Blog post July 2009

If a member decides not to complete their profile then they’ve chosen to be relatively anonymous, whether they know it or not. But if as community manager you have a large percentage of members that are anonymous this will obviously negative impact on the quality of conversations. Conversely if you have a community where most members have a rich profile which they keep up to date then it’s likely to result in positive conversations. And positive conversations sustained over time help sustain a successful online community.

The challenge we at SiftGroups are always set by organisations and businesses looking at online social media is typically a request to “show us examples of social media delivering measurable value (ROI)”. If only it were that simple. Like any social activity, online social media is pervasive and insidious. It cannot be corralled or managed in a traditional way.

I recently bought a neat little Netbook to use as a sofa companion whilst tolerating various abysmal American drama shows. It runs Ubuntu, the geek's choice of operating system, and although my fingers are probably built more for a full-size keyboard, it's a very decent little thing overall.

Until, that is, i deveoped a edious fau wih he keyboard.

A couple of Saturdays ago, a Facebook contact for one of our communities picked up the phone and dialled me – the Community Manager. He had the wrong number, but the number was for one of my colleagues who delivered the message that this person was very insistent about speaking to me, called back a few times, and seemed to be saying some strange things.

For many blogging is a bit passé – the new blogging is Twitter with all the attraction of immediacy and connection with others that a ‘classic’ blog would struggle to provide. So what’s the point of a blog?

The job of the community manager is not an easy one. He or she has to juggle competing internal cultures of IT, senior management, and the community itself in order to deliver results. Results in terms of engaged, active discussions as opposed to corporate generated content which is typical of traditional websites.  At SiftGroups we recognise how difficult this balancing act is.

You'll almost certainly have read by now that Google are entering the operating system market with Chrome OS, and they claim that it will spell the end for

At SiftGroups we’re compiling a glossary of terms that we use and terms that we avoid. How we all describe people has a direct bearing on how we treat them – and that certainly applies to the world of computers and the Internet. In everyday conversations the word ‘user’, if used at all, is usually in the context of abuse – such as ‘drug user’.

It's been a long two days in Bournemouth meeting a spectrum of businesses already trying out social media or thinking of giving it a go – so it was nice to end the day with Serena Everton, the Head of eCommerce at AllSaints Retail, saying I'd given her 'the best piece of advice of all'. And what was that advice? If you're in the retail sector especially, don't attempt to engage with social media initiatives if your business is not already truly customer-focused.

Not so many years ago, when for most companies the web was little more than a way to publish a brochure without paying for the printing, the subject of 'uptime' tended to be of interest only to the big players - online banking, eBay, Amazon, the BBC and so on. These were true 24x7 operations with money, market share and reputation at stake if their service went offline.

What's the difference, then, between 99% uptime, and 99.99% uptime?