Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs
- ISBN13: 9780132357791
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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
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Review by M. McDonald for Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs
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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 enough to address the issues fully. Shah is not wrong, its rather he is narrow in the ability to his advice to work beyond his experience and he is looking at the issue with an established techno-management lens that does not capture the potential of these new technologies. Perhaps no book can capture it all, in which case this becomes part of a social media library and body of study.
That has been my observation at more than two dozen companies I have met all of whom have the same question “We, meaning IT, have built a social network with all the bells and whistles but no one wants to use it.” The reason behind the low use is in the question itself. Social networks are not built and provided by one party for others to use. Social networks are not software in the traditional sense, but generative technologies that require engaging the business in their creation of the applications that matter.
My intent in this review is not to degrade Shah’s work. The book is first rate, complete, well written and very thoughtful. Its just that Shah’s application of traditional heavy weight IT management principles do not consider the idea that the business, not IT builds the solutions. This is understandable as the author comes from IBM and the advice he provides reflects their unique sales/engineering culture that looks for structure and unfortunately is unique to Big Blue. There is nothing wrong with IBM, the same way that there is nothing wrong with the advice in this book.
Readers need to be aware that this book treats social networking as a management and technical issue. A view that I have observed is incomplete at best and detrimental to the enterprise efforts to gain the collaboration, knowledge sharing and flexibility needed to compete in this environment.
Shah recognizes this issue, devoting five of the ten chapters to issues related to the social system. Unfortunately here he takes a technical management view defining the roles, governance and structures required to set up a central management of the network. The work is good and complete down to salary ranges for community managers and their assigned work tasks. I can see this working in a highly structured culture where people look for the right way to contribute before making a contribution. The issue with gaining value from social networking is not that they do not have enough management; it is more like they do not have enough emphasis on the social systems. In this regard I like Seth Godin’s notion of mavens as a lightweight structure to make the social systems work.
Strengths:
* Comprehensive in addressing the management and technical issues involved in implementing social networks in a modern top down corporation
* Strong focus on defining terms and laying out the taxonomy of social networking
* Chapter 10 the last chapter’s first few pages summarizes a strong definition of social media and networking. It should have appeared in the first chapter as it sets a good context for the book
* Proves technical and operational management best practices for those technologies
* Clearly written and focused as it delivers a significant amount of information in 162 pages.
Challenges
* The absence of examples is regrettable, as we need to see how these practices work in reality rather than being described in the abstract. Changing social relationships is always contextually heavy and some examples would have gone a long way to addressing the points mentioned earlier.
* The book does not address business issues that can be addressed by social networking. The focus of the social networking solutions implied by the book is in terms of people using wiki’s, blogs and the like rather tan what the business uses the tools to accomplish.
* The view of social networking as fundamentally a technical and central management issue. This is despite the fact that Shah offers models that are not based on central control like the starfish model. Unfortunately as he goes to illustrate potential applications the management structure turns out to be centralized more often than not (Chapter 5).
* The book outlines solutions that are dependent on the authors experience within IBM and that colors the recommendations and views. IBM is mentioned sporadically throughout the book and while they have accomplished a lot using social networking, the book is a little too IBM centric to be viewed as an entirely independent analysis of what works in the market place. This does not make what Shah writes wrong – it just makes it narrow in is potential application.
* Social behavior is assumed to come from management structures rather than the motivation and interest of people. This gives the reader the feeling that a top down approach, driven by sponsors can tacitly coerce collaboration out of a corporation.
Shah’s book brings a technical set of practices that compliment McAfee’s business-social definitions in his book Enterprise 2.0. This is a good thing and readers will find value. However they must recognize the limitations and implied mental models found in the book.
I need structure for social networking and this book does a good job of describing structure. However, you need the right social systems first as no amount of structure will overcome weak social dynamics and create value.
Review by David Bennett for Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs
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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 the Internet. Shah provides detailed information on the benefits of using social networking to address common business problems (e.g. group-think, lack of real collaboration, etc). This book makes a strong case for using social networking to facilitate better communication among employees, encourage “out-of-the-box” thinking, and involve customers and partners in decision making and project development. Using social networking in this fashion saves the company money, and contributes to a company’s creative capital. I also found his real-world examples helpful. Thus, there are many good points and ideas contained within this book.
Now, let me express the things I didn’t like. The treatment of the topic is so thorough and academic that he lost my interest. For someone in my situation, this book was overkill. It seems as if there are headings, subheadings, and then even more subheadings below that! If I had the time to process it all, or was involved in a business big enough to thoroughly explore every facet of social-networking, this book would be great. I just don’t really need to know the six social government models, or the five “markers of commitment levels” (comfort with online tools, doing the minimum, participating and learning, relating and belonging, seeking recognition, and altruism…just so you know!). Even the examples he gives that I am familiar with and use, such as a popular blogging website, are often buried in sections like “Ecosystems,” where I learned that said blogging site is a “homogeneous ecosystem,” while IBM is an example of a “heterogeneous ecosystem.” While I understand his point, I am not really that interested in the detailed theories related to a blogging site. Unfortunately, this is the only instance that the very successful site is mentioned in the entire book!
Overall, this book may be helpful for some people, who are very interested in social-networking, or who are involved in a business that is big enough to deeply explore the benefits of social-networking. This is why I gave the book three stars; Shah knows his stuff, and I am convinced someone will benefit from it. However, that “someone” is not me. I would have preferred a more concise and practical book, filled with simple and concrete steps businesses can take to use social-networking for their benefit.
Review by Bojan Tunguz for Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs
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I love social networking tools. I am continuously logged into Facabook, and I use Twitter more or less regularly to promote some of my professional websites. I thought that a book on social networking for business would help me use these tools more effectively, and perhaps improve the visibility and accessibility of my professional websites. However, from the information that I’ve gathered about this book it seems to be geared more towards large businesses which want to utilize social networking tools to manage their personnel and projects. Or so I assume based on the author’s background as some sort of social networking guru at IBM. The fact is, this book is so atrociously badly written that I will never know for sure. Poor choice of words, awkward phrasing, sentences in different paragraphs that allude to each other are just some of the problems with writing that I encountered already on the first couple of pages. I found myself reading and rereading several passages in order to understand what was going on. I can’t believe that a reputable publishing house would publish something like this. This book is in a need of a LOT of editing, but I fear that even with some heroic editing effort it still might be unsalvageable.
Review by bsg2004 for Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs
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This is a textbook-style theoretical book, geared more towards larger businesses and people who work or manage/plan enterprise environments and want to develop a serious social networking presence. Written by an IBMer, this has the look and feel of IBM – you may recognize the imbued process and formalisms. This book can perhaps also serve as an academic overview of social networking for businesses.
If you have a small or medium business or you are an Average Joe/Joanne interested in social networks or want to learn how to make them most of Twitter or Facebook, you will likely not find this book particularly helpful.
They should have probably given this book a better title to pin-point its target audience, maybe something like (Building) Social Networks for the Enterprise?
Review by Alain B. Burrese for Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs
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I just finished “Social Networking for Business” and if you are looking for a book to teach how to use facebook, myspace, youtube, twitter, and related sites to market your products and services because you have heard that social network marking is the way to go, this is not the book for you. This book does not show you how to use these kinds of sites for marketing. If this is the information you need, you need to look elsewhere. One reference you might find useful is “Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook” by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo.
“Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs” by Rawn Shah is a book for businesses or organizations that are looking to make an on-line community to play a role in their business. An example would be Amazon’s reviewing community. This book does not discuss writing reviews, but rather what kind of community would benefit different kinds of businesses and organizations.
This book is much more theory than practical steps. It shows a business how to look at trends, define the social experience it wants to provide to the community it creates, the different human factors involved when building a culture and deeper collaborative relationships, different kinds of leadership for the various communities, and what is needed to manage and measure the collaborative project.
The book is quite technical, and again, a lot of theory, and as such, it is a bit dry. I found that it had no practical applications for my smaller businesses. However, I did find the book interesting in an academic way. It was good to learn about the various social environments and how they can be used by businesses. With that said, this book really was not written for me and other small business owners looking to market with Social Networking. That’s what I thought it was going to be with the title. I was wrong. It is more about creating social networking platforms within your business. And even then, it discusses the social and community aspects, not the nuts and bolts and technical aspects of doing this.
If you are in a business or organization and are tasked with executing a social computing project, this book will assist you in the planning of such a project. The book really is for community managers or developers. If you want to use sites such as facebook, twitter, youtube, and so on to market with social networking you will want to find another book. It’s a good book for its specific market.
Reviewed by Alain Burrese, J.D., author of Hard-Won Wisdom From the School of Hard Knocks and the dvds: Hapkido Hoshinsul, Streetfighting Essentials, Hapkido Cane, the Lock On Joint Locking Essentials series and articles including a regular column on negotiation for The Montana Lawyer. Alain Also wrote a series of articles called Lessons From The Apprentice.