Blogs
Our bloggers are here to share their experiences, challenges and ideas gained from their work with online communities and helping organisations engage with their audiences.
Tuesday 31 January 2012
Since the publication of our benchmarking report on online communities for membership bodies we’ve been encouraged to continue to stir the pot and engage more with senior management. The overriding message from the report is that senior managers don’t appreciate just how valuable proactive engagement leading to productive collaboration with members can be.
An attendee, Gareth Jones, has blogged about the event, and one of his observations is pivotal to the successful development of any member...
Wednesday 14 December 2011
A big thank you to all those who attended our inaugural ‘huddle’! Together we explored the findings of our first annual report on the health of online communities in membership organisations. Using the content from the report, four groups simultaneously shared their experiences, challenges and frustrations and then summarised them back to the other groups. The outputs were both enlightening and reassuring. Many recognising that they are in a very similar place.
From both the report and the...
Monday 21 November 2011
As you may be aware if you’ve visited siftgroups.com or seen our tweets over the past few days, last week we released our very first Community Report: Benchmarking Online Community for the Charity Sector.
Through our research, we set out to discover what’s key to running an online community in the Third Sector right now? What are people measuring? What would they like to measure? What issues keep cropping up?
Our findings made for fascinating reading; did you know, for example, that 81% of...
Friday 11 November 2011
A few weeks ago, we had to stop and catch our breath – so many new things happening in the world of social media! And still so much more to come...
And now Pages for Google+ has launched. So what does this mean for you right now?
We usually advise people to exercise a bit of caution before rushing into a new platform – you should ideally invest time and energy into social media websites which match with what your audience is doing at this moment.
But alongside that we recognise that sometimes...
Thursday 10 November 2011
Today is World Usability Day.
This is rather timely for us, as it follows the recent anniversary of SiftGroups adapting its approach and bringing on board a whole raft of new talent, turning the business into a truly user-centred design agency.
Over the last year user experience, creative and front-end development roles have been fully embedded into all of our work. And with this comes a marked improvement and focus on the usability of our digital output. Evidenced-based information...
Thursday 3 November 2011
Should you put a maximum length on user-generated content like comments, or blogs, or reviews, or your site? It’s question that’s sometimes discussed in the light to of trying to stop the kind of long, boring rants that allow the posters to get somethings of their chests but don’t do any favours to anyone else. This approach meant that earlier this year, the New York Times cut the maximum permitted posting down by 60%, while the BBC News – citing, in part, the extra cost of moderation when long...
Friday 30 September 2011
We all know that the world of social media constantly fluctuates - but at the moment it seems to be in overdrive.
We've got Google+ to think about, and soon - branded pages for Google+. We've got Facebook's ongoing changes, and upcoming Timeline. We know that we'll have to think through how to approach the Timeline from the perspective of telling the story of our charity, organisation, company or brand. But we don't know yet how this will impact on Pages. Then there's Facebook's new mobile...
Friday 16 September 2011
A lot has changed since we gave you some hard facts about online social media platforms last Summer. It’s amazing how much things can change in a year – but we wouldn’t expect anything less in the world of social media. For 2011 we're providing a more in-depth snapshot of stats and demographics for a handful of the most common platforms. Our resources are listed at the bottom of each section, and are sometimes quoted directly.
To put things into perspective, consider that as of March...