Yesterday I had the privilege of presenting at the IABC Canadian Western Region “Dare to Lead” conference (hashtag #D2L2010 on Twitter). Dare to Lead is an annual leadership conference for IABC board members across Western Canada, this time held in Calgary, the third largest IABC chapter in the world.

My talk was on “Socializing the association”. I first pointed out the obvious, that associations represent walled garden communities – folks inside the walled garden get good stuff, folks outside the wall do not. That model has worked for decades, but my hypothesis is lots of the good stuff can now be had via social media and web 2.0 sites, so there is the threat of substitution. I recommend associations embrace social media, think long and hard about applying the “freemium” model of doing business, or risk disintermediation like travel agents.

I added the video “Social Media Revolution 2″ from @equalman, author of “Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business” to the front of the slides. At the end of the video, just click the next button to get to the first slide.

I’ll get a screencast up shortly on how to use Netvibes as an inexpensive monitoring tool.

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