Ever invite a bunch of IT guys to liven up one of your New Year's Eve parties? Didn't think so.Rawn Shah's book "Social Networking for Business" strives to explain the Twitter-YouTube-Facebook dynamic to tech people and systems-savvy executives, which no doubt it accomplishes. For the rest of us, the book is a dry read and a head-scratcher.
"Social Networking" takes what is by definition a random populist phenomenon and boils it down to a taxonomy. Shah, an IBM tech guy, sees social networking in the same light as, say, Cisco networking. He refers to "social tasks" that help shape these interactive media, a telling choice of words.
He creates "social experience models," interesting but conceptually simple to those with a working knowledge of social networking sites and apps.
Here's Shaw on the variations of these models:
Most social environments implement multiple experience models, combined into different parts of the environment. This enables the environments to capitalize on different tasks when individual users require a particular type of experience.
Indeed. To be fair, one of Shah's primary concerns is not so much Digg or StumbleUpon but in-house top-to-bottom interactivity systems built by, and managed by, IT departments.
He successfully argues for social networking in all of its forms as essential for business, making "Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs"
useful for those of us dealing with dubious CEOs and boardroom luddites.
