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