Fareed Zakaria. Bio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fareed_Zakaria

Challenges we face as county, society. One way to think of looking problems. Through eyes of our new president. Obama. Dilemma. How many are new and unexpected. Young senator who was trying to decide to run for the presidency. Walking on beach Hawaii. Wife was against it. At that point. Dow Jones was 14000. Global boom. Only question was How do we get out of Iraq? It will take sophistication and skill. Safely say, only item 27 on to do list for Obama. North Korea, pirates, etc.

Only two and half years? What happened? From there to here? Not see this world? Easy to get obsessed of the moment. Lose sight of what's happening, of the problems coming toward us. Any job. The urgent will crowd out the important.

At the end of the day. What did I accomplish? Knowing what's going on around. Be aware. Got into it because of greed. Simplistic view. Any complicated phenom won't happen that simply. What is the solution? Find better bankers?

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Engagement is like being on the receiving end of a bullhorn. Barrage of noise. You don't see faces behind the horn. With rise of social tech, people are now talking with each other, communication is no longer just one way. David Carroll – Musician. Saw baggage handlers throwing his guitars. United breaks guitars! No. 4 in search results when you type in United. 5 million views in the past 5 weeks. The Groundswell. People can find each other.

This is about relationships. With each other and with people you are trying to reach. Obama. Used tools to reach people so they felt empowered. He didn't have to give control, he created a movement, a groundswell.

How do you create your groundswell. Short term? Based on transaction? More personal? Or something passionate, intimate. Have a sense of loyalty. You have to strategy! With four goals.

Learn. Through dialog. Quickly and deeply. Learn about what is said, then have dialog. Help them and support them. Blogsearch.google.com. Twitter search! 140 characters? What can you get? What's the power of twitter? Tool that enables you to listen to the groundswell and ultimately to learn. You need to turn your association into a learning association.

Dialog. Conversation – listen first, then engage. Leads into more deeper relationship. No different when you reach out to the groundswell.

Engagement Pyramid. Bottom are the watchers and not actively participating. Sharing is next. They'll share with colleagues and friends. Next are the commenters – blog posts. Producers are people who create content. Top are the curators. They are running these communities, moderating forum, editing wikis. The MOST passionate. The place to start is the BOTTOM.

Red Cross volunteers. They've created dialog with Red Cross. Volunteers say it not only to Red Cross but also seen by all their friends. Friends then say hey I saw your post! Tell me more about it. This si the beginning of your groundswell.

Groundswell. Highly controlled by you or by people who are passionate. Allowing them to help themselves. You need to extend participation from the few at the top to the many at the bottom. Starbucks. Welcome ideas to be posted to their Website – customers can then comment, vote on ideas they like, provide even more feedback to improve the original idea. And then these ideas are owned by starbucks employees and then provide feedback to this community, whether they implement it or not.

Again, need to widen the scope. How do we get started? No money. No time. Have people but they don't know how to do this? Legal or IT won't help us! And those who feel losing control. Now everyone is a spokesperson with this groundswell thing. Yikes!

Start small. And start it now. These people who want to participate in this groundswell don't want to wait. Start looking and see what people are saying. Pick a group. Find these revolutionaries. The change agents. Those passionate about creating relationships.

Second thing – how to measure? What's the ROI? You're thinking the wrong way. Are doing it more effectively through Facebook, Twitter, etc., rather than traditional media? Use the measurements you already have. This does not require new measurements.

Two types of metrics you can apply. Rate org 1-10. Would you tell someone you know . . . 9-10, they are promoter. 3 or less are detractors. Want more promoters. Social media is built for this. Other metric is lifetime value. Value of member? Acquisition costs, retention costs . . . think of referral value. Do they tell other people? They have their networks and can impact network on your behalf!

Control. The hardest thing to do for organizations. Why do you need control in the first place? And what are you control of in the first place? If you want to craft that relationship that is passionate, you have to give up control. You don't know where it'll go and there will be many pitfalls along the way but in the end, it'll be deep and passionate.

Think Walmart. They tried plenty of ideas. Failing plenty of times. But the point is they kept trying. Finally they developed Checkout – blog from their own shoppers. A Hit! Google mantra. Fail fast, fail smart.

How do you give up and control but still remain in command? Every org has a sandbox. Some small some large. Laws of the sandbox need to be defined by you. Then expand the sandbox.

Summary. Focus on the relationships on what you are trying to form NOT the Technology but you have to USE them. And Understand how the people you are trying to reach use them. How can you engage these members without using them yourself.

Start small. Start with learning!

Be ready to relinquish control. You're not in control anyway! Get use to it.

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How is the connected world changing your mission? “Here Comes Everybody” Group action just got easier. Mobile phone, Internet, transformed they way people collaborate.

Changed media landscape. HSBC example. Penalty free checking to college students. Thousands signed on. Over the summer, rescind offer. Charged 140 pounds. Not ok, have 30 days to withdraw. Stop the great HSBC graduate ripoff on Facebook. Thousands join this group. They start talk about it. They start trading tips on how to transfer money from one bank to another. Once one person solves problem, it's solved for everyone else. Goes viral with media. Schedule real world protest. By this time, HSBC has caved in. Students were unhappy AND COORDINATED. Use to media as source of information. That's it. With FB, now it's source and platform for collaboration. No managerial structure needed.

Convening value. Use media to convene not only to inform. Revolutions. Printing press. Telegraph. Telephone. Then capture content on media. Recently, harness the airwaves. Curious asymmetry. Stuff good at creating conversation, not good at creating groups. Vice versa. Internet. It's a many to many. Allows groups to get together. Buy a TV. Consumer goes up by one, but not producer. Computer, both consumer and producer. Media is transformed.

Chris Avenir – Freshman at Ryerson. Ryerson threatened explusion. He published study group materials on Facebook. Clash of metaphor. Is FB just old media offered in new package. Or real world moved into the Ether. It's the wrong question! What FB is like, is like FB. Old analogies is inadequate to describe what is going on.

We're use to institution being at the center, then broadcast to users. We're getting use to two-way conversation. Now, the users can talk directly to one another. Many orgs are living through this shift. Membership orgs – you give me money and you have membership. Now they want to listen, talk back to each other and talk back to core institution. What are you gonna do about it? When cost of participating is low enough, you get amateurs doing it. People who do it for different kind of orgs.

We're not use to see things in the public for the public. Now it's so cheap to publish on your own. Not WHY PUBLISH THIS, to WHY NOT PUBLISH IT! (because cost is so low to publish). The people who are having conversations don't care that we can see it. Thai coup. Blogger get camera phone and post pics of tanks. Suddenly people are pouring in to her blog. She's not journalist but committed an act of journalism. Then she posts hello kitty phone she wants. People then say get back to the coup! Then she posts “Life Like This.” No media org in the world will tell new viewers to buzz off. She's doing it for different motivations than professionals.

For orgs, it's not about tech, it's about sociology.

Institutional reactions. JNJ BTW – johnson and johnson, btw. They talk about “products” then have comment policy. First paragraph, we'll delete anything off topic. Or if about products, go somewhere else. Made comment count red. Why did you have blog in first place? Don't try to pretend. Just don't do it in the first place. Have goal and figure out tech needed.

Loss of control. BBC example. It's already in the past. If you don't think you lost control, you're not looking very hard. If you are having about your orgs, you will find it many places which are not sponsored or owned by you. Choice. Ignore, replace, compete? BBC did it all with Doctor Who Website.

Adopt logic of ALSO rather than INSTEAD. You cannot remove these presences. We can't stop it even if we wanted to stop it. If you have the same problem for a long time, maybe it's not a problem but a fact. So when they put up their own site, they published their own info, then employ ALSO by adopting wiki. You leverage value of the wiki without too much work. You allow them to do it all through you.

Modernista. Rather than Website, they forward people to their wiki listing. They say all info is beyond our control. They've recognized that people would not believe anything they would publish on their own so they just list clients and offer potential clients to browse the list and read what other people have to say about their company.

Linux – I'm doing a free operating system (just a hobby) I'd like to know what features most people would want. (Torvalds) Did go out and say we're going to crush Microsoft in the server market!

Wikipedia – Humor me. Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes. (Sanger) Didn't say we're out to crush Encarta and put them out of business.

Twitter. I want to have a dispatch service that connects on our phones using text. This intuition was developed five years ago.

Find the person in your org that gets it. That has big transformative idea and lock them out of the building. Then have them come back in with 100 medium sized ideas or a thousand small ideas. This is how these systems work. Modest numbers of projects has a better chance to transform and institution. You have to have small iterations. Figure out the feedback from this development.

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Jeff Howe - new business model.  Open call. The act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form on an open call. Istockohoto.

Not only in for profit companies. NTEN crowdsourced the agenda for their annual meeting. People submitted and voted on ideas. Music festivals are starting to crowdsource.

Why associations should be interested? About people being engaged. Threadlist.com -  it wouldn't exist if there weren't people who didn't care about their photos. Member doesn't have to apply, open to everybody. Offers opportunities for small discrete tasks. You get to choose how much time you get to contribute.

How does it work? Tried one issue of the magazine. Let all readers pick stories that would appear in the magazine. Process should be real easy. Short tasks should be easy to understand and easy to do.  Brainstorm for ideas for a month, then vote then ask them to recommend resources.

Brainstorm - submit ideas. Voting - rate from 1-5 scale. Resources - suggest angles, sources, etc.

It's like recycling.  If everyone does a little bit, it adds up to a greater objective.

Finding Volunteers. Went out to section councils and got buy in from liaisons. Articles in the magazine for each of the steps.

Volunteer Engagement. About 50 people with about 80 ideas. Economy, social media. Voted - about 70. Recommended resources - 30.

Technology. Focus on tasks, then pick platform. Brainstorm = submit text, vote then rate items, recommend resources = comment on items. So many tech options. You can pick a number of options. Could of done it over email but lots of solutions. Tools included threaded discussion for brainstorm, survey for voting and again threaded discussion board for recommending resources. Did it in the SharePoint platform.

Slinkset.com digg clone. Set up in half and hour.

Final Results. Content for ALL the magazine. Make it identifiable - heavily branded as "crowdsource issue." Also branded throughout the features. Also included people names of those who contributed resources. Feedback on magazine website. Like the idea.

Challenges. "bad" ideas that are voted highly. No control! Concerned wouldn't get enough ideas or ideas we didn't like. We had to commit to using ideas submitted. Editors like control.  Many ideas submitted were already covered. Just decided to apply different treatment to subject matter already covered. Scary to give up control, we were proud about the May issue with great response from reader.

Communication. Advertise, spread word. Did we the best we could to spread the word? We didn't use social media. We thought about it. After process is over, people didn't know that crowdsource was happening. People felt like they heard from but felt like they didn't see the final result in the process.

Try it out on the small scale first. To see if we would do it again

Technology (again). Minimize hurdles. Know the technology that members are good with. Option with people to send email. Technology isn't always free. Tried to find free tools on the Internet, but not might now be well rounded.

Transparency. Important to pick process and stick with it. Be comfortable what you want to crowdsource. Members only or open to public? What to do unused ideas - communication is key on why used or not. Again, keep everyone in the loop.

We felt we had more information that we had done better - whitepaper. Another crowdsource issue with a theme to it. Give it more structure from the start. Communicate more broadly. The bigger the crowd the better. More broadly we can communicate the better. Get members involved with ASAE more. A way to volunteer for the organization.

How do you keep staff overwhelmed? You can have three thousand participating? Internet is great. Would be a great problem to have. Members are handling the bulk of the work. Important to have staff buy in. All excited about it because of the buy in.

Crowdsource editorial calendar? How do we create a tool that people participate/communicate.

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