Blogs
Friday 9 July 2010
Here’s some facts aggregated from a number of sources (supplied on request) taken at the beginning of this year. They identify the type of people and the amount of real use people get from the most famous platforms in the business throughout the ‘western’ world (Europe, North America and Oceania/Australia). In many ways it makes for sober reading – perhaps the majority of people with access to the Internet (more than 63% - 747 million - of the ‘western’ world’s total population) are finding...
Friday 9 July 2010
If you have listened carefully to the opinions of your customers, paid attention to their changing wants and needs, and heard the wider conversations in your field, then you are in a far stronger position than ever before to understand and capitalise on the dynamics of your market niche. (If you haven’t then read Listen and Learn.) As well as having the kind of market intelligence your predecessors would have died for, you also have a direct line to every single one of your customers, and to...
Friday 9 July 2010
Some of the best comic material comes from listening in to conversations on the local bus. A journalist’s best source is the trusted insider to conversations and events as they unfold before they become public. In business, having access to timely information, often gleaned from conversations round the water cooler, can profit the individual and potentially damage her company.
We all like to listen in to others’ conversations and sometimes join in. It’s the natural way not only to socialise but...
Thursday 24 June 2010
Community Champions are those members who are the most active and whom you have officially appointed to be volunteer leaders within your community. You may call them Advocates, Volunteers, Leaders, Mentors or a number of other names. SiftGroups calls them Champions.
We’ve previously written about Community Champions in the blog by Lawrence Clarke called Any volunteers? How to reduce costs and increase activity, but now I would like to look in more depth at two very specific parts of this...
Thursday 27 May 2010
Agile is the all encompassing word used to describe project management methodologies which are empirical. So from the point of view of a project this means that in an Agile project, some of the definition of what will be delivered is done during the project - and based upon observations and experiments within it.
There are many different Agile methodologies, for example Scrum, DSDM Atern, XP (Extreme programming), and RAD (Rapid Application Development). Generally the...
Wednesday 12 May 2010
We’re not the only consultancy to encourage our customers to do persona profiling; but we’re probably more ambitious about it than most, hoping you’ll get much more than the usual benefits of market understanding and usable design. As characterisations of typical customers (current or future), if you only treat your personas as people you can interrogate or sell to, you are going to let them – and yourselves – down. They’re worth more than that.
At the heart of any success in the online world...
Friday 23 April 2010
When you plan your information architecture, you are aiming to present your wares in a manner that will make immediate sense to your customers, while reflecting the particular values of your brand, but your IA serves another function as well. It offers the scaffolding for your thoughts - a bit like contents page of a book, or the timetable of a conference. It has to be logically organised.
It’s true of course that the web allows myriad pathways to find information, and search engines may take...
Wednesday 31 March 2010
News International’s decision to start charging for their online newspapers has led to a lot of debate: will this save The Times, and the rest of the Murdoch stable, from financial disaster, or consign them to oblivion by driving away human eyeballs and search-engine spiders?
We can only wait and see: and every newspaper in the world will surely be watching closely. Free online news is causing most news publishers to haemorrhage money at an alarming rate. The best ones are...
Friday 12 March 2010
Rituals are personal routines – the time of day I brush my teeth – or more interestingly shared activities – the time of day I sit down and join my family for a meal. In a community sense rituals are universally acknowledged and shared. These rituals are needed to provide structure, predictability and character to the community to which the individuals feel they belong.
On a daily level such rituals manifest themselves as shared and repeated behaviour. Such behaviours can reinforce the...
Thursday 11 March 2010
Give us the widgets
“We’ve got to have a Twitter widget” – one of the key phrases used by web teams in 2008 and 2009. Prior to that, the best thing since sliced bread was having a Google map on your Contact Us page, or perhaps a nice AJAX-powered dynamic postcode lookup gadget. The truth is, some popular new technical tools are here to stay and others will fall by the wayside. The challenge for any organisation looking to take advantage of these emerging tools is the sheer pace at which they...
Tuesday 2 March 2010
I used to have a colleague who constantly worried about “getting all the ducks in a row”, by which he meant, I think, knowing what the elements of the task were and tackling them in the right order.
Re-thinking and re-creating your web presence needs you to line your ducks up; not because it’s so difficult to build a functioning website, but because it’s hard to devise one that fulfils all your objectives and integrates fully into your operational structures.We’ve all experienced some of the...
Monday 1 March 2010
Previously we have exercised ourselves over the meaning of ‘social media’ and the importance of a ‘social media policy’. With that as background it was clear from a recent talk I gave on ‘Creating an integrated social media strategy’ at the TFM&A show that there were plenty of people looking for answers.
What is social media?
To get us all in the same place it’s important to clarify the words we use. In this context when we say ‘social media’ we actually mean ‘online social...
Friday 29 January 2010
A few weeks ago we asked if you have a social media policy, and gave you some ideas for how to create a simple plan which will enable your internal team to help support the audience-facing representatives of your company or organisation.
But a social media policy is more than just knowing how to respond to online enquiries in a timely manner. It’s also about how your organisation presents its brand online, and how individuals within your organisation speak about your brand in their own personal...
Thursday 7 January 2010
We talk a lot about community and community management, blogging and content-sharing, but while the sexy stuff is important, don’t forget the old-fashioned arts of editing and publishing when you’re planning and developing the inhouse parts of your website.
Content management systems normally offer two friendly buttons at the bottom of the page, one marked Preview, the other Publish. Of course, your access rights to those buttons will have been set by the site manager, but if you are using a...
Tuesday 5 January 2010
What happens when someone asks you a tricky question in your community, website, Facebook page, Twitter page or blog? Do you answer them? How long does it take you to answer? If you don't know the answer, do you know the appropriate person to contact in your organisation? Does that person understand the importance of timeliness in a web environment?
Every organisation needs a team of internal “champions” to help support the audience-facing person of their team (you may call them a...
Thursday 17 December 2009
This is a 4-part guide to using Facebook and Twitter for those already running their own online communities on their own sites.
In Part 1 of this guide to using Facebook and Twitter I explained that you should get into the social media scene and have a look around to find out where you need to be, and how information you share can shape your audience's perception of you.
In Part 2 we discussed your online presence, information overload, and the types of information that I share on...
Tuesday 8 December 2009
This is a 4-part guide to using Facebook and Twitter for those already running their own online communities on their own sites.
In Part 1 of this guide to using Facebook and Twitter I explained that you should get into the social media scene and have a look around to find out where you need to be, and how information you share can shape your audience's perception of you.
In Part 2 we discussed your online presence, information overload, and the types of information that I share on...
Friday 4 December 2009
Stories get our attention. Good stories are easy to remember. Story-telling is the oldest form of human interaction, and helps convey meaning, values and custom. If we ignore the power of story-telling in building our online communities we are missing one of the most powerful conversational assets. Yet how many sites looking to engage with their audience demonstrate an awareness of this natural form of interaction?
Stories get our attention. Good stories are easy to remember. Story-telling is...
Wednesday 2 December 2009
I'm often asked how the Sift business came about, sometimes by clients and regularly by colleagues. So I asked our CEO, Ben Heald, to give me the details and I'm pleased to share them here.
The Sift Story
"The origins of Sift lie in the two key founders Andrew Gray and I. Andrew was running CompuServe in the UK, whilst I’d trained as an accountant with KPMG and had entrepreneurial leanings. I knew Andrew as I’d studied psychology at Bristol University with his wife Katharine, and...
Monday 30 November 2009
Back in August, as his News Corporation company reported huge financial losses, media mogul Rupert Murdoch announced his bold strategy for shaking up the newspaper industry: charging for content. It wasn't a new idea, of course; businesses of all types have tried charging internet users in many ways for many products, some sucessfully and others not.
Today, Johnston Press has become one of the first to adopt Murdoch's proposed charging strategy for a number of its local titles. One...
