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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
    • Pages: 192
    • Edition: 1st
    • eBook (Watermarked)
    • ISBN-10: 0-13-263934-3
    • ISBN-13: 978-0-13-263934-7

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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

 

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

 

 
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