Social Media & Associations | Golden's Rules for Associations

They’re not entirely wrong …

9 June 2026 Leave a comment

Those are possibly the four most important words to keep in mind when you find yourself in an argument.

Science versus MAHA

While listening to a recent Why Should I Trust You podcast I was struck by an astonishing comment from Sheryl Gay Stolberg, the lead reporter for the New York Times covering science and healthcare. (She also has a long and distinguished career covering politics.) In the podcast, she was discussing Secretary of Health and Human Services RFK Jr. and the “Make America Healthy Again” movement.

“Kennedy would say, ‘well, all these public health officials say vaccines are safe and effective. And we know that’s not true’.

“And, you know, he kind of has a point about that. I mean, some people are injured by vaccines, just like any drug. You know, they carry side effects.

“So to make a sweeping statement that all vaccines are safe and effective is also, I would say, imprecise. And what I have tried to do in my coverage is to bring some precision to these debates in a way that is understandable for people.”

This observation was astonishing because it was unexpected. But on reflection, what was truly astonishing was that on first hearing it felt in the slightest bit inflammatory or unreasonable.

I recognize that merely by quoting this, I place myself at risk of instant dismissal for treasonous disloyalty to my own personal (and I believe) informed confidence in the general safety and efficacy of vaccines.

But my point isn’t about vaccines at all. I could imagine conversations like this around any issue of disagreement on any topic of importance in which the participants are deeply and, most significant, emotionally invested. Questions of politics (immigration policy, vaccine policy, whatever) or even questions about who is or is not allowed membership in your organization.

Precision and context – not generalities and absolutes

It is about the inherently unproductive nature of what passes for public discourse on any and every policy issue that people care deeply about. The same thing that sometimes passes for debate in association boardrooms when important issues around mission, values, or legacy are at stake.

The villain here isn’t that disagreement exists. It is that the ensuing argument is too often based on generalities and absolutes when, as Stolberg pointed out, what is called for is precision and context. Too often, combatants are triggered by a litmus test that instantly governs every word that comes out in response: “Are you for me or against me?” This framing demands a take-no-prisoners approach aimed at beating your opponent to death … and usually devolves into little more than slinging slogans at each other and attaching a disparaging label to them. It amounts to a reflexive rejection of any validity to any of their concerns that ends discussion before any discussion has even occurred. There is nothing left but the shouting.

To be sure, there are extremists on the fringes of many arguments who probably can’t be reached. But having a serious and honest conversation about an issue in controversy starts with acknowledging the possibility that there just might be a legitimate kernel of truth in what your opponent has to say and looking for it, rather than instinctively going into attack mode.

Returning for a moment to the vaccine divide: if we can acknowledge and agree there is some element of risk we open the possibility of dialogue on the something we can agree on: that risks, even if extremely limited, deserve to be addressed and minimized. Because harm, even if limited to a small number of individuals, is no small thing to the people harmed. If we stubbornly refuse to acknowledge any risk at all, we abandon intellectual honesty and lose credibility. And most tragically, end the possibility of positive progress.

“We’ve forgotten how to argue”

G. K. Chesterton is a writer I greatly admire. He was a fierce and uncompromising defender of his (sometimes unpopular) beliefs but was genuinely loved and admired by even his bitterest opponents in thought. I don’t always agree with him, but I am always enlightened.

He liked to distinguish between a quarrel and an argument. He despised the former and relished in the latter.

And here’s the distinction he drew. A quarrel is a fight. It’s object is to win. The object of an argument is greater understanding. Getting to the truth. The whole truth. And in Chesterton’s view, the principal objection to a quarrel is that it interrupted the opportunity for a possibly important and productive argument. The problem isn’t that there is disagreement; it is that people have forgotten how to argue.

In practice a good argument calls for something very difficult: intellectual humility, even in the face of hostile and unreasonable opposition.

It starts by framing the area of disagreement with precision: understanding the possibly valid and unaddressed concern that your correspondent brings to the table. And it requires showing real empathy for the opponent and their need. Skip this step, and you lose the possibility of seeking areas of agreement.

Constructive arguments, not quarrels

Chesterton was extremely close to his brother. In his Autobiography he wrote:

Cecil Edward Chesterton, was born when I was about five years old; and, after a brief pause, began to argue. He continued to argue to the end. I am glad to think that through all those years we never stopped arguing; and we never once quarreled.

So the next time the temperature rises in a conversation, take a beat. Imagine the speaker is someone you care deeply for. And listen with precision for their pain point rather than defaulting into sweeping generalizations that ignore their concerns. The more consequential the issue, the harder it is to maintain that mental state.

And the more critical it is to do so.

Disclaimer

The ideas contained here are my own. I do not speak for any organization or company.

AI was used to generate the image accompanying this post. I do NOT use AI to generate or edit drafts.

Filed under Social Media & Associations, The Nature of Associations, The Way We Are Tagged with Argument, chesterton, debate, Divisiveness, health, philosophy, politics, Public Policy, Vaccines

Politics as the Third Rail of Constructive Dialogue

18 February 2026 Leave a comment

In a recent thread on ASAE’s Collaborate discussion platform a highly (and rightfully) respected member of the community postulated a conceivable (and dire) scenario of AI’s possible long-term impact on society, citing sources which made the scenario plausible.

But here’s the thing. Plausible. Not inevitable. Intended to open a necessary dialogue, not shut it down.

Foresight Explores Possible Futures; It Doesn’t Make Predictions

It is vital that we constantly keep in mind the distinction between exploring possible future scenarios and making predictions. Strategic planners should be doing the former, not the latter. Making predictions is a dangerous game that can lead them to shut down avenues of thought prematurely and to their long-term detriment. If their prediction is wrong, their whole strategy collapses.

Considering possible future scenarios (even the most extreme ones, positive or negative) can trigger useful strategic insights into what we need to be doing in the here and now. They don’t require us to bet the future on the likelihood of any one of a multiplicity of possible future scenarios being the one that actually plays out. They allow organizations to maintain a necessary posture of nimbleness.

Risking the Litmus Test Response

Add any hint of a political element to your scenario, and things get touchy. Any discussion of anything remotely political in today’s environment risks having your contribution attacked or (on closed platforms) even censored for being unacceptably political.

But even if tolerated, the element of politics risks something that, in my mind, is far more serious. Positing uncomfortable possible scenarios exposes you to what I call Litmus Test responses: baseless judgments made about what the scenario you shared indicates about what the reader assumes its content says about whether you are “with us or against us” politically.

Not Everyone Joins Your Conversation with the Same Intentions

Therein lies the source of the problem. When we enter into public discourse, we can approach it from a number of different postures and with a number of different purposes. It can be an exercise in foresight. Or it can be an exercise in advocacy. And the catch is, your readers might not be operating from the same posture you took in writing it.

When you engage in online discussions with the intention of stimulating an exercise in foresight, you are likely to attract responses from those less interested in strategic foresight and more interested in advancing their own (legitimate) agenda of stimulating political action.

I emphasize legitimate since such activities are certainly values-based (whether I share those values or not). And I always assume the good intentions of the poster (regardless of whether I personally agree with their agenda or not). But the purpose of this kind of public discourse is to convince. It is a strategy of reduction, not expansion. It is intended to use a scenario to move you to a particular position that supports their views and hopefully provokes political/social action and activism of a particular bent.

Like I said, legitimate. Even vital. Just different. And comingling creates misunderstanding and conflict, not understanding.

A Covert Damper on Speech?

The thing that stood out (and saddened) me most about that thread on Collaborate was the very obvious discomfort of the original poster: an individual I know to be deeply serious, well informed, qualified, and responsible. A person who had something useful to add to a discussion that could advance acting with foresight. But who was clearly concerned over how his comments might be taken or that they might get his post taken down.

It resulted in a posting that was vague and in-direct. Exactly the opposite of what is needed for an informed exercise of strategic dialogue (or activism, for that matter).

It struck me as an example of a different kind of chilling effect on the free exercise of speech. Subtle and covert, but no less unfortunate than any overt action to silence the opposition.

But I Might be Wrong

Intellectual honesty requires me to acknowledge that I am guilty of reading the Collaborate post in a manner that aligned with my own interests and purpose. But I don’t know the mind and heart of that writer. In writing this, I made the assumption that his intent was foresight. It could just as likely been intended as advocacy. Either purpose is righteous.

And either way, the concerning factor is this:

What kind of discussions are we not having because we are afraid to engage in them? And what is that costing us?

Disclaimer

The ideas contained here are my own. I do not speak for any organization or company.

AI was used to generate the image accompanying this post. I do NOT use AI to research, generate or edit drafts.

Filed under Association Advocacy, Social Media & Associations Tagged with associations, Social Media, Social Media & Associations

The Power (and Limitations) of Social Media

24 April 2016 Leave a comment

At a recent conference, I was diligent in my efforts to use social media to not only capture my own notes, but share them with my colleagues and associates, present and absent. I got a decent amount of reaction and interaction for my efforts. Retweets, likes, comments and discussion. (Nothing remotely viral, mind you, but my efforts did not go unnoticed by the (in the grand scheme of the world) relatively small community of professionals who share my interests and concerns.)

I even got a tweet from a colleague whom I admire and who was not at the conference that my social media flow “made me feel like I was there and able to participate.”

I was simultaneously flattered and horrified by the reaction.

Flattered, because it suggested, perhaps, that I had been reasonably successful in a small but arguably impactful way in amplifying engagement and advancing the discourse of the brick-and-mortar event within the likeminded community who care about my profession and its future.

Gratified that the focus achieved through the laborious process of reducing insights to fit the 140 character limits of the media seemed to have been successful.

Horrified to think that these soundbites, absent all the context, nuance and depth of the intellectual substance generated by the conference itself, could conceivably pass for (and be accepted) as remotely adequate or even marginally profound.

Frustrated that the limitations of capturing the idea is sometimes achieved at the expense of failing to give full or proper credit to the source of the insight. Just because I tweeted it doesn’t mean the thought was mine. But with a 140 character limit, there is only so much capacity to convey an idea and give proper credit where credit is due. (The media almost compel us to become involuntary plagiarists.)

And in my morning after moment, I am left wondering: We live in a world where political engagement and news have already been reduced to soundbites, slogans and attention grabbing at the expense of substance, a process readily evident in the current presidential political campaigns and how they are covered. This has replaced serious political discourse and deep engagement with achieving solutions to the complex issues and challenges that face us as a society. News has evolved from “what bleeds, leads” to whatever can ignite passion is more important than advancing the dialogue in any meaningful way. That passion is not a bad thing; maybe it is even a critically necessary thing. It is just insufficient if it fails to enable action that achieves actual solutions. (It has been two years since #bringbackourgirls galvanized global attention … but those girls are still gone.) In politics, that passion can even be counterproductive to actually getting anything done and impede building any basis for consensus as a foundation for concrete action.

Maybe I am just sleep deprived and it will all look better tomorrow, but the question I am left with: Have associations (or really any cause or mission-driven enterprise) become as attention-deficit benighted as our politics and news, and do we now accept that soundbites (slogans) that resonate actually do constitute sufficient wisdom and knowledge? Or constitute an actual accomplishment?

I do not want to in any way dismiss or disparage the sincerity and good will behind this new , social media reality … I just wonder whether it actually is getting us anywhere.

Or worse, creates an illusion of substance that enables complacency.

Filed under Social Media & Associations Tagged with associations, impact, Social Media & Associations, twitter

Free? Hold on a Minute.

8 April 2013 Leave a comment

A few years ago I moderated a workshop on Chris Anderson’s book, Free and its implications for associations at the Digital Now conference. (That presentation can be found here.)

Anderson’s thesis was based largely on the concept of a “freemium” – give something away that creates a demand for future purchases. You know, give away a razor and create a future market for razor blades.

A lot of what Anderson had to say rang true. And a lot of associations and some of the smartest people I know who lead them jumped in on the concepts. But I had two nagging concerns, then and now:

First, while it is absolutely true that, in the digital age, with the cost of bandwidth and storage decreasing to almost nothing, the incremental cost of adding an additional customer has also approached zero. It costs the association nothing to send a digital magazine to an extra non-paying subscriber (or a few thousand). It costs the association nothing to benefit an extra thousand nonmembers when it achieves a legislative victory. But somebody had to bear the expense of creating the content in the first place or investing in the advocacy legwork. Who pays for that?

Second, there is what Harvard Business School professor Youngme Moon calls the “hedonic treadmill.” That is, “the human predisposition to feel entitled to today what we used to feel thankful for yesterday.” What’s given away free might be enough to stimulate purchases for a while, but almost immediately what was once viewed as exceptionally enticing when received for free, is simply taken for granted. It becomes an entitlement, not a windfall. To feed the freemium appetite, providers are trapped in a business model characterized by an ever escalating demand to give away more and more in order to sell less and less.

Well, it turns out I wasn’t the only one with these concerns. In his soon-to-be-published book, Who Owns the Future?, Jaron Lanier does an about face on his own previously held views on free content and crowdsourcing. Lanier’s credentials in this arena are pretty good. He is often credited with coining the term “Internet 2.0” and was a pioneer in virtual reality. (His involvement in VR dates back to work at Atari Labs in the early 1980s).

In his new book, this founding editor of Wired magazine argues that free information is wrecking our economy and that rather than “the wisdom of the crowd,” digital crowdsourcing “can too easily turn into a lynch mob.”

The book is set to be published in May, but the profile in the January issue of Smithsonian magazine, “What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?,” gives you a pretty good idea of where he is coming from.

Reactionary or visionary? Let the debate begin …

Filed under Social Media & Associations Tagged with free, freemium, membership models, the end of membership as we know it

The social media dog that didn’t bark

24 October 2012 2 Comments

In the Sherlock Holmes mystery “Silver Blaze,” the solution turns on “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” Scotland Yard Detective Gregory can be forgiven for his confusion when he protests, “the dog did nothing in the night-time.” “That,” Holmes observes, “was the curious incident.”

There are a number of dogs that didn’t bark in Jamie Notter and Maddie Grant’s 2012 Social Leadership Survey. As Joe Rominiecki points out in ASAE’s coverage of the survey, the most deafening silence came in how low “participates on social media in his/her own voice” ranked in the survey’s list of desirable traits in a leader. For all our talk about the importance of engagement in social media, that characteristic ranked tenth out of twelve in the survey. And it came in behind such old school, low-tech characteristics as “brilliant strategist,” “holds others accountable,” and “leverages best practices.”

But before that segment within the association community that insists social media is just the latest fad diverting our time and attention from our real work gets too comfortable, the lesson to be learned is more subtle, but just as challenging to the status quo.

Reading the data, I would consider acceptance, or more precisely, overt recognition of the need for fluency and authenticity in the leader’s social media voice to be a lagging indicator. It comes later. But it will come.

Why do I say that? Look at the leadership characteristics that did rank high in Notter and Grant’s survey: “transparent, shares information freely;” “comfortable with conflict;” “open to diverse perspectives.” These are certainly capacities that are demanded of a social media-fluent association leader. But they are also leading indicators: factors that are driving associations to social media, regardless of their level of comfort, fluency or expertise in that environment.

Now I can already hear the Twitter-resistant among you protesting that these same leadership characteristics have relevance and importance in the “real” world, too. True enough.

But there is no question that social is the increasingly dominant medium for the general population. And I, for one, find the fact that we recognize the importance of being strong in the very areas that will make us successful in both cyber and more traditional communications venues a very encouraging sign. It is a basic requisite for survival in a multi-media environment that is changing rapidly around us —a world where we can ill afford any all-or-nothing media strategies and have to (at least for a while) keep our feet in multiple camps simultaneously or risk disenfranchising some portion of our constituency that is moving at a different speed toward social, or has different communications preferences.

I sometimes get irritated with some of the prophets of social media. They can be just a little too insistent that “social media is the answer,” regardless of the question¹. Social is a means to an end, not a goal to be pursued for its own sake. If the data had merely indicated popular enthusiasm for social media as social media, I would have been unimpressed. That would have just recognized an already obvious trend that might even be open to the charge of being a fad.

But the data didn’t do that. It provided validation that the underlying skills necessary in effective social media are increasingly recognized as means every association leader needs to master, regardless of how far they have gone down the social media path.

That suggests we’re moving the right direction, whether we realize it or not.

¹ And let me be crystal clear, I do not consider Notter and Grant to be included among those faux prophets of social media. To the contrary. They are among the most clear-headed analysts of social media and associations out there today. And if you haven’t read their book, Humanize, stop reading this blog and get it.

Filed under Social Media & Associations Tagged with Social Media, trends

Context, confidence and authority

16 April 2012 2 Comments

The problem I have with most social networking is that you can’t ask follow up questions.

Like a lot of people, I suppose, it took me a while to warm to Twitter and Facebook. I was initially put off by the sheer triviality of an overwhelming majority of the traffic. I mean really: I don’t care to take time out of my day to help Eleanor “reach a new high on Gingerbread Porch.” I have no interest in opening the fortune cookie sent to me by Rick. And my son probably didn’t need me to be instantly alerted with the news that he is now the mayor of a local microbrewery.

There is clearly a lot of chaff to sift through to get to the wheat. At times, so much chaff in proportion to wheat that it hardly seems worth the effort to do the sifting.

But if you stifle that initial impatience and annoyance, get a little bit ruthless about who you “de-friend” and block¹, and use some of the filtering tools available, it can at least be made more manageable.

And well worth the effort. I am often struck by both the incisiveness and precision of thought and by the profound insight and wisdom coming from entirely unexpected sources via LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Nothing, it seems, so focuses the mind as the need to get it all reduced to 140 characters. Nothing so challenges your established assumptions, bias and prejudices than a well-worded observation from a perspective you otherwise never would have considered.

But the exchange of information is (by design) asynchronous and non-linear. The platforms frustrate my desire to follow up or probe deeper. The flow of information remains largely (in some platforms, entirely) fragmented. As public as these engagements are, the context is inherently personal and unique to each of the disparate players in the dialogue. That is empowering, but it also creates an elevated need to take personal responsibility for exercising discipline and integrity in drawing your conclusions.

To be sure, there were loads of problems and limitations with such quaintly old fashion media as listservs and online forums: they were closed, insular and not conducive to diversity of views or breakthrough dialogue. But they did at least create a single, fixed thread for each conversation, which allowed you to follow ideas-reactions-elaborations as they developed. With the current platforms for social networking, too often the kernel of an absolutely brilliant idea remains just that: no more than the potential for future growth. And the very ubiquity and ease of individual access to mass communication obscures the fact that when I engage in a discussion with my community, I can’t be sure everyone I am talking to is seeing the same overall picture or collection of individual posts that I am. (Very often I find myself wanting to object on the basis of facts being argued that have not yet been introduced in evidence … only to discover that precisely that point has been previously made and discussed somewhere else on a wall or in a group I am not part of.)

Let me be clear: the problem didn’t start with social networking. In 1980, you couldn’t just assume a statement was true because you read it in the newspaper. Politicians have always used sound bites taken out of any context to imply a broader point, unsupported by any facts.

But as the speed and ease of mass distribution have increased, as the value placed on brevity has risen, and as the sourcing of information has grown more opaque, the issues of context, confidence level and authority have become even more the individual information consumer’s responsibility. Just because @twbmstr stated it cleverly and stated it as fact, 50 people retweeted it, and 5,000 people indicated they liked it, you have little basis to judge whether @twbmstr knew what he (or is it she?) was talking about in the first place. It is still up to each reader to provide whatever level of validation satisfies his or her standards of reliability. And I may or may not be privy to counterpoints and discussion on the very same tweet going on somewhere else.

Now before the social media cheerleaders get all in an uproar, I am absolutely NOT, NOT, NOT saying these are fatal flaws or that they invalidate social networking. The advances in community, collaboration and dialogue that social media have enabled are very real and not to be ignored. I am just saying that like any medium of communications, the now prevailing modes have limitations and flaws. Sometimes different limitations and flaws than the media they replaced. Sometimes differently, exaggerated flaws. But limitations and flaws nonetheless.

Which means they still need to be used wisely.

¹Sorry, Eleanor. In order to avoid the 30+ totally useless messages you put out each day, I am willing to risk missing the one substantive communication you share each month.

Filed under Social Media & Associations Tagged with Social Media, Social Media & Associations

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