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10 of 11 persons found the following review helpful.
A technical manual for an inherent social solution
By Mark P. McDonald
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 masters as it is based on a premise that social networking is a engineering that ought to be structured and controlled at the center like other technologies. While this is possible, the counsel Shah offers is based on the fundamental principle that if you build it right, manage it right, then they will come.
That logic is simple but it assumes that business pros are users of the engineering science rather than creators of the solutions that operate on a social network. That last piece is primary as those following the counsel in this book bear a high prospect of plainly recreating existent low value low action intranet portals and cognition 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 rectify but not sufficient to address the issues fully. Shah is not wrong, it is rather he is narrow in the capacity to his counsel to work beyond his experience and he is looking at the issue with an conventional techno-management lens that does not capture the potential of these new technologies. Perhaps no book may 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 established sense, but procreative technologies that require engaging the business in their creation of the apps that matter.
My intent in this review is not to degrade Shah’s work. The book is initial rate, complete, well written and very thoughtful. Its just that Shah’s application of traditionalisti 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 counsel he provides reflects their distinguishable sales/engineering culture that looks for structure and unluckily is distinctive to Big Blue. There is not one thing wrong with IBM, the same way that there is not one thing defective with the counsel in this book.
Readers need to be conscious that this book treats social networking as a management and technical issue. A view that I have observed is not complete at best and damaging to the enterprise attempts to gain the collaboration, psychological result of perception learning and reasoning sharing and flexibleness necessitated 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 finish down to salary ranges for community managers and their assigned work tasks. I may see this working in a highly structured culture where persons look for the right way to bestow before making a contribution. The issue with profiting value from social networking is not that they do not have sufficient management; it is more like they do not have sufficient special importance and significance 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 original few pages surmise a strong definition of social media and networking. It ought to have appeared in the firstborn chapter as it sets a good context for the book
* Proves technical and operational management best exercises for those technologies
* Clearly written and concentered as it delivers a significant amount of data in 162 pages.
Challenges
* The absence of examples is regrettable, as we need to see how these exercises work in reality rather than being described in the abstract. Changing social relationships is always contextually heavy and a good deal of examples would have gone a long way to addressing the points noted earlier.
* The book does not address business issues that may be addressed by social networking. The focus of the social networking solutions implied by the book is in terms of persons 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 in spite of the fact that Shah offers models that are not based on central control like the starfish model. Unfortunately as he goes to illustrate potential apps the management structure turns out to be centralized more oftentimes than not (Chapter 5).
* The book outlines solutions that are dependent on the writers experience within IBM and that colors the recommendations and views. IBM is cited sporadically allround 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 wholly independent analysis of what works in the market place. This does not make what Shah writes defective – it just makes it narrow in is potential application.
* Social conduct is assumed to come from management structures rather than the motivation and interest of people. This gives the reader the sentiment that a top down approach, driven by sponsors may tacitly coerce collaboration out of a corporation.
Shah’s book brings a technical set of exercises 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 ought to recognize the limitations and implied mental models found in the book.
I need structure for social networking and this book does a good occupation of describing structure. However, you need the right social schemes original as no amount of structure will get over weak social dynamics and create value.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Badly written
By Adam Khan
Have you ever read a textbook that was almost inconceivable to follow? That’s what it’s like attempting to read “Social Networking For Business.” The info may very well be excellent. I wouldn’t know; I couldn’t stay awake long sufficient to find out.
I picked a sentence at random so you may see what I mean: “However, you may still fit this aggregate behavioral selective information into the context of a given framework by separating dedication into distinct threshhold levels and looking at for markers of sure types of actions that fit profiles of conduct for each level.”
Just a few minutes of reading this kind of thing will put you right to sleep.
I commend the writers read Rudolf Flesch’s book, “How to Write, Speak, & Think More Effectively,” implement the principles of readability, and try again.
2 of 2 persons found the following review helpful.
Technical, Thorough, and Confusing
By David Bennett
I am fascinated in social networking, and it is future prospects or potentials 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 gain my businesses. My introductory “business” is working for a private school that is always looking for ways to increase enrollment and obtain funding. My second business is a little communications company that operates respective 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 employed to reading academic literature, I didn’t intend to buy a book that reads like a dissertation on social networking.
First, let me spotlight galore of the positives. This book is very thorough, and is filled with tables full of data with regards to respective types of social networking, and ways a business may use the Internet. Shah provides elaborated selective information on the gains of using social networking to address mutual business troubles (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, give hope or courage to “out-of-the-box” thinking, and implicate clients and collaborators in decision making and project development. Using social networking in this fashion saves the company money, and contributes to a company’s originative capital. I likewise found his real-world examples helpful. Thus, there are some 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 exhaustive and academic that he lost my interest. For somebody in my situation, this book was overkill. It seems as if there are headings, subheadings, and then even more subheadings under that! If I had the time to routine it all, or was involved in a business huge sufficient to exhaustively explore each facet of social-networking, this book would be great. I just don’t in truth need to know the six social government models, or the five “markers of dedication levels” (comfort with online tools, doing the minimum, taking part and learning, relating and belonging, seeking recognition, and altruism…just so you know!). Even the examples he gives that I am intimate with and use, such as a popular blogging website, are often buried in segmentations like “Ecosystems,” where I learned that said blogging internetlocation is a “homogeneous ecosystem,” while IBM is an example of a “heterogeneous ecosystem.” While I comprehend his point, I am not in truth that fascinated in the elaborated theories related to a blogging site. Unfortunately, this is the only instance that the very successful internet site is brought up in the entire book!
Overall, this book may be helpful for a great deal of people, who are very mesmerized in social-networking, or who are involved in a business that is huge sufficient to deeply explore the gains of social-networking. This is why I gave the book three stars; Shah knows his stuff, and I am convinced somebody will gain from it. However, that “someone” is not me. I would have preferent a more concise and practical book, filled with simple and concrete steps businesses may take to use social-networking for their benefit.
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