Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs
I just finished “Social Networking for Business” and if you are looking for a book to teach how to use Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, and related sites to market your products and services because you have heard that social network marking is the way to go, this is not the book for you. This book does not show you how to use these kinds of sites for marketing. If this is the information you need, you need to look elsewhere. One reference you might find useful is “Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook” by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo.
“Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs” by Rawn Shah is a book for businesses or organizations that are looking to make an on-line community to play a role in their business. An example would be Amazon’s reviewing community. This book does not discuss writing reviews, but rather what kind of community would benefit different kinds of businesses and organizations.
This book is much more theory than practical steps. It shows a business how to look at trends, define the social experience it wants to provide to the community it creates, the different human factors involved when building a culture and deeper collaborative relationships, different kinds of leadership for the various communities, and what is needed to manage and measure the collaborative project.
The book is quite technical, and again, a lot of theory, and as such, it is a bit dry. I found that it had no practical applications for my smaller businesses. However, I did find the book interesting in an academic way. It was good to learn about the various social environments and how they can be used by businesses. With that said, this book really was not written for me and other small business owners looking to market with Social Networking. That’s what I thought it was going to be with the title. I was wrong. It is more about creating social networking platforms within your business. And even then, it discusses the social and community aspects, not the nuts and bolts and technical aspects of doing this.
If you are in a business or organization and are tasked with executing a social computing project, this book will assist you in the planning of such a project. The book really is for community managers or developers. If you want to use sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and so on to market with social networking you will want to find another book. It’s a good book for its specific market.
