Feature Article

monvalleyadmin July 10, 2014Editorial

Mon Valley Region on the web

by d tomasic

At several Region and Region Board meetings then President Russ Redshaw expressed a desire to steer the MVR toward establishing a web presence.  At the January Board meeting where the leadership alignment for the next year was established the board placed Dave Tomasic as member-at-large in charge of communications.  DaveTomasic volunteered to re-establish Region newsletter and to spearhead putting MVR on the web.  The interest in the web may have a root in the convenience board members believe it can afford the members.  However, a deeper more compelling reason may be behind the move to toward a web presence.

Unlike younger adults and kids who are considered digital natives, most members of the MVR are in fact not totally integrated digital immigrants.  A digital immigrant is a person who matured before the information age and is in the process of embracing the ways and machinery of the digital age.   It is easy to spot one:  they wear analog wrist watches, have blinking clocks, have recently discovered e-mail, have normally developed thumbs, and can explain why the sound your phone naturally makes is called a dial tone.  Oh, when you say web, they conjure a mental picture of where spiders live.  This is perfectly normal and nothing about it is wrong.  For the Region leadership to embrace the concept of an internet presence is a true sign that digital immigration is happening.  The web is a place to easily conduct a currently tedious internal business.   It is also where the club can make its best effort to grow and grow the club is a must if it is to survive.  Web participation will give the club visibility among the ever growing segment of the population that takes its information from and leverages the convenience of the internet to its advantage. Without increased visibility, the club appears to be doomed to die through natural attrition.

As MVR members, we understand and derive a utility from meeting together, participating in club activities, and generally promoting a mutual love of the automobile.  The car is losing the “path-to-freedom” image of the past.  Cars have a different set of appeals for today’s digital natives.  But cars can be and should be celebrated for many more reasons: their place and roll in history, as platforms for engineering advancement, as inspirations, and as art to mention a few.   Just as we choose to emigrate to less familiar digital ways; we need to establish a path for digital natives to choose immigration into the world represented by the MVR.  People are still people and they discover all kinds of things that attract their interests.  For people younger than most of our membership, the inherent impatience of the digital natives will blind them to our offering if it is not readily available and easy to access.

What the club needs to do to attract new members, and maybe keep current members, is brand MVR membership as an attractive and preferential product within our pool of potential customers.  Our most pressing membership problem is that our product is saturated within our current customer pool which is basically our cumulative acquaintances.  We need to become visible and attractive to a larger pool of customers.  The web can be an important factor in reaching out to potential members, but web presence alone will only work if coordinated with efforts designed to spark desire and attract potential members.  A marketing campaign of sorts needs to be envisioned, organized and executed.

We need to apply the Pareto’s Principle to our visibility.  You may recognize this as the 80-20 rule.  The value of the Pareto Principle is that it reminds us to focus on the 20 percent that matters. Of the things we do conducting the Region’s business, only 20 percent really matters. Those 20 percent produce 80 percent of our results.  We need to  identify and focus on those things.  We need to focus amd make sure  that 20 of business percent is our first concern.