The debate over social media continues at associations across the country, begging the question: Is the reward worth the risk?
To answer that question, MCHC advises associations and their members to take a slow and balanced approach to implementing social media. “Once we studied the issue and created guidelines to steer staff in the right direction, we realized that we still needed to assess our strengths and weaknesses in this area and make sure our team was well positioned to handle these sites,” says Caryn Stancik, MCHC’s vice president of communications. To that end, MCHC organized its staff on a linear continuum of social media familiarity. On one end, it identified younger employees who grew up with Facebook and MySpace and could navigate the Internet with ease. Members of this group, it decided, needed clear direction on how to keep their private lives separate from their professional lives. On the other side of the continuum were MCHC’s more experienced employees, who typically arrived to the social media party one or two generations too late. Because they had little use for social networks in their p
