Membership Marketing it is anything but "Business as Usual!"

I was fortunate to be the Keynote Speaker for the AVECTRA Users Group Conference in Orlando, Florida, earlier this week. What a great conference and what a great community of professionals.

The focus of my presention was on the practical recommendations made by membership marketing professionals who attended a workshop I ran the day before. To set up these recommendations, I presented some pretty compelling information as to why we can no longer simply rely on one or two marketing channels and must incorporate the web and social marketing into our programs.

Here is a smattering of that information...:

• 1 out of 8 couples married in the US last year met via Social Media. 
• Number of Years to Reach 50 Million Users:
• Radio 38
• TV 13
• Internet 4
• iPod 3
• FaceBook 9 MONTHS 
• 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled on-line studies. 
• YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world. 
• 25% of search results for world’s top 20 brands are links to user generated content. 
• 80% of companies are using LinkedIn as primary tool to find employees.
• January 27 2011 issue of Internet Retailer noted about Amazon.Com:
• Amazon’s $12.8 billion in 2009 North American sales represented 8.6% of the nearly $149 billion in online retail sales for that year reported by the U.S. Commerce Department.
• In the July 20 2010 issue of Internet Retailer noted:
• Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. In its Kindle update, Amazon did not offer any comparison between the sales of paperbacks and e-books.
• Over the last 30 days, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books.
• As cited on http://www.pingdom.com/, over 72% of those people who access social netwrok sites are between the ages of 25 and 64. 54% are between the ages of 35 and 64. Most associations I work with will agree that their members fall between the ages of 25 and 64.  Therefore, we can loosely assume that HALF of YOUR MARKET (or more) are using social networks.

If you don't have a social media strategy, you need one. People are now learning to buy product and successfully administer their lives using the Internet and Social Networking. Membership marketing for membership and trade associations is not the same as 10 years ago...5 years ago...even 6 months ago. It is evolving and its being driven by the Amazon.Coms and FaceBooks of the world.

As Darwin pointed out...



Adapt or Die. Your choice my friends.