NTEN is taking part in the virtual book tour Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer are doing to explore concepts from Open Community: a little book of big ideas for associations navigating the social web. In this post, Maddie and Lindy answer a few questions for the NTEN community.

Why did you write Open Community?
Maddie: Lindy and I have talked to thousands of association executives who have voiced their frustrations about the social web--from the overabundance of tools and the disorderly experimentation of staff (and members!), to the lack of organizational support and the unwieldy processes for monitoring and managing social media, and that’s just the beginning. We decided to write Open Community as a way to address those frustrations and redirect the thinking about using social tools to build community online.

Maddie Grant & Lindy Dreyer, SocialFish, LLC and Leslie T. White, Croydon Consulting LLC

Ready to adopt a social media policy for your organization staff? Awesome. You probably have some ideas about the risks you want to avoid and how you'd like your staff to interact on the interwebs. Easy peasy, right?

Until you end up staring at a blank page.

It's easy to get caught up in all the different audiences and guidelines you want to include. Here are a few tips to get you past the writer's block and get something down on paper.

Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer, SocialFish, LLC

In a word, no.

If the goal is to integrate social media marketing into your traditional marketing, you're setting yourself up for failure. After all, traditional marketing is based on pushing out and controlling the message, targeting, and running insular campaigns. By comparison, social media marketing is based on relinquishing control, two-way communication, building community, and breaking out of campaign-thinking to build trust over time.

For many nonprofits, traditional marketing still works. Now is not the time to drop the tried and true when social media marketing is still so unproven for your organization.

So here are some social media marketing tactics that can coexist with your older tactics:

Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer, SocialFish, LLC

Social media is all the buzz these days. For associations and non-profits wondering how to get in the game -- or how to figure out whether they should -- listening is the place to start.

Listening means finding the online social spaces where your audience is already communicating, monitoring the conversations that happen there, and gathering intelligence you can use to better understand your audience. Because social media is open and public by nature, listening is not only welcome -- it's expected.

Best of all, you can get started for free!