DigitalNow: Association Leadership in the Digital Age

Clay Shirky - Author of the groundbreaking book: "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations"

A new digital revolution is taking hold. The source of this revolution is not computers but the connections among them, as our social networks fuse with our technological ones.

How are associations being affected by this migration from an information economy based on the work of the individual mind to new forms of collective intelligence and collective effort?

How will this revolution create fundamental changes in your association, and in the way our society — all modern societies, in fact — is structured?

Clay Shirky illustrates these fundamental forces at work, and how they will change the world's organizations and, ultimately, ourselves. Clay is the author of the groundbreaking book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

Clay has written extensively about the Internet since 1996. Over the years, he has had regular columns in Business 2.0, FEED, OpenP2P.com and ACM Net Worker, and his writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Harvard Business Review, Wired, Release 1.0, Computerworld, and IEEE Computer. Slashdot, Red Herring, Media Life, and the Economist’s Ebusiness Forum have interviewed him. He has written about biotechnology in his “After Darwin” column in FEED magazine, and serves as a technical reviewer for O’Reilly's bioinformatics series. He helps program the “Biological Models of Computation” track for O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conferences.

Peter Hirshberg - Chairman, Technorati.com

The audience is up to something. An international phenomenon, people are creating their own content, learning from one another, and gaining power.

What are your members looking for on the Internet and where are they finding it?

How can your association adopt a model that will help you remain relevant?

How can your association brand itself to be heard?

During a nine-year tenure at Apple Computer, Hirshberg headed Enterprise Marketing, where he grew Apple's large business and government revenue to $1 billion annually and helped lead the company's entry into the online service arena. Peter is a Trustee of The Computer History Museum and a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute. Peter earned his bachelor's degree at Dartmouth College and his MBA at Wharton.

Amber MacArthur, New Media Specialist and Web Strategist

Amber MacArthur is the personification of “old school” meets “new school.” If you visit her web site at http://ambermac.com/, you’ll find connections from Wikipedia to the New York Times, and from YouTube to the Canadian Broadcasting Company.

According to Wikipedia, Amber is a Canadian television and netcasting personality, but it’s just not that simple to describe who Amber is and what she does.

Amber is a young media and technology professional who uniquely and perfectly represents our blended, cross-functional, multimedia, multi-cultural global society. Her work covers everything from reviewing the top 5 iPhone applications to discussing the unrealistic physical standards that the media promotes through the use of image editing and technical enhancements of photography.

With one foot anchored in traditional communications and relationships and the other splashing around in the river of new media, Amber is uniquely qualified to discuss the impact of social networking on our society in general, and to discuss how the social media “revolution” may affect associations in particular.

When she's not reporting on the latest Web trends, Amber MacArthur is working with companies—including HP, Bell, Microsoft and Adobe—to research, design, implement and monitor them. At the world-famous Razorfish, in San Francisco, she was a strategist for a variety of Web content, branding and usability projects. She was also the Web communications director at HigherMarkets, and is a co-founder of Arktyp, which designed TWiT.tv, one of the first and most influential podcast networks in the world.

No one knows “new school” like Amber – and she understands it from the “old school” perspective. You won’t want to miss her dynamic and intriguing presentation.

Charlene Li, Author and Award-winning Forrester Analyst

Charlene Li is co-author of the influential book on Web 2.0 titled, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.

Groundswell explores how social media -- blogs, wikis, Facebook -- has impacted the way customers interact with brands. These elements of a social phenomenon -- the groundswell -- has created a permanent, long-lasting shift in the way the world works. Most organizations see it as a threat but it is also an opportunity.

According to an article by Groundswell co-authors Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, "... groundswell technologies are exploding. They're cheap and easy to create and improve, they tap easily into the Internet advertising economy, and they connect people who naturally want to connect. The net result of all this accelerating activity is that the groundswell is about to get embedded within every activity, not just on computers, but on mobile devices and in the real world. This is the ubiquitous groundswell."

As an award-winning Forrester analyst on social technologies, Charlene has developed a unique "ladder of engagement" methodology known as Social Technographics™ that places the groundswell into a practical framework. Social Technographics™ classifies people according to how they use social technologies.

At DigitalNow 2009, Charlene will discuss how associations can take advantage of the groundswell, and utilize Social Technographics™ to develop a strategy that speaks directly to the unique make-up of their constituency.

In addition to discussing her work and its application to associations, Charlene will be providing a summary of DigitalNow highlights and helping associations create a plan of action.

Learn more about DigitalNow 2009 speakers.

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