Seth Godin wrote a blog post about why blogging helps you become a better writer. Here’s one point that particularly caught my attention:

4. It’s okay if you leave. Bloggers aren’t afraid to include links or distractions in their writing, because we know you’ll come back if what we had to say was interesting.

I bring it up because I think it is particularly relevant to associations, but also to the whole "myth of control" conversation about social media. It’s just another example of how our old paradigm (we must control, they must not leave, we must keep them, what is your retention rate…) may not be serving us as well as it used to. What if it is okay for them to leave? What if the door isn’t locked, and they can come and go when they please (because with the Internet, that’s actually true)?

It also reminded me of a post that Sue Pelletier wrote referencing John Moore’s work about brands and would you "miss them" if they were gone. Sue referenced the thought as "scary" for an association or an association’s meeting. Gasp! If we weren’t there, the people would find other organizations or meetings to go to?! Yes. They would. And they always will. Just like the blog. I will leave to find other things to read because there is so much good writing out there. But as long as you keep doing something of value for me, I will come back. I may upset the marketers, but (to me, anyway) it’s not about brand.

I wouldn’t miss you, the association, or you, the brand. I would miss the valuable interactions I have with you. Of course, I probably wouldn’t miss them too much, because I can easily find value elsewhere. In Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind, he argues that right-brained concepts are going to drive the economy in the near future, and one of the drivers is "abundance." This ties in. It is very easy to create value for people these days (thanks to the Internet). When value is scarce, then you build a powerful organization by figuring out how to get people in and then not want to get out. It’s a long "trip" to the next value stop, so you stay where you are. Or at least the costs of leaving to find new value outweigh the benefits of the value you are receiving.

That’s not true any more. But I don’t think that’s so bad or so scary. Let them leave, but keep figuring out how to provide the most value. This could even include pointing them to valuable things that are not yours! If you provide value, then they’ll come back.