Peter Furtado
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...
Tuesday 2 August 2011
The more happy people you know, the happier you’ll be yourself (so say Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler in their book Social Networks and Happiness ). And if you’re happy, your mood will make your contacts happier and cheerfulness will ripple through society, to your friends, and their friends, and their friends too. And remember you’re just five handshakes away from the President of the USA – so if you have a good laugh today, then the papers will carry photos of Barack Obama grinning...
Monday 27 June 2011
More and more companies and charities are using social media for their marketing and campaigning, for brand reputation and management, finding new contacts, friends and followers, and taking part in conversations big and small. New ideas are emerging all the time; it’s fun, it’s creative, it doesn’t involve much capital investment, and it can lead to surprising new openings and opportunities.
What’s not to like?
A really quite alarming proportion of these businesses haven’t addressed the...
Monday 21 February 2011
Peter Furtado has been working with SiftGroups since 2008. His background is in publishing, and for ten years he was editor of the monthly magazine History Today, as well as chief executive of the company that published it. He studied history at Oxford University, holds a DLitt from Oxford Brookes and has written and edited several books on historical topics.
Monday 21 February 2011
For many people, online community is virtually synonymous with discussions (what used to be called forums) and social networking. Discussion forums are ubiquitous, so it’s not surprising that these are what people think of first when we talk about the social web. On a lot of sites when you click on the word ‘community’ you get taken to a forum area, quite possibly hosted elsewhere, and left to get on with having conversations. But does it have to be like that? Are discussions the only way of...
Tuesday 5 October 2010
You’ll never walk alone
What exactly do we mean when we talk about community? It’s a really hard word to define (Wikipedia, rather bizarrely, tell us that “there were ninety-four discrete definitions of the term by the mid-1950s”), and many of the definitions you’ll find today – especially from social media consultants – are not so much descriptive as rhetorical. Here at SiftGroups, we use this definition:
Community: An evolving group of interacting people organized around common values and...
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...
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...