B2B Conversations Now

Chris Brogan and Julien Smith are looking for a viral way to kill 2 birds with one stone; they want to sell more copies of their new book “Trust Agents” while at the same time do some good for society. Chris even posted How Do We Kill Birds? to ask for recommendations.

Having read Trust Agents, I took their advice and instead of responding to Chris’ post directly, I decided to create my own post here in the hope that others with great books may benefit. Personally, I think Chris and Julien have a much larger potential than trying to sell discounted copies to companies with a percentage going to charity.

Why not make a BIG difference?

What if there were a category of potential customers that not only had millions of loyal followers but also broke into manageable groups each and every year to hear from community thought leaders? What if those groups were actually doing a lot of focused good for their members and society in general?

Those groups are professional associations. Living in the DC area, I have had the pleasure of working directly with many of these groups. Albeit I was selling enterprise technology to them, I still gained quite a bit of insight into how they work and the power they have.

The Statistics

There are over 4000+ professional associations headquartered in the US

They are all non-profit and generally like helping others

Their members implicitly trust them (they join voluntarily)

They are always searching for information to help their members

The Business Case

Most associations run on tight budgets. Unlike their private sector cousins, they generally don’t have huge marketing budgets, but they are not poor either. They spend wisely on things that will help their membership excel, which will bring in more members. Here’s how a book selling deal could help them.

They are always looking for ways to augment their financial positions to help keep their membership costs low; book revenue sharing would work well

They all have annual conferences driving speaking engagement opportunities for the authors. This would provide HUGE upside for sought after authors.

Next Step Strategy

If you are sold on the power and opportunities that associations present, how do you move forward? Where do you start?

It may be daunting to think about approaching 4000+ entities individually. Fortunately, there is one organization that I like to call the Mother Ship of associations. I call it this because it is an Association of Association Executives. That’s right, the folks that run associations belong to their own association meaning that if you target the top tier you have access to thousands of associations and millions of ultimate members.

That Mother Ship is called ASAE & the Center for Association Leadership. It is headquartered in Washington DC and has several conferences throughout the year. Here is their About Us:

“ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership are two organizations linked together by a common belief and a common passion. We believe associations have the power to transform society for the better. Our passion is to help association professionals achieve previously unimaginable levels of performance. We do this by nurturing a community of really smart, creative, and interesting people - our members. In short, we connect great ideas and great people.”

I checked out their calendar of events and saw at least 3 citing using Social Media to help associations. Sounds like a winner to me! The cost to join ASAE is around $395 annually but what it gives you is priceless. You can subscribe to several email-based listserv platforms based on a specific business category like technology or, in this case, [social] networking.

That’s my 2 cents worth for all you authors out there! I hope it helps.

Dale

Tags: B2B Marketing //