Business

Social Media Roundup: Build Your Own Road

One associations pro's efforts to build her own startup in the AMS space. Also: why efficiency is an easier hurdle than innovation—and why that shouldn't stop you from being innovative.

Building something new isn’t easy. It can be an incredibly maddening experience, especially since it seems so much easier to build upon roads where the ground’s already been laid.

But there’s something refreshing about going in a direction nobody else is, kicking up a little dust in the process. Two takes on that mindset in today’s Social Media Roundup:

Start Me Up

It sounds risky to drop everything and launch a startup in the association space, doesn’t it? But Teri Carden, founder of Review My AMS, has been angling to create a new business model for a while. And late last year, she went for it. What led to her decision, and how’s it going so far?

In a new interview with Association Mavens‘ Bryan Kelly, Carden explains exactly what inspired her to start her clearinghouse of association management system reviews and drove her decision-making process. Everyone has an opinion on their AMS, it seems, but the right information can be hard to find. She said she wasn’t really sold until she started asking people outside of her circle of friends:

“I wanted to hear from the marketplace themselves,” she said. “I went to … the ASAE technology conference, and there I did some market research. The findings were rather interesting, and so here I sit today saying the findings made it a go.”

The full interview is above; check out the transcript on the Association Mavens website.

Innovation Over Efficiency

“If emerging markets are attractive, why is so much investment capital flowing to mature markets? And, if growth is mostly about gaining market share and developing new products, why is a substantial focus on investment to retain existing customers and make existing products and services more efficient?”

Over at Harvard Business Review, Accenture’s Matt Reilly raises these questions about why, when there’s so much room for ambitious growth strategies, it seems so much of the investment is happening in already-mature areas. Part of the reason is that there’s a lot of room for efficiency in these markets, something that digital technology investment is well suited to encourage. But Reilly says there’s room to do more.

“Too many companies appear to be overlaying digital technologies on their existing infrastructure and business model,” he notes.

Is there room to build new infrastructure apart from the old? There’s a nice broad question to ask. Read Reilly’s post to get your mind working. (ht @ChatterBachs)

(iStock/Thinkstock)

Ernie Smith

By Ernie Smith

Ernie Smith is a former senior editor for Associations Now. MORE

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