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

Library Journal

For companies looking to increase exposure and revenues in today's online environment, leveraging social technologies is serious business. Any project or venture using social technologies requires a strategy, an oversight structure, and mechanisms to measure the outcome. Shah (social software enablement, IBM Software Group) here documents these best practices and identifies patterns and metrics as well. Do not let the slim size of this text fool you; this is quite a dense read and is extremely granular in nature. Furthermore, the book has a strong emphasis on IBM solutions, which might make it more difficult for smaller businesses to embrace the advice. VERDICT While the advice offered here on macro- and micro-level activities is technically applicable to any social project or initiative, readers may not always be able to relate to the content or the examples. In the end, this is a scholarly text appropriate for only the most serious-minded and is potentially an excellent resource for MBA programs.—Judy Brink-Drescher, Molloy Coll. Lib., Rockville Centre, NY