Synopsis

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

Biography

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.