The Social Factor: Innovate, Ignite, and Win through Mass Collaboration and Social Networking Review

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(More customer reviews)Four signs that you are seriously behind the Internet-driven times: 1) You type "www" in front of Web addresses, 2) You think "geek" is a term of derision, 3) You subscribe to TV Guide and 4) You have a landline. If these descriptions fit you, then you will find Maria Azua's book eye-opening. She describes online developments such as wikis, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, widgets, social bookmarking, folksonomies, avatars and all the rest - and explains what they can do for your business. However, if you are already an experienced social networker, Azua's guide will be a review of familiar information. getAbstract recommends this book to businesspeople who are feeling mystified by the Internet - that is, anyone who needs to update his or her Web skills. Online, it's a new world. Azua's book provides a good map.

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Harness the Power of Social Networking to Promote Innovation and Drive GrowthA treasure trove of strategic and tactical insights for the business leader

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Digital Habitats; stewarding technology for communities Review

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(More customer reviews)I'm often the technology steward for communities of practice (CoP). I create the Ning spaces and configure `em, I setup the email lists, I work out whether we should have a wiki or a blog or a discussion forum or some other combination of communication technologies. As you can see I'm quite a geek: I really do love it.
And whenever I get stuck I'll contact my friends at CPSquare: Etienne, Nancy and John. And while I know they all have a deep understanding of CoPs I tend to ask Etienne the theory questions, Nancy the technology questions and John the group dynamics questions. Together they are a formidable team. Sadly I think their new book, Digital Habitats, will give them strong cause to suggest I should RTFM: Read The Flipping Manual.
Digital Habitats (DH) has a single goal: to help the reader understand the role of technology steward in cultivating a community of practice: what is it, why you would do it, are you are cut out for it, how to do it and where to find help. But it is not a shoppers guide nor a roadmap for technology selection.
There is a lovely photo of Etienne, Nancy and John in the preface and I feel that reading DH is like have a friendly conversation with them on a sunny balcony. They provide the context, a little theory, then lots of practical tips supported by real life stories to ground it and make it memorable.
For me there are three ideas in this book I have already put into practice with great effect.
Experience shows us that all know that communities of practice are different, and sometimes poles apart. DH introduces the idea of community orientations to help us understand where the emphasis might lie and therefore what technologies make most sense.
There are 9 orientations: meetings, open-ended conversations, projects, content, access to expertise, relationships, individual participation, community participation, serving a context. With my engineering communities, for example, I've asked the members where they see their current orientation and then ask them to identify where they would like to be. A community might start off very content focussed but realise that the real benefits will come from providing access to expertise. By understanding this orientation gap the technology steward can start introducing tools to facilitate the future orientation needs.
The second idea I find useful is how my friends (I was going to say `the authors' but it didn't feel right) describe the range of activities a community might be engaged in. The axis range from informal to formal and learning from to learning with. This diagram helps me ensure I'm thinking about the full range of possibilities when helping communities members design their CoP.
DH envisages three types of readers: deep divers, attentive practitioners and just do it-ers. The just do it-ers are directed to chapter 10 which contains an action notebook. It is a series of checklists to help you think about the role of the technology steward. What I love about chapter 10 is that I can jump in and start learning about the role by doing things and then come back to the descriptions contained in the rest of the book when it is more meaningful for me. DH makes the job of finding the relevant descriptions in the other chapters easy through a multitude of cross-links from chapter 10 to the relevant book section.
There are very few practical community of practice books available (I can think of 3 others) and Etienne has already had a hand in writing one of them. So Digital Habitats is a valuable addition to this exclusive club. It's highly readable and practical and will definitely help make a difference to the quality of your technology support for your community of practice.

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Technology has changed what it means for communities to "be together." Digital tools are now part of most communities' habitats. This book develops a new literacy and language to describe the practice of stewarding technology for communities.Whether you want to ground your technology stewardship in theory and deepen your practice, whether you are a community leader or sponsor who wants to understand how communities and technology intersect, or whether you just want practical advice, this is the book for you.

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The New Social Learning: A Guide to Transforming Organizations Through Social Media Review

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(More customer reviews)If your profession is learning and development, The New Social Learning is a must read.
Even if you are one of those people who are suspicious of social media or one who thinks social networking is a place for wasting time or if you think Twitter is a place where people tell you what they are eating for lunch, you will read the book and understand exactly how social learning is a new imperative for how we enable organizational learning. You will find this book to be a practical guide to implementing social learning in your organization.
At the end of each chapter, there is a list of common objections and how to overcome them. I found this to be the most useful part of the book. Just like a sales person needs to overcome objections from prospects, any organizational leader who intends to implement a new thing, must prepare for the inevitable objections that arise from the skeptics and curmudgeons. And there will be many. The list of objections and the ways to overcome them are, by themselves, worth the cost of your time to read this book.
The other idea that I infer this book is that people will learn what they want to learn when they want to learn it despite our best efforts to design and deliver training. Too many L&D professionals are hung up on the need to control the instructional design and training delivery process, believing that people simply do not learn properly, unless proper instruction is used in proper training delivery. Well this book is one step in the direction of proving that idea wrong. Our job is to not deliver instruction, but to enable people to learn what they need to learn to get their jobs done now.
Although the New Social Learning does not propose that instructional design and classroom training will be replaced (far from it), Tony and Marcia weave tales of company's that are using various elements of social and collaboration technologies to enable people to learn and most importantly grow and improve job performance....which is what this is all about in the first place.

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Most business books on social media have focused exclusively on using it as a marketing tool. Many employers see it as simply a workplace distraction. But social media has the potential to revolutionize workplace learning. People have always learned best from one another—social media enables this to happen unrestricted by physical location and in all kinds of extraordinarily creative ways. The New Social Learning is the most authoritative guide available to leveraging these powerful new technologies.Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner explain why social media is the ideal solution to some of the most pressing educational challenges organizations face today, such as a widely dispersed workforce and striking differences in learning styles, particularly across genera-tions. They definitively answer common objections to using social media as a training tool and show how to win over even the most resistant employees. Then, using examples from a wide range of organizations—including Deloitte & Touche, IBM, TELUS, and even the CIA—Bingham and Conner help readers sort through the dizzying array of technological options available and decide when and how to use each one to achieve key strategic goals.Social media technologies—everything from 140-character "microsharing" messages to media-rich online communities to complete virtual environments and more—enable people to connect, collaborate, and innovate on levels never before dreamed of. They make learning dramatically more dynamic, stimulating, enjoyable, and effective. This greatly anticipated book helps organizations create a contemporary learning strategy that is as timely as it is transformative.

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Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a Connected World Review

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(More customer reviews)Intended to be an introduction and guide to the application of social network analysis (SNA) to the realm of social media, readers interested in how we can use methodologies of SNA and mathematical applications of graph and networking theory, to analyze the social media networks that form when individuals link-up or respond to each other, will want to purchase and study this book.
First, some background notes. This book has its roots in the work of an organization that has received generous funding support from Microsoft, called The Social Media Research Foundation. The Foundation has made significant progress in the development of open tools and open data sets for the purpose of encouraging open scholarship in the realm of social media and worked hard to develop tools that allow for better visualization and analysis of such widely used services as email, Wikis, Twitter, flickr, YouTube, Facebook, and the World Wide Web (WWW).
However, tracking content flowing through social media can be like trying to drink from an open fire hose. Realizing this, the Foundation began to focus resources and personnel on efforts to utilize ideas from the social sciences to follow the "social media swarm" of comments, favorites, product tags, ratings and links, in order to discern the key words, individuals and topics being communicated here and there. One of the tangible results of their work is the Foundation's release of a free and open product referred to as "NodeXL." The application itself is "a spreadsheet add-in," that is designed to support macro-views of networks for the purpose of "discovery and exploration." The Microsoft-funded research team built this tool to fit inside the user's copy of Excel in either Office 2007or 2010.
Does it work? Well, users say that it "makes the creation of social network maps as easy as making a pie chart."
Users can use NodeXL to make maps of public social media conversations based upon topics that matter to them. These maps of connections between people who mention a product, or a brand or some other key word or phrase, can reveal to users key positions and clusters in the crowded social networks. In this manner, users can zero-in on individuals who discuss a topic as they appear to be the "center" of the display and often are one of the key and influential members of the population being analyzed as well as have the ability to measure changes over time.
With small and multinational businesses alike, entrepreneurs, private individuals, and State and Federal government agencies all looking to SNA tools for help in discerning trends, networking connections, and changes in social media interactions, Microsoft's NodeXL free, open-source plug-in for use with Excel provides users with instant graphical representations of the relationships that exist between complex networked data. This is an obvious breakthrough for researchers, students and end-users alike who seek to study and understand visual and network analytics and develop applications useful in the real world.
Still interested? Then, this is a book for you - as members of the application development teams present readers with good overview case studies and how-to explanations regarding the developments behind each NodeXL application feature. Here's the table-of-contents to whet your interest:
I. Getting Started with Analyzing Social Media Networks
1. Introduction to Social Media and Social Networks
2. Social media: New Technologies of Collaboration
3. Social Network Analysis: Measuring, Mapping, and Modeling Collections of Connections
II. NodeXL Tutorial: Learning by Doing
4. Getting Started with NodeXL, Layout, Visual Design, and Labeling
5. Calculating and Visualizing Network Metrics
6. Preparing Data and Filtering
7. Clustering and Grouping
III Social Media Network Analysis Case Studies
8. Email: The Lifeblood of Modern Communication
9. Thread Networks: Mapping Message Boards and Email Lists
10. Twitter: Conversation, Entertainment, and Information, All in One Network!
11. Visualizing and Interpreting Facebook Networks
12. WWW Hyperlink Networks
13. Flickr: Linking People, Photos, and Tags
14. YouTube: Contrasting Patterns of Interaction and Prominence
15. Wiki Networks: Connections of Creativity and Collaboration
Appendix- NodeXL for Programmers
Principal authors are - from the University of Maryland - Derek L. Hansen of the iSchool and Ben Shneiderman of the Department of Computer Science and with Marc A. Smith, a sociologist, that is presently Chief Social Scientist with the Connected Action Consulting Group in Silicon Valley, California.
Highly recommended for college and university library collections, and readers interested in methodologies used to better understand the social networks permeating our personal and professional lives.
R. Neil Scott, MBA/MSLS
Middle Tennessee State University


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Businesses, entrepreneurs, individuals, and government agencies alike are looking to social network analysis (SNA) tools for insight into trends, connections, and fluctuations in social media. Microsoft's NodeXL is a free, open-source SNA plug-in for use with Excel. It provides instant graphical representation of relationships of complex networked data. But it goes further than other SNA tools -- NodeXL was developed by a multidisciplinary team of experts that bring together information studies, computer science, sociology, human-computer interaction, and over 20 years of visual analytic theory and information visualization into a simple tool anyone can use. This makes NodeXL of interest not only to end-users but also to researchers and students studying visual and network analytics and their application in the real world.

In Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL, members of the NodeXL development team up to provide readers with a thorough and practical guide for using the tool while also explaining the development behind each feature. Blending the theoretical with the practical, this book applies specific SNA instructions directly to NodeXL, but the theory behind the implementation can be applied to any SNA.

To learn more about Analyzing Social Media Networks and NodeXL, visit thecompanion siteat www.mkp.com/nodexl

*Walks you through NodeXL, while explaining the theory and development behind each step, providing takeaways that can apply to any SNA

*Demonstrates how visual analytics research can be applied to SNA tools for the mass market

*Includes case studies from researchers who use NodeXL on popular networks like email, Facebook, Twitter, and wikis

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Social Media at Work: How Networking Tools Propel Organizational Performance Review

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(More customer reviews)A great guide for building, accelerating or transforming your organization's Web 2.0 strategy.
Don't miss out on the social media revolution sweeping the corporate world.
There are great case studies along with tips to build your Web 2.0 strategy.
It's a bible for Web 2.0 at the workplace!

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The definitive guide for using social media to build more effective organizations
Today's networking technologies-wikis, blogs, and social networking sites-are changing how we build professional relationships and work collaboratively. In this insightful book, three organizational development experts from Oracle Corporation offer executives down-to-earth strategies for leveraging the power of social media to build more effective and agile organizations, engage employees, and sustain competitiveness.
Offers practical advice for using social media (wikis, blogs, and social networking sites) to increase organizational effectiveness
Presents proven recommendations for building teams, accelerating learning, and fostering innovation by adopting social networking tools
Shows how to tap into the power of social networks to improve organizational performance
Demonstrates how social media will help organizations thrive for years to come by drawing on case studies from companies like Intel, Cisco, Nokia, and others

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