Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs

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

About the Author :
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.