Last friday, I was lucky enough to be a guest speaker at California Society of Association Executives in order to talk about social software for professionals.

I love talking to normal people about emerging technologies and from a technology perspective these folks were very mainstream (although from a leadership perspective they were elite). To give you a sense, the other speaker was the president of the association of chain link fence manufacturers. Here’s where some of the highlights from the presentation and the feedback:

There are three primary reasons the executives were interested in social software (blogs, wikis, social networks). They want to know what the buzz is about. They want to be more relevant with young members. They want to continue to attract and retain members.

One of the first questions was how hanging out on Facebook for hours on end would help their association. Luckily I had an answer. It won’t. That’s leisure and nobody should be doing that as part of their work day. However, there are plenty of ways to use a social network for professional use cases. You just need to stay away from the leisure activities.

Another concern was that their members were older and unfamiliar with social software. All of our demographic data shows that the number one driver of activity is how strongly people want to network. At a recent tech conference, 9 of the top 10 job titles fell in the range between Project Manager and CEO. The geeks had been pushed out by managers and executives. Also, our networks for associations are always our most active because people join associations to network. Familiarity with social networks never comes into play (although people need to own a computer).

Interestingly, nobody had a strong desire to blog. I think this is because their members weren’t big blog readers. However, several people had good experiences with blog search and I was able to point them to Summize which is just as powerful but for Twitters.

Some people think associations have a problem because they aren’t attracting a younger demographic. As evidence, only two people in the room of 150 were younger than 30. The alternative view though was that people aren’t seeing the need for associations until they’re more established. I tend to believe that.

My goal was to give people a framework about thinking of social software as a tool to solve a problem. A blog can be a way to communicate and converse with members. A wiki can help you publish and update key information. A social network can help members connect. And of course, a CrowdVine social network for your conference means your attendees show up knowing who they want to talk to.

I’m speaking next Tuesday (Jan 8) at the Sonoma County Web Developers about how to use social networks to achieve adult/professional goals.

Social Networks for Adults
Date: Jan 8, 2008
Location: Volunteer Center of Sonoma County
Time: Networking 6:30 PM to 7:00 PM
Program 7 to ~9pm (break, raffle ~8)

It’s inspired by a snippit from danah boyd’s ETech keynote about life stages and how they are reflected in social network behavior. A lot of early social network adopters were young. So a lot of the behavior looked immature or like it was without-value to people who were in a “more mature” stage of their life.

Here’s the trick to unlocking the value of social network: imitate people who have the same values as you. According to danah, once people have passed through life stages focused on identity creation (finding yourself) and integration/coupling (finding a career/spouse) they start to focus on societal contribution. For almost everyone, the main societal contribution is work.

There are a lot of ways social networks can help your career, company, professional association. I’d tell you now, but I’d rather see you in Santa Rosa.

As a side note, Sonoma County Web Developers is my favorite group to talk to. They are pragmatic practitioners and give great reality checks for people who spend too much time in Silicon Valley. I spoke about web2.0 two years ago and got a great piece of feedback:

Tony, our customers are small businesses, and by definition small business owners are control freaks. This empowering users thing is great, but can you give us a different benefit to sell.