SiftGroups - Insider

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Welcome to SiftGroups Insider

Welcome to the new look SiftGroups and our first Insider newswire. We’ll be aiming to use these to keep in touch with both our clients and other people we’ve been talking to over the last few years, and to share news and information on both SiftGroups and the rapidly developing world of social media.

Four steps to community success

Vibrant online spaces don’t just happen, they need careful planning and nurture to turn them from a barren wasteland into an active, thriving resource. Our 4-step programme gives your community the tools and know-how to succeed.

	Plan We'll put you in your members' shoes and help you to speak their language. You'll learn how to focus your resources on delivering real benefits to your visitors and rapid ROI to your stakeholders.
	Build Giving you the modules and tools you need straight out of the box. We won't trap you with technology either; your Open Source site is yours to keep.
	Sustain Our experienced community managers can guide you through a comprehensive mentoring programme leaving you with the right skills for the job.
	Harvest We've had our own communities for more than 10 years, so we know exactly how to make the most of them.

Read more about what we do at SiftGroups.com

From SiftGroups.com

Each month, the SiftGroups Insider will offer up the best snippets from our bloggers.

Coffee, bacon and leveraging one's assets

The promise of strong coffee and bacon rolls prompted nearly 100 publishers to set their alarms a little earlier last Thursday morning and gather at the Law Society Hall in Chancery Lane for a Publishers Breakfast Seminar.

SiftGroups co-hosted the event along with Jobs board supplier Madgex and SEO specialist SiteVisibility.

I am a person not a user

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’. So why is this the term that’s applied to all of us the moment we get near a computer?

Team news

	Rupert Jabelman joins us as a PHP developer, strengthening our development team and helping us deliver tailored requirements for clients.
	After carefully listening to all of your feedback, we have also brought in Kate Lover to the customer support team to help us communicate better and work on our Community Healthcheck programme.
	We love telling people what we do, both online and in person, so Polly Holbrook has joined our marketing team to help us spread the word.

A foreword from James Skinner

Chief Operating Officer, SiftGroups

Some of you will remember that we’ve been called SiftGroups before, and in a way it was really important to us to keep our focus on what we do best – and that’s using our decade of experience of working with online communities and groups of like-minded individuals to help our clients get the most out of their investment in social media.

One key new offer that I’m particularly pleased to announce is our Community Healthcheck Plan which offers a regular, structured review of both the quantity and quality of engagement happening within your site. You don’t have to use our technology to get the benefits of this programme, so regardless of the platform we can help you benchmark your site and measure its progress.

I look forward to speaking to many of you over the coming weeks, and to meeting some of you at one of our forthcoming events.

Social Media Expert

Gems from our community management expert

1. Put quality before quantity

Before you can start to increase yield stop chasing ‘eyeballs’ and consider engaging communities.

Read four more tips

Real Homes Magazine

Following the acquisition of Real Homes magazine from Hachette Filipacchi in December 2008, Ascent, the special interest publising arm of Centaur Media, commissioned SiftGroups to produce a new site to join their existing portfolio of online community titles including Homebuilding & Renovating Magazine, Plotfinder.net and Period Living.

With no existing web presence for the title, Ascent needed a rapid delivery and Sift was able to use its 12-years of experience as a social media publisher to provide an off-the-shelf solution ideally suited to Real Homes, delivered in a matter of days.