By Carla Kalogeridis
Cow tipping is a myth, an urban legend, if you will. Cows don't sleep standing up, therefore they don't tip. Cows are prey animals and very aware of their surroundings. If they let you sneak up on them, it's because they are domesticated and think you might have a bucket of grain. And if you could get close to a cow who happened to be not paying attention—and standing on two legs—it would still take more than you and a couple of friends to tip her over.
If you don't believe me, just check YouTube. Or Wikipedia. Or Google.
Where I grew up, everybody knew somebody who had tipped a cow. The stories were repeated and embellished and giggled over. But then, along came the Internet and the World Wide Web. Free information on anything you can imagine—even cow tipping.
So let's say you are the Cow Association of America. You've got information about cow tipping, information that warns people not to try it because it's not possible anyway and is even potentially dangerous. Along comes a woman who googles cow tipping and checks out your association's website because it pops up first. She sees an article titled, "The Truth About Cow Tipping.” She's intrigued. She clicks on the link, anxious to find out if that cute guy she met at Speed Dating really did tip 14 cows in one evening and lived to tell about it. And then:
You must be a member to access this information. Log on now, or click here to have membership information sent to you.
Does this person join your association? No. She gets irritated, hits the back arrow on her browser, and checks out the next website on her Google search—and the next after that, if necessary—until she finds the information she needs…for free.
In fact, the really scary truth is that even our members who have a login often choose to skip to another source rather than be bothered to locate and key in their information. Does your request to login lead to check out (as in, "I'm outta here”)?
Unless your association's information is so proprietary or one-of-its-kind that nearly no one else has anything like it (or even close to it), then chances are potential members can find most of what they need online for free. We all know that, whether we are openly talking about it or not.
So here's the million-dollar question: If information is no longer the membership holy grail, what is? An association's great content still entices members to join—but it may no longer be the new member reel-in that it was pre-Web. As we come to grips with that, we must think more strategically about what we are doing with our content—and why.
Carla Kalogeridis is editorial director of Association Media & Publishing. For the expanded version of this commentary, see Signature magazine, September/October 2011, p. 56.
