ASAE was great!

Well most of the NALS staff just got back from our American Society of Association Executives conference and it was great! Toronto was a nice city and welcomed us well. We all learned a great deal in our sessions and I will try and find the time over the next few weeks to share some of it with you.

I wanted to start out by sharing some information on social media and social networking. We all know what Facebook is and surely everyone has heard about Twitter and LinkedIn. NALS is on the forefront in using these social media outlets to help stay connected to members and help them become engaged with the association. Our hope is that by having a presence on these networking tools we will be able to be there for you where ever you may be online. We understand that many people use the web for different things and we want to try and accommodate you. I have to say that I am pleased by the response that we have had to these tools and I think that you can utilize them for your chapters as well. I am not saying that everyone needs to start tweeting today but at least give it a thought...who knows you might have some fun!

You are welcome to use the NALS Community to set up a group for your state and chapter to start and you can see how we are using forums and blogs to not only get information to members but to interact with them on a personal level even though we are no where near one another. You can talk about what books you are ready, what shows you are watching, or even something about work...if you want to. From there you can start conversations in the NALS facebook group about up coming events in your chapter or anything else you can think of (with in reason). There is no need to dive head first into all aspects of social media...but you need to start getting your feet wet because pretty soon we will all be swimming in it and those that are used to the water will not be nearly as shocked!

I recommend setting up a twitter account and if nothing else follow @NALStweet, @LawMagazine, @Letter10 and @NALShailey and see what we have to say! You will quickly figure out some things and find some people you want to follow. You will undoubtedly get some messages from people you want nothing to do with but you can block them and move on. Twitter grew from 450K users to 11 million users in one year so there are a lot of people out there, the beauty of it is that it is very easy to ignore the ones that you don't care about. Get on and take a look you can't break it!

Well that is about it...I am going to try and make a better effort at updating this for you.

Jay