Cruise or Accelerate?
If you had the choice would you rather ride in cruise control or accelerate your cruising speed? Please don’t respond to this question immediately, rather think about your answer throughout the next 7 minutes. Like me, many of you may have joined a Toastmasters club to continually improve your speaking and leadership proficiencies so you could use those skills to create opportunities in your business and personal lives. You also probably joined this club because you had so much fun here and we have a true sense of connection among our members.
Over the years, due to the efforts of inspired club members, Silver Spring Toastmasters has consistently attained the highest level of achievement possible for a club, the President’s Distinguished designation. And if you take a close look at our progress, while it is not a given, our club is poised to make President’s Distinguished this Toastmasters year as well.
In order to maintain its current cruising speed our club already knows what it must do and my primary goal this year is to help our club do what it knows. Individually and collectively we must continue to create project based content while educating and communicating through it. That content and our connectedness is what influences visitor after visitor to join us.
Now if we want to increase our cruising speed, how would we do it? Believe it or not, we already have an accelerator available to us. That accelerator can integrate our communication, educational, recruiting and retention efforts while making the strength of our content and connectedness more visible.
The accelerator is our club blog and the ways we can use it as a team. The success of any blog is based on having a steady flow of new content. So think about it: we can post meeting agendas, summaries, speech and evaluation videos and transcripts. We can even post photos and make announcements such as special events, inductions and award attainment. Each meeting could account for as many as 10 quick posts every two weeks.
Now the challenge is the effort it would take to coordinate this. It is a lot of work for one person so the answer is having a team of members manage the task. I propose that our club officers and anyone else who wants to be involved in the effort learn how to use the platform our blog is hosted on. Then posting could be assigned to team members by information type.
So once that challenge is answered, how would our club benefit from blog involvement? First off, when content is published on the blog it will further solidify our top search engine ranking for the term Silver Spring Toastmasters. This way people in the Silver Spring area who are searching for a way to improve their public speaking skills will see broader evidence of a fun and engaging solution to their problems and be attracted to experience in person what the Silver Spring Toastmasters family is all about. Also because blogs allow consumers to comment we’ll be able to deepen our own relationships and create a sharing community with people outside our club who may also be influenced to visit us.
Another challenge we’d face is some members may have a concern about their content being made public. I’d say that participation would be completely voluntary and next here’s a question to consider: what could involvement on the blog do for you as an individual? You could use it to learn skills that will help you expand your professional and personal network because of your content. Also you could learn how to build an online resume through your content and position yourself as a problem solver and thought leader in your field of expertise. The possibilities are many and you could make your start here.
So my fellow Toastmasters, fun, family and a Presidents Distinguished designation for our club this year are definitely my priorities and now I ask you again: would you rather ride in cruise control or accelerate your cruising speed?
