Would it surprise you to learn that association job board candidate lists can be comprised of 70% to 80% nonmembers?

Allright buddy, I'm going to need to see a receipt for that membership.

I know what you’re thinking … those people will never join. They’re just using us to find a job and we’ll never hear from them again.

That’s probably true. The majority of those job candidates will never join your organization.

Of course, the majority of the people who take advantage of your “one time only” discount to the next conference won’t join either. The majority of people who received a complimentary copy of your trade publication won’t join. The majority who went through your certification program won’t join.

Here’s the difference. In all those other programs, the lead generation program cost you money, and those “never join” prospects are a drain on your resources.

For an association job board, the candidates are your inventory. Even if those people never join your organization, never attend and event and never subscribe to a single publication, their applications to jobs on your job board are what allows you to enjoy the non-dues revenue profits.

In other words, on that job board that you’ve been grumbling about you’re not only meeting what is probably your members’ core need – career enhancement – you’re building your member prospect list and getting paid to do it.

If you don't know what you did, I'm certainly not going to tell you.

There are a lot of things in life that I freely admit I don’t get. Fashion is one of those.

I don’t mean that I have a genetic inability to know what colors match and struggle with the tuck/untuck dilemma when dressing in the morning. Well … actually, that is a pretty accurate description of me.

Moving on, I don’t understand the whole high-fashion, runway model thing. The picture over there to the right was a teaser on the Wall Street Journal home page to get me to read an article on some amazing fashion trend.

Look at that model. Doesn’t the expression on her face just scream “Joie de vivre”? That means “Joy of Life” to those who lack my sophisticated understanding of foreign languages.

Why would someone looking to sell clothes have a model walk down a runway glaring at me?

Assuming the fashion writer isn’t just making it up as he goes along, presumably the point of this fashion collection was to somehow celebrate the joy of life.

The photo essay included nine photos. Each model looked angrier than the last.

I have no ultimate marketing wisdom here. I just don’t get it.

Non-dues revenue is critically important to professional associations.

Yes, your association job board should be making you money.

That’s true as a general rule, but it is critical today. The past two years have been a difficult period for the professional association. It’s not uncommon for some of these organizations to have lost 20% to 30% of the membership in a year.

Laid off workers dropped their memberships. Cost cutting companies stopped paying for those that were left.

It was – and still is – a disturbing period for executives at these organizations.

This was after several years of eroding membership because many people assumed that social media could replace the professional association membership – for free. (It can’t, but that’s another post.)

Short version, professional associations need some time and resources to retool and re-define the business. The worst time to try and do that is when revenue has a severe downturn.

When run properly, job boards are a fantastic tool to drive both non-dues revenue and provide a tangible member service.

The key phrase there is “when run properly.”

Job boards are not typically seen as a core offering. As a result, it has about third- or fourth-level priority for the marketing team and tends to just … sit there.

I just posted a new presentation on how to market an association job board.

Enjoy!

Like a good little marketing consultant I signed up for Groupon a few months back just to get a sense for how it all works. Overall, it was a clever system, handled well. However, my only goal was to see what it was and I didn’t have much interest in buying anything.

So … unsubscribe time.

Fie on you my ancient nemesis!

Mechanically, Groupon handled the unsubscribe in textbook best practice fashion. The email had an easy to find link, one click and I’m out.

But then they got clever, and as a result I was almost tempted to rejoin the list just because they gave me a laugh to start my day.

Take a look at the picture to the right. That’s a shot from Groupon’s unsubscribe screen. I meet Derrick, the guy who thought I’d like the offer that prompted me to unsubscribe.

With the click of a button, I can punish Derrick. Can I resist? Of course not! click …

Someone comes out on a video clip, yells at Derrick and pretends to throw coffee on him. Groupon then tells me that was pretty mean and invites me to re-subscribe if I feel bad now.

That was, without a doubt, the best unsubscribe experience I’ve ever had!

Groupon awesomeness, in logo form

It kept true to the brand – both in terms of the sense of fun and in keeping in line with email marketing best practices.

I didn’t re-subscribe, but I do feel guilty about it.

Sorry Derrick.

I just noticed the other day that the operating system has become the lead message in mobile phone advertising. I’m not sure exactly when that transition happened, but I suspect it was about the time that the iPhone came out.

You punk kids! Where's the love?

It used to be that the actual phone handset was something from Motorola, Samsung, etc. – or a least a brand that those companies owned. These days, I see ads focusing on the operating system – Windows, Android, etc.

It’s almost as if the designer and manufacturer of the physical handset is irrelevant. Look at all those Android phones out there. Someone makes them. Is it Motorola? Samsung? Some new player? I have no idea.

That’s a pretty clear indication of the decline of the Motorola brand. At one point, Motorola was closely associated with mobile phone service. It meant quality, innovation, technology. Today, they hardly seem to exist in the marcom space.

Verizon, AT&T and everyone else are promoting the fact that their phones are on Android. They company that makes the phone is irrelevant.

This past year I’ve been doing some volunteer work with the Joseph Business School – a business school associated with Living Word Christian Center that teaches business principles from a biblical perspective.

Even the logo is awesome

One of the recent graduates has just launched her new business and it’s a great idea.

Oops! Diapers 2 Go operates vending machines that offer diaper changing kits and other young child oriented products.

Basically its for those situations where a parent is out with the baby and runs out of diapers, ointment, wipes, etc.

I have three kids. Trust me, that happens. A lot.

There’s also a selection of healthy kids snacks and commonly needed medicines.

All in all – great idea. Wish I thought of it.

I’ve been using Clear.com for my home Internet, VOIP and a mobile account for my PC for about 9 months now. I’m almost universally happy with the service and the price I pay for it.

Will accept free T-shirts for this logo

I was on the Clear site earlier today (ok, for a tech support issue, but they’re still great) and saw a link comparing Clear.com to Verizon, who apparently is rolling out a 4G network.

The resulting page offered a side-by-side comparison between the two services. Not surprisingly, Clear was pretty clear that they think their service is better.

It was the conclusion of the comparison that caught my attention. Clear offered a link to the Verizon website with a call to action – “Check for Yourself”.

That takes guts, and some confidence in the quality of your offering. It’s one thing to claim you’re better. It’s another to claim you’re better, then offer to hold the door for your prospect so they can check out your competitor.

Did you know Verizon can hunt you by the smell of fear alone?

As a happy Clear.com customer I can’t tell you if this is an effective sales strategy, but it definitely shows some guts.

If you’re going to make a brand claim, make a big one. Make one that people will remember. It’s tempting to hedge your bets, but often the payoff is much better by choosing to be bold.

I had what was ultimately a positive tech support experience with Dell over the weekend, but there was one jarring moment of poor (and poorly timed) salesmanship that’s been sticking in my head.

Since I know you’re burning with curiosity, the issue had to do with Google Chrome crashing a lot. Turned out to be a virus that corrupted the files and it required more than uninstall/reinstall of Chrome to fix it.

Anyway, when you’re on tech support there are long periods when you’re just sitting on the phone while the rep has remote access to your computer. Usually, that’s just dead silence (or heavy breathing if he forgot to hit mute).

When the rep is waiting for something to happen, they appear to be trained to look for an opportunity to sell something. Great idea, and I’m sure it brings in some nice cash to Dell.

Most of the time, they try to sell some variety of an extended warranty or service package.

In this case, he was trying to sell me on an upgrade from Microsoft Office 2007 to Microsoft Office 2010.

His premise was sound. The newer version of Office would, theoretically, have tighter protections against viruses. I was on the phone with tech support due to a virus problem.

Oh, and you were doing so well!

He lost the sale because his understanding of what he was selling could not advance beyond the script in front of him.

“It will give you the latest protection against viruses up to the level of your anti-virus software.”

I asked for a translation of that gobbledy-gook three times, and all he could do was re-read the script.

Lost sale.

The idea was to couch a sales pitch into a legitimate piece of technology and computer security advice. All he had to do was rephrase the script into human speech and he would have had a nice little commission.

Tip for the masses – Selling from an expert positioning can be powerful, but you need to know your product to pull it off.

I read an article the other day in the Wall Street Journal about an extension of the Google Chrome operating system that will compete head-to-head with Microsoft Windows.

The logo stares at you from any angle. Try it!

I think the Chrome browser is awesome (despite a recent crashing tendency). I switched to it about six months ago because of its far greater speed and simplicity.

I have to say I’m skeptical about the viability of a Chrome operating system. At the inauguration Google presented it as a platform that just provides the Internet. That’s great, but the Internet isn’t everywhere.

I have a mobile account with Clear, which has some geographic limits for now, and I’ve had one in the past with AT&T that was nationwide so I’m plenty comfortable with remote Internet access. Even with that, there are often times when I just don’t have a connection and having a computer that is useless unless online just seems like a major limitation.

They also suggested that people can use tools like Google Docs to get the work done that used to be on Microsoft Office. Google Docs has a long way to go before it gets to that point.

For all Microsoft’s flaws, it does provide a consistent, common backbone to the business world.

It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out in the next few years.

I bank at PNC. This is a recent switch based on their Virtual Wallet product – a creative combination of a checking account, interest-bearing checking and a savings account.

Stop selling and just take my money!

Anyway, the other day I stopped by the ATM to deposit some checks and had an odd experience with PNC’s sales process.

Depositing to an ATM is an act of faith. I’m feeding checks into a machine hoping it all turns out okay. Now, I’ve been doing this for 15 years so in most cases I don’t even think about it. It’s normal.

That’s not true for everyone. I occasionally come across people who are just not comfortable with technology. They don’t use ATMs. They don’t do anything online. It’s not common, but the is a wide range between that person and someone like me (who uses ATMs exclusively and does most of my banking and bill paying online). Most people are probably comfortable using an ATM for deposits, but …

In this case, I went through the process. I fed the machine my card, typed in my PIN and had set everything up for the deposit. The next step was feeding the envelope to the hungry machine and moving on with my day.

That’s when PNC decided to pop an ad into the process and ask if I was interested in learning more about some new service they’re offering. I don’t even remember, so you can see how effective the ad was.

The main problem is that the timing of that ad caused me to have a moment of doubt about the deposit I was about to make. It broke my routine and suddenly I was wondering if I had entered the deposit information correctly. I almost cancelled the transaction and started over.

The point here is that upselling and cross-selling is important, but there is a time and place for it. Watch out that your efforts to increase the deal size don’t interfere with your efforts to close the deal in the first place.