Last week, I had a conference call to discuss a potential series of social media workshops we might have done with Leslie Poston, of NH’s Uptown Uncorked and the co-author of Twitter for Dummies.

However, Leslie found out earlier that morning that Lani and I are members of the International Social Media Association (ISMA). As a result, she said she couldn’t do any workshops with us or be seen as being associated with our business because of our relationship with ISMA.

That, shall we say, took me a bit off-guard.

Now, I knew that there had been a brouhaha in the blogosphere about ISMA back in December, but I hadn’t bothered to read anything about it. As I’ve told a number of people then and recently, I’m content to let ISMA handle ISMA issues, and focus on my own business. In retrospect, though, I probably should have paid a little closer attention.

Turns out Leslie also has her own specific concerns about ISMA, and she and I had a great conversation (really!) after the initial surprise wore off.

She asked me - and I’m paraphrasing - what I could tell her about ISMA to change her mind, because other people had already tried unsuccessfully to do so.

The rest of this post mirrors what I shared with her in response, which has little to do with ISMA and much more to do with our own business and the reasons for the decisions we made, which are four-fold:

1. Previous corporate experience.

2. Ramp up our learning curve for to serve our audience in general, and our clients in specific, much better.

3. Long-term trust in Mari Smith.

4. Global masterminding opportunity.

And up front, I’ll ask you the same questions (also paraphrased) I asked Leslie before I told her the story:

Based on what I’m about to share, can you see how we logically came to be involved with ISMA from a business perspective? Can you see why it makes sense that we as business owners made the decision to go through Mari’s program?

I’ll keep this short and to the point. Promise.

1. Previous stuff. Way back before the dawn of time (1998-2001), I worked in corporate America as a bank auditor. Me? A bank auditor?! Yes, you read it right: A bank auditor. And one of the expectations of the job was to work toward the “Certified Internal Auditor” (CIA) designation offered by the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA), a professional association for the industry.

Not only did I earn that one, I was about six months away from earning my “Certified Information Systems Auditor” (CISA) desgnation from yet another association, the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA), before I switched careers.

This wasn’t a matter of ego, stacking all the acronyms behind my name. This was a professional expectation, laid down by the AVPs, VPs, and SVPs who managed the auditing departments of two banks for which I’d worked as an auditor.

So when someone talks to me about the professional benefits of certification - regardless of how many organizations in the industry are doing the certifying - it’s an idea I can get behind.

2. Ramp up. In 2007 and 2008, we were getting more and more questions about social media from clients. Hey, when you handle blogging and online content strategy, it’s a natural leap.

We’ve been blogging since 2006, on Facebook since 2007, and Twitter since 2008 - imperfectly, in the trenches, learning as we go and figuring things out the way most small business owners do. But as the questions started coming faster, and became more pointed (i.e., “Can you help us?”), Lani and I knew we needed to get into a focused training program. We highly value education and professional development, and we looked to a source we already knew and trusted to get it.

3. Mari Smith. We’d been following Mari for about a year when we had the chance to meet her at an event in November 2008. You know how sometimes you meet someone in person and they’re not the same person you’d been reading, listening to, and watching on YouTube? Not so with Mari. She was exactly as genuine, generous, and transparent in person as she was online. What a relief!

Mari announced in March 2009 that she was going to be rolling out a six-month intensive training program - not just on Facebook and Twitter, and not just her! She brought in Lou Bortone (another NH guy) to teach about online video, Jesse Stay (the creator of Static FBML), Nathan Kievman on LinkedIn, and a few others, too. It was a virtual program - with live content delivered via webinars - and that fit in perfectly with our married-with-business-and-two-young-children lives.

Plus, she had even bigger plans. She intended the program to be a certification-level thing. She intended to launch a global association at the end of this inaugural program. And when she talks about “Radical Strategic Visibility,” she walks the walk.

We believe Mari, we believe IN her and the purity of her intentions, and it was the right program at the right time for us. Not to mention…

4. Masterminding. This is one thing I didn’t share with Leslie when she and I talked, but it’s very relevant (and particularly so for Lani). You know the benefits of collaborating with like-minded entrepreneurs. It’s why you go to networking gigs, attend regular events in your industry, and other business-focused get-togethers in your corner of the world.

But how often do you get the chance to participate in a six-month social media intensive, sharing resources, brainstorming new opportunities, and making valuable connections, with 50 business owners in six countries (US, Canada, UK, Italy, South Africa, Australia)?

Answer: Once in a blue moon. We’d have been silly to pass it up. So in April of 2009, we said “Yes” to Mari. And there you have it.

Now, here we are, 11 months later. Are there other social media certification programs out there? Yes. Are any of them perfect? No. Mari herself regularly notes through her own channels and with comments on other folks’ blogs that there’s room to improve ISMA, and she’s consistently working in that direction.

And there are the “other” questions. Can social media practitioners authentically be certified in the first place? How can a new professional body, with the same intentions as other well-recognized associations - like, say, the American Marketing Association (AMA), the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) or the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) legitimize itself? What’s an appropriate investment for in-depth social media training? Are direct marketing tactics relevant for the social media space?

Those “other” questions go well beyond ISMA, and to my mind, focusing on ISMA in answering them is the equivalent of ignoring the forest for the trees. So in future posts later this month and year, I’m going to start throwing my hat into the larger, more relevant fray and answer these larger questions.

In the meantime…

For Epiphanies Inc. in specific, in my conversation with Leslie and reputationally in our corner of the world, the real issue boils down simply and only to those two questions I asked her (and you) earlier:

Can you see how we logically came to be involved with ISMA, from a business perspective? Can you see why it makes sense that we as business owners made the decision to go through Mari’s program?

Posted in Social Marketing, Storytelling, Tools to "A-Ha Yourself!" |

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