@stuartgh » SiftGroups

Essential online community blog posts of 2009

Stuart Hall — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 09:20:42 +0000

My blog posts of 2009, from how to reward top contributors to discussion about community metrics to grow your community, bullet pointed for you below. Here’s to a successful 2010 with more thoughts on online community, & with a special eye out for enterprises investing in communities for their employees (and what that might mean for internal communication professionals).

Community metrics module for drupal wins innovation award

Stuart Hall — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 18:29:47 +0000

Great to see that the community metrics module for drupal won an award for innovation at the Sift awards on Friday night. To read more about what the metrics can do, please see my post on the SiftGroups blog where it goes into more detail: New metrics to help you grow your community.

Pic taken by mint imperial.

One swallow does not make a summer

Stuart Hall — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 19:30:16 +0000

Coming out of the Bannatyne’s Gym this evening a news piece on Sky News caught my eye about social networks. It was the news indeed (published on Facebook yesterday) that they were cash flow positive: “Earlier this year, we said we expected to be cash flow positive sometime in 2010, and I’m pleased to share that we achieved this milestone last quarter. This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term.”

No doubt plenty of wise folk will say this is a good sign but maybe Facebook are the exception in a recession?

I’d probably agree except that I’ve noticed some other encouraging signs, both at the very large (Facebook) end of the business spectrum and the not so large, in comparison, from the UK. For starters the news on 2 September that European social software specialists Headshift, had been bought by the Dachis Group based in Austin, Texas, in a move described by the Guardian as the ‘Facebookification of business’: “The London-based social media firm Headshift is the first acquisition of Jeffrey Dachis’s newly formed Dachis Group. Dachis’s former agency, Razorfish, was a huge success with a value of $5.5 billion at the height of the 2000 bubble. With his new company, the entrepreneur plans to invest in the corporate social networking area and will focus on making customer participation a big business: “Social business is the new way of working, not just new technology.”

Thirdly, that London-based social media agency FreshNetworks, doubled in size in 2008, are doubling in size again this year and moving to new offices, by all accounts.

So perhaps a trend? Prediction is, as I think they say, an uncertain science, but with online community specialist company SiftGroups in Bristol, who I work for, also moving into new offices things look brighter for sure. For me personally I have one further indicator, which is my own private confirmation of this upward trend, and for sure there remains the lack of cash for investment in the system at large. But finger’s crossed that while ‘one swallow does not make a summer’ that enough swallows can make something happen. Chaos theory anyone?

PS: And even as I sit here watching French Wednesday evening football at 21:02 news rolls in from TechCrunch: “Twitter Closing New Venture Round With $1 Billion Valuation”.

How can mentoring help online communities?

Stuart Hall — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:06:24 +0000

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.

But that said what positive tools can help you build a sustainable community and support your community manager? At SiftGroups we recognise how difficult this balancing act is. I’ve written about helping your community manager avoid burnout in the context of trying to run a customer-facing service without the skills and experience to meet those demands. Read more at the SiftGroups blog.