts in Membership Marketing. Erik Schonher spoke with John Day, the director of membership development for IEEE, who said his association used a multi-channel approach that took niche markets into account. Definitely worth a read.

3. Cynthia D’Amour wants to know if you’ve read a book lately. She attended an event at a library in Ann Arbor, Mich. and many other attendees asked about audio books and revealed they hadn’t read a book in years. I’m quite a bookworm, so this post broke my heart a little. But Cynthia asks chapter leaders if they “need to shake up how they deliver their chapter experiences to members.” Maybe not everyone has an hour or so to read each day, but listening to a book is another option. Could your association do something similar?

4. Joe Rominiecki is one of the newest bloggers at ASAE and The Center’s Acronym blog, and I’m loving his content so far. If you haven’t seen his latest post comparing marathon running to planning (and participating in) a board meeting, be sure to check it out. I’m no certainly no marathoner (in the interest of full disclosure, I’ve just recently picked up running), but I can picture the scene: prepping for a marathon vs. prepping for a board meeting. Association execs and staffers have to conquer that meeting but continue to be enthusiastic when it’s over. A great metaphor.

5. Jeff Hurt wrote a very thorough post about conference and membership revenue models — more specifically, how they have to adapt for the next generation. Jeff writes, Association leaders, board members and conference organizers, are you producing bland sugary-sweet cola, or crafting and cultivating fine wines? I love this metaphor because I’ll take a great glass of wine over bubbly soda any day. It’s all about the quality of the content … the revenue will soon follow.

From everyone here at MemberClicks, have a wonderful weekend!

Imagine you’re an executive or staffer at the hypothetical organization XYZ. (Perhaps such an association does exist, but for the purpose of this example, I made it up.) Now, what if this tweet appeared on Twitter: “I had the worst experience with XYZ association. They are so unresponsive.” What would you do?

Maybe you don’t think too much of it — you’d reach out to the member and try and get to the root of his or her problem. But perhaps not enough of your members use Twitter for you, as a staffer at XYZ, to be too concerned.

Think again.

Wednesday, both Google and Bing announced they had reached agreements with Twitter to include tweets in their search results. Google Vice President of Search Products and User Experience Marissa Mayer blogged yesterday about Google’s move, saying:

…We are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months.

Microsoft (which owns Bing) made a similar announcement yesterday: Working with those clever birds over at Twitter, we now have access to the entire public Twitter feed and have a beta of Bing Twitter search for you to play with (in the US, for now).

Now, even if only a minority of your members use Twitter, anyone who searches for your organization will see that negative (hypothetical) tweet in their results — and any others like it.

The social media game is changing the way we search and obtain information. Just last week, when little Falcon Heene was supposedly flying in a man-made balloon somewhere over Colorado, millions of people were tweeting about the subject. Imagine if all those tweets showed up in Google and Bing, today’s foremost search engines. The possibilities are astounding.

Maybe your members aren’t actively using Twitter yet, but they may in the long-term. Or maybe some other social network will come around and de-throne Twitter (which is entirely possible). It’s likely that social network will also be integrated into our search engines. No longer are the Web sites of news organizations and top-ranked blogs the only items that appear in our search results. The opinions and thoughts of real people — your members — will appear there as well.

Don’t be afraid to give up control of your online message, but be sure you, as an association executive or staff member, do everything possible to keep your members as engaged and positive as possible.

Happy Friday to one and all! I feel like I say this every Friday, but it is so gross and drizzly here in Atlanta! I hope everyone else’s weather is brighter. Who’s psyched for the weekend?

And now, my top five favorite association management blog posts of the week!

1. At Association Executive Management, David M. Patt wrote about his two different perspectives when it comes to creating bylaw amendments — his role as an executive director of one association, and his role as member in another. There’s a great dichotomy between each role, and I think there are some great lessons to be found here. Association execs should think about their decisions from members’ points of view more often.

2. I love the comments on this Acronym post; December is “what if?” month! The comments are seriously fantastic! The sky is truly the limit here, and don’t let your fears keep you from imagining what could be in your organization. “What if associations got rid of membership fees?” “What if associations got rid of their boards?”

3. I don’t know about everyone else, but I’ve always felt a tremendous amount of pressure to be perfect — when I was a kid, I wouldn’t give an answer in class unless I was 100 percent sure I knew the correct answer, just because I didn’t want to be wrong! This is just one of the reasons I loved Lindy Dreyer’s “rant” about associations and social media not always having to be perfect.

4. Don’t miss this interview with Greg Hill from the the Kansas Dental Association. It’s chock full of info about how the association uses video and social media, which Greg manages. The organization produces an in-house news report called “KDA Video Minute” and hosts its own social network through the Ning platform. Kudos!

5. Here’s a different perspective about social media — Association Voices’ Michael LoBue is deleting his Twitter account, and here’s why. It’s distracting (sometimes true) and is the “train wreck of thought.” Some good points here; Twitter definitely isn’t for everyone, and people shouldn’t jump on the bandwagon just for the sake of it.

From the halls of MemberClicks (including our office pup Huck!), have a great weekend!