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Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs
- By Rawn Shah
- Published Jan 13, 2010 by Pearson Prentice Hall.
- Copyright 2010
- Dimensions: 6 X 9
- Pages: 192
- Edition: 1st
- Book
- ISBN-10: 0-13-235779-8
- ISBN-13: 978-0-13-235779-1
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Product Author Bios
Rawn Shah is best practices lead in the Social Software Enablement team in IBM Software Group, helping to bring the worldwide population of more than 350,000 IBMers closer together and to improve their productivity through social software. His job involves investigating the wide range of social computing technologies, collecting best practices, measuring the usage and behavior of social software as it impacts productivity, and advising on implementation, governance, and operations.
In his prior job as community program manager for IBM developerWorks, he led a team of operations and development staff covering the worldwide network of thousands of communities, blogs, wikis, and social computing environments supported by IBM. He also led the creation of the developerWorks spaces software tool, a multitenant system to allow individuals and teams to bring many social tools together into their own focused social environments.
An avid software gamer, he has been involved in the online gaming world since 1990, both as a player, a guild leader, and hosting massively multiplayer games. He has witnessed how these social environments have grown from underground curiosities to the billion-dollar businesses of today, with the nature of social grouping and collaboration evolving hand in hand with every new offering.
He has previously served as network administrator, systems programmer, Web project manager, entrepreneur, author, technology writer, and editor in different business environments: as a sole proprietor, in a small startup, and in a Fortune 50 company. He has contributed to six other books, the most recent being the category-leading Service Oriented Architecture Compass, which since has been translated into four languages. His nearly 300 article contributions to technical periodicals such as JavaWorld, LinuxWorld, CNN.com, SunWorld, Advanced Systems, and Windows NT World Japan, covered a wide range of topics from software development to network environments to consumer electronics.
The First Best-Practice Guide to Executing Any Type of Social Computing Project
Organizations today aren’t just participating in social networking, collaborative computing, and online communities--they are depending on those communities to play crucially important roles in their business. But these collaborative environments don’t just manage themselves: To succeed, they must be guided and nurtured carefully, actively, and intelligently.
In Social Networking for Business, Rawn Shah brings together patterns and best practices drawn from his extensive experience managing worldwide online communities at IBM and participating in social networking on the Internet. Drawing on multiple real-world examples, Shah identifies key success factors associated with launching social networking projects to meet business objectives and guides you through managing the crucial “micro-challenges” you’ll face in keeping them vibrant.
• From mega-trends to micro-issues
Mastering both high-level strategy and day-to-day, ground-level management
• Defining the social experience you want to provide to your community
Clarifying how members can join together and collaborate on collective tasks
• Focusing on the crucial human factors
Building a culture of engagement in deeper collaborative relationships
• Promoting effective leadership and governance
Setting ground rules that work appropriately for the situation, without “oppression”
• Building the skills to manage and measure your collaborative project
Discovering the skills necessary to effectively lead computing projects
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
A technical manual for an inherently social solution, By
This review is from: Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Rawn Shah's book, Social Networks for Business, is a top down technical view on implementing social media. He provides a view of social networking that will appeal to IT professionals as it is based on a premise that social networking is a technology that should be structured and controlled at the center like other technologies. While this is possible, the advice Shah offers is based on the fundamentals that if you build it right, manage it right, then they will come.That logic is simple but it assumes that business professionals are users of the technology rather than creators of the solutions that operate on a social network. That last piece is important as those following the advice in this book bear a high probability of simply recreating existing low value low activity intranet portals and knowledge bases in new social networking clothing. A warning that this is a rather lengthy review in order to explain why I see the book as technically correct but not... Read more
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Badly written, By
This review is from: Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Have you ever read a textbook that was almost impossible to follow? That's what it's like trying to read "Social Networking For Business." The information may very well be excellent. I wouldn't know; I couldn't stay awake long enough to find out.I picked a sentence at random so you can see what I mean: "However, you can still fit this aggregate behavioral information into the context of a given framework by separating commitment into distinct threshhold levels and watching for markers of certain types of actions that fit profiles of behavior for each level." Just a few minutes of reading this kind of thing will put you right to sleep. I recommend the authors read Rudolf Flesch's book, "How to Write, Speak, & Think More Effectively," apply the principles of readability, and try again.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Technical, Thorough, and Confusing, By
This review is from: Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I am interested in social networking, and its possibilities in business. My friends and I spend a lot of time on Facebook, Twitter, and other sites, so it makes sense to use all of this to the benefit my businesses. My first "business" is working for a private school that is always looking for ways to increase enrollment and obtain funding. My second business is a small communications company that operates various informational websites. I was hoping to find a book that offered practical, easy-to-understand, and proven ways for businesses to use social networking. Unfortunately, I found this book to be very academic, technical, and not very user-friendly. While I am used to reading academic literature, I didn't intend to buy a book that reads like a dissertation on social networking.First, let me highlight some of the positives. This book is very thorough, and is filled with tables full of information about various types of social networking, and ways a business can use... Read more |
Online Sample Chapter
Social Networking for Business: Social Computing on the Ascent
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xiii
About the Author xiv
Chapter 1 Social Computing on the Ascent 1
Reshaping the Way We Work 5
Integrating into Business Processes and Activities 8
Summary 9
Chapter 2 Sharing a Social Experience 11
Modeling Social Experiences 17
Different Experiences for a Complex World 21
Summary 23
Chapter 3 Leadership in Social Environments 25
Governance and Leadership Models 28
A Selection of Leadership Models 29
The Centralized Models 29
The Delegated Model. 32
The Representative Model 34
The Starfish Model 35
The Swarm Model 36
Choosing a Leadership Model 37
Leaders and Influencers 40
Summary 42
Chapter 4 Social Tasks: Collaborating on Ideas 45
The Structure of Social Tasks 46
Identifying Beneficiaries 47
Describing the Form of Aggregation 48
Building a Template for a Task 49
Different Models of Social Tasks 49
Idea Generation 50
Codevelopment 53
Finding People 58
Summary 60
Chapter 5 Social Tasks: Creating and Managing Information 61
Recommendations and Reviews 61
Reviews 62
Direct Social Recommendations 63
Derived Social Recommendations 65
Creating and Categorizing Information 66
Sharing Collections 67
Folksonomies and Social Tagging 68
Direct Social Content Creation 70
Derived Social Content Generation 71
Filtering Information 72
Social Q&A Systems 73
Summary 74
Chapter 6 Social Ecosystems and Domains 75
Grouping Instances 75
Grouping Tools 77
Grouping Audiences into Domains 78
Who in the Organization Should Run the Social Environment? 81
Summary 83
Chapter 7 Building a Social Culture 85
Defining a Culture for a Social Environment 86
Ideology and Values 87
Behavior and Rituals 88
Imagery 90
Storytelling 92
Culture and Maturity of Social Environments 93
The Cultural Impact of Social Architecture 94
How Social Experience Models Impact Culture 94
How Social Leadership Models Impact Culture 97
How Social Tasks Impact Cultural Values 99
Summary 99
Chapter 8 Engaging and Encouraging Members 101
Belonging and Commitment 101
Creating a Model for Identifying Commitment 103
Maturing over a Lifecycle 108
Programs to Grow or Encourage Your Social Group 112
Membership Reward Programs 112
Recruiting Evangelists and Advocates 114
Member Training and Mentoring Programs 116
Summary 117
Chapter 9 Community and Social Experience Management 119
The Value and Characteristics of a Community Manager 120
Personality Traits and Habits 125
Where Do Community Managers Fit in an Organization? 127
Community Manager Tasks and Responsibilities 129
Member and Relationship Development 129
Topic and Activity Development 132
Administrative Tasks 133
Communications and Promotion 135
Business Development 136
Summary 137
Chapter 10 Measuring Social Environments 139
What Can You Measure? 140
Dimensions of Measurement 143
Types of Metrics 144
Metrics and Social Experiences 147
Measurement Mechanisms and Methods 149
Quantitative Analytic Measurement Mechanisms 149
Qualitative Measurement through Surveys and Interviews 150
Summary 152
Chapter 11 Social Computing Value 153
Defining the Structure of a Social Environment 154
Choosing a Social Experience 154
Setting a Social Leadership Model 156
Defining a Social Task 157
Grouping Experiences and Identifying the Audience Domain 159
Cultural Forces Shaping Social Environments 160
Social Computing and Business Strategy 161
Index 163
Sample Pages
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