Much like any conference that has to do with associations these days, it seems like so much revolves around two key topics—data and technology.

We have information on our members that we want to better utilize. And we want to take our marketing to the next level with tools to help us parse that data, or even, y’know, make our tweets prettier. (Speaking of tweets, you should check out our RebelMouse page.)

Some of those highlights in today’s Social Media Roundup:

Tools to Watch

More tools: ChartBeat (real time website stats), Canva (visual storytelling for SM), http://t.co/PuzHPK2YsU (image resizer for SM) #MMCCon

— Sandra Giarde, CAE (@sgiarde) June 17, 2014

Can't wait to get home and try @canva to add images to my tweets! Thanks @s_yamkovenko #mmccon LD1

— Amanda Lea Kaiser (@AmandaLeaKaiser) June 17, 2014

On Tuesday, SocialFish‘s Maddie Grant took a dive into a huge array of tech tools in her express learning session and, in the process, touched on starting points in spaces as diverse as data analytics, editorial organization, curation, and visual storytelling.

(Impressively, despite the fact that I know a lot of these sorts of tools, she introduced me to a few. Hello, PeopleLinx!)

Grant has slides from her session over at her blog, but it’s worth giving special mention to Canva, a web-based design tool that generated a ton of buzz among MMCC attendees and was mentioned at multiple sessions. If you find Photoshop or InDesign too bulky for making social shareables, it might just blow your mind.

Marketers Want Data

https://twitter.com/KarenatVERIS/status/479088470984777728

Maybe it’s not a surprise that attendees polled by the ASAE Marketing Council had a clear answer about their key concerns. It’s a big conversation point in marketing circles in general, and the numbers say it all: Attendees said they want to know how to dig into the data they have about their members so they can better use it. And further, they want to better personalize their offerings for members—something that requires lots of data.

As Associations Now‘s Joe Rominiecki noted at a Tuesday session on ASAE’s Associations Now Plus newsletter, it took a long time to get the product—which delivers customized content to every ASAE member based on their topic interests—off the ground, in part because it required the in-depth classification of content. To optimize personalized newsletters, you need a knowledge of member interests.

How’s your organization leveraging data for personalization purposes? Tell us in the comments below.

(artecop2/ThinkStock)