Social Media

This will be the fourth summer that I will teach my graduate class in designing social media. Every year, I have asked online for suggestions of book (not usually "textbooks") for the class which is part of the MS in Professional and Technical Communication at NJIT. Students in the PTC program tend to be (or intend to be) designers, technical writers, media & social media managers, but I always get a few students from the management, communications, media, IT and design majors.

The course examines how organizations use social media as communication tools for marketing, education & training and community building and students do social media surveys and create strategy proposals for actual organizations.

Though the bulk of the daily, short readings are current and available online, I also ask each student to select an outside book that focuses on an area of interest to their goals. they share content from that book when appropriate into the discussions online so that the class gets content from a number of other books.

Making the reading selection process itself a social media project seems appropriate. Books and readings in social media go out of date so quickly that it seems foolish to rely on a traditional textbook.

I am also a proponent of Open Educational Resources, especially open textbooks. Having put two sons through college not so long ago, I am also very cognizant of the cost of textbooks. There are lots of open texts (again, textbook may be a misnomer) and I try to use those when possible.

As general texts for the class, I will include three texts that are available free online. These three are not strictly about social media, but each contains ideas that I find provocative to the discussion. I will point students to specific chapters or sections and I feel a lot better about doing that knowing that there will be no cost to them.

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler has made the entire book and additional materials available for free download at cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/

The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation, by Jono Bacon [free PDF download]

Jonathan Zittrain's book, The Future of the Internet - and how to stop it is also a free pdf download under a Creative Commons license.

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Outside Reading Book Suggestions for DESIGNING FOR SOCIAL MEDIA
The first section of the list below includes books I have read and found useful and that students have used. The second section includes titles suggested by readers of this blog, colleagues and titles found, read and recommended by my students in past years. You'll notice that many of the titles are not specifically on social media or are on some area within social media (such as marketing or design).

If you would like to suggest a book related to an aspect of social media, please do so by adding a comment below.

1. Virtual Communities- Felicia Wu Song  "Does contemporary Internet technology strengthen civic engagement and democratic practice? This book seeks to understand the technology on its own terms, focusing on how the technological and organizational configurations of online communities frame our contemporary beliefs and assumptions about community and the individual. It analyzes key structural features of thirty award-winning online community websites."


2. Designing mLearning: Tapping into the Mobile Revolution for Organizational Performanceby Clark Quinn is being used this summer in NJIT's PTC 650 - ELEARNING DESIGN FOR MOBILE


3. What Would Google Do?: Reverse-Engineering the Fastest Growing Company in the History of the World by Jeff Jarvis and also his second book, Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live


4. Power Friending - Amber MacArthur


5. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations - Clay Shirky


6. Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies - Charlene Li


7. Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide: Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations - Amy Shuen


8. Designing for the Social Web - Joshua Porter


9. The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future - S. Craig Watkins


10. Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone - patterns, principles, and best practices for starting a social website - has more of a design focus rather than current trends (so it might be relevant longer).


11. Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone. - Mitch Joel - a business focus on using Net marketing, esp. free tools and services


12. Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee ~ Web 2.0 for the enterprise


13. The Twitter Book by Tim O'Reilly and Sarah Milstein - using twitter in a personal or company context


14. The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr


15. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, by Sherry Turkle


16. Virtual Communities (Digital Formations) by Felicia Wu Song


17. The Social Media Handbook: Rules, Policies, and Best Practices to Successfully Manage Your Organization's Social Media Presence, Posts, and Potential - Nancy Flynn


18. There is another book similarly titled The Social Media Management Handbook (subbtitled "Everything You Need To Know To Get Social Media Working In Your Business")


19. also several other social media handbooks specific to different areas


20. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation - Tim Brown


21. The Cluetrain Manifesto - though ten years old, the authors' 95 theses about the networked marketplace probably make more sense today. Observations about business in America and how the Internet will continue to change it.


22. Building Social Web Applications: Establishing Community at the Heart of Your Site -  by Gavin Bell


23. The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success - Safko


24. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins.  This book puts web 2.0 technologies and trends into a much larger historical context of participatory culture. 
    

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The following titles are ones that I have not read, but that have been recommended by my students and others.



25. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green


26. Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook (and Other
    
    Social Networks) by Dave Kerpen  I am very interested in the art/science of creating content that grabs large audiences. I chose this book because it focuses on creating content as well as how to retain your audience and keep them engaged with your brand. I may also have been taken in by the Facebook thumbs up on the front cover, telling my subconscious that this was the book to buy.
    


27. The Social Media Strategist: Build a Successful Program from the Inside Out - Christopher Barger
    


28. The B2B Social Media Book: Become a Marketing Superstar by Generating Leads with Blogging, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Email, and More by
    
    Kip Bodnar and Jeffrey Cohen.
    


29. The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future by S. Craig
    
    Watkins  Unlike the other books that have been posted about so far, the book I chose is not really about marketing with social media. It is more
    
    about the culture of social media and people’s use of it, specifically users in their late teens and early twenties. The author interviewed a number of young people about the ways that they use social media and their feelings and attitudes towards it.


30. Six Pixels of Separation by Mitch Joel


31. Socialnomics by Erik Qualman.
    


32. The Science of Marketing: When to Tweet, What to Post, How to Blog, and Other Proven Strategies by Dan Zarrella - a scientific approach to the way businesses and brands approach marketing. It uses a combination of marketing, statistical, and psychological research to explain why and, more importantly, how, companies should adapt marketing strategies such as blogging, social media, email marketing, and webinars.
    


33. Ken Auletta - Googled: The End of the World as We Know It


34. Shel Israel- Twitterville


35. Chris Brogan and Julian Smith Trust Agents


36. The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging


37. David Meerman Scott - New Rules of Marketing & PR


38. Paul Gillin - The New Influencers
    


39. Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge - Putting the Public Back in Public Relations
    


40. David Kirkpatrick - The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that's Connecting the World
    


41. Bob Garfield - Chaos Scenario


42. David Meerman Scott - World Wide Rave
    


43. The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business - "whuffie" is Hunt's word for social capital on the Web
    


44. Virtual Communities: Bowling Alone, Online Together by Felicia Wu Song
    


45. On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and Its Founders - Michael A. Banks


46. I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy - Lori Andrews
    


47. Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices - Christopher Locke


48. The Social Media Business Equation: Using Online Connections to Grow Your Bottom Line - Eve Mayer Orsburn
    


49. Return on Relationship - Ted Rubin and Kathryn Rose
    


50. Navigating Social Media Legal Risks: Safeguarding your Business - Robert McHale
    


51. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture - Jean Burgess, Joshua Green, Henry Jenkins, and John Hartley
    


52. Wide Open Privacy: Strategies for the Digital Life - J.R. Smith and Siobhan MacDermott
    


53. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age - Manuel Castells
    

Last December, Microsoft opened up registration for its own social network Socl http://www.so.cl to users with Microsoft and Facebook accounts. They had beta tested it with Microsoft employees and college students before that. As social networks go, it's more Pinterest than Facebook or Google+. The landing pages are photo collages.

Will it compete with Facebook? I don't think it was designed to compete. It comes from Microsoft Research FUSE Labs. I read that their research was in social search with students and more related to learning. I don't see how that research led to Socl which seems to a service where people connect/follow others over shared interests via image collages. In other words, it's Pinterest.

I could mock Microsoft for that but on their own Socl "About" page, they say that Socl is not designed to compete with the established social networks. They describe it as an “experimental research project with a minimal set of features.”

One of those features is “parties” which lets groups participate in online "video viewing parties." It's no Google+ Hangouts but I do see a similar strategy with Socl to what Google is doing with Plus. Both companies are trying to create a cross-platform ecosystem where all the parts are connected. Google has had some success with that. Some. Can Microsoft connect their mail, Bing, Socl etc. across hardware (Surface tablets) and software (Windows 8)?

I keep reading bits and pieces about Google using semantic search technology. It's a way that they plan to answer user questions rather than simply hunt down words. For quite awhile I had read about this being the next big thing in search engine functionality. I'm no expert on search technology but it seems that most of the searching we now do is semantic.

We have become used to seeing our search results as list of blue links. That's how it has been since the beginning. But you are probably noticing more things on the top of that results page. The promise of semantic search is to improve search accuracy by understanding our intent and also the contextual meaning of the terms we search.

Although Apple's Siri has both fans and critics, the potential is pretty exciting. It can support natural language now and it will get better at semantic search in the future. Instead of just using a keyword-based search, we can ask a question. Instead of "restaurant, Italian" and a zip code, you ask "Where's a good place to get Italian food nearby?" Is that question really so much easier than the keyword search? Well, Siri or Google or the next big thing in search will will know where you are located already (via GPS or your IP address) and it will also know that we have been to other restaurants in the area. And if we have entered some social data, like reviews of those restaurants, it will be able to suggest somewhere to eat that fits out personal little algorithm.

At least that's is the plan.

It was a year ago that I read an article about Google's semantic search algorithm. and since making it work requires vast amounts of data, Google seems like the one to do it. Now, why don;t I include Bing or other search sites? For one thing, I haven't heard much about their attempts at this, but mostly it's because they don't seem to have the other "personal" data about me that would make it work.

I actually took that Bing versus Google test online at http://www.bingiton.com/  and it consistent comes up Google for me.

I have also read that "true" semantic search uses an "inference engine" which means that - like a good human reader - instead of just recognizing words, it draws on its own "knowledge" to reach a conclusion.  Hello, ontology!

Oh yeah, something else needs to happen. We, the users, need to change our searching habits. We will have to move from basic keywords that result in thousands of results, to clear queries that recognize the capabilities of the engine.

Tweetchats are live synchronous conversations that happen on Twitter. People gather around a designated hashtag and anyone who wants to participate just searches for the hashtag and then uses it in their tweets.

These thing pop up organically at events. Most conferences create an "official" hashtag and ask people to use it it during the conference. A variation on planned conversations are the chats that emerge around events like elections, the Academy Awards, the President's State of the Union address etc.

Of course, you can follow a hashtag at any time. Looking at the tag #MOOC will show you the current conversation on Massive Open Online Courses, but a tweetchat is when a designated time is planned to chat. (See an example below) Tweetchats usually have a moderator(s) who will ask questions and guide the conversation.

Some hashtags have been used for several years. For example, if you search in twitter for the hashtag #lrnchat, you will find tweets about instructional design, training, and eLearning.

You don't need to have an account in twitter in order to follow a hashtag, but then you are only an observer witn read but no write privileges. That would be very Web 1.0  :-(    One general education hashtag is #edchat and going to https://twitter.com/search?q=%23edchat&src=typd will show you what tweets people are tagging as #edchat currently whether or not you belong to twitter. Two other tags used are #blogchat (about blogging) and #futrchat for futurists.

What inspired me to post this today is that I am participating in an online social media course and we are doing a tweetchat tonight from 8pm-10pm US EST (Need to convert that time?)  Again, tweetchats are "open" because anyone can follow a conversation and participate, so if you want to to follow us or join in, go ahead.

There are also web apps to help filter these conversations from the rest of the flood of tweets in your feed. Tweet Chat and Twitter's own native app, TweetDeck, are two popular ones.

This RSA Animate video has Manuel Lima, senior UX design lead at Microsoft Bing, looking at using network visualization. Hierarchical tree structures are being dropped and researchers are more often using networks to map the complexities of our modern world. Visualization and network topology are new cultural memes.

This was taken from a longer lecture given by Lima.  Listen to the full talk: http://www.thersa.org

Social bookmarking is when a community of users compiles an index by collectively submitting ("bookmarking") favorite or relevant sites for the community. To make it work, the sites are tagged with keywords to facilitate searching.

The idea of creating a folksonomy is something I wrote about here in 2008 and earlier. On the surface, it sound rather random and disorganized.

Folksonomy,
the people's taxonomy that is so prevalent on the Web through sites
like delicious, Flickr and Digg, works as long as there is some
agreement on the naming. If I tag something as "satire" but others tag
it as video, or comedy or TV or SNL, does that make it better/broader or
break the system? True taxonomies rely on agreement.  Plant taxonomy
classifies one plant as Gerbera jamesonii so that the common name
"African daisy" or the altered versions of the scientific name ("gerber
daisy" or "gerbera daisy") all point to the same thing. It's not
arbitrary at all.

I ask my students to tag useful sites for my visual design course in delicious with the unique tag of "msptc605"
so that their fellow students can share bookmarks and so that the list
can increase in future semesters. We agree on that tag so that all our
bookmarks can be together, but we also need to have additional tags such
as typography, color, usability so that the list is useful. It's not
arbitrary at all.

It has been enough years that there is a history of social bookmarking. But it seems to me that the use of many of the sites that were the most popular social bookmarking sites in 2010 are not being used as much today.

This video from 2007 was introducing a service like delicious to new users.




But I am not using social bookmarks as much as I did before. My own delicious account that I used for classes has fallen into disuse.

Certainly "tagging" is still being used. But adding the hashtag #edtech to your twitter post is not the same thing as what social bookmarking meant five years ago.

Some social bookmarking sites took a different approach to the process. There was more a "voting" (up or down) approach on the site Digg (which has gone through several rebirths and is no longer really a social bookmarking site). Facebook uses a "thumbs up" Like button for people to indicate to friends that they "Like" a site or post. But these choices are not searchable in any satisfying way and they are not tagged into categories. Newsvine called the headlines there "seeds."

Have Net users outgrown social bookmarking or has the practice evolved to simply tagging in social networks? Is "social tagging" the term to replace "social bookmarking?"

Back in 2006, I asked "Is Folksonomy Taxonomy or Fauxonomy?  Maybe the question is being answered.

Apple's iTunes U has never been social. Apple doesn't really do social. (Well, there was Ping, but that was dead on arrival.) But there is a new feature that is meant to allow users to learn with others, ask questions, and work more collaboratively in the iTunes U environment.

This social layer is already used in various ways on sites like Coursera, Edmodo, Knewton, Rafter, Codecademy and Udacity.

For this new social effort, Apple is partnering with Piazza. An article on the Forbes site, describes Piazza, not very flatteringly, as "a free student question and answer service" that adds the social layer to an otherwise one way "course" experience.

Piazza, as with most ogf the previously mentioned sites, is a newer startup that launched in January 2011. It allows students to
discuss topics in a course and has been free. Professors
or students can set up a page for a class. The only difference in the Piazza with iTunes
connection is that those courses will be public rather than closed to the students in a traditional class.


The first iTunes U course that is being used for this added layer is not a surprise. It is the "Coding Together: Apps for iPhone and iPad" class offered by Stanford. It is already one of the most popular classes on iTunes U, with over 10 million downloads. (The registration is open through July 6, if you want to try it out, but the class runs from June 25 to August 27.)  Of course, the new social tools are available for any course in iTunes U.

For my graduate students in "Designing Social Media" this summer, I created this list of outside reading in various aspects of using social media.

Social media is a topic that is changing so rapidly that using a traditional textbook or even a popular title is almost impossible. Some of these titles are not new and are included because they not only give some historical context to the discussion, but they contain the "theory" of using social networks and media. Having students look at that theory and compare it to the current practices is valuable.

I wish all the readings could be from open textbooks and readings available online for free. I do use many articles available online and  I assign some readings from open textbooks such as The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler. Benkler's entire book is available for free download at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/ 

Students are required to select a book for outside reading.The titles below have been used in previous semesters or were recommended by students and faculty. They cover a wide range of social media and related areas. Hopefully, students choose a book close to their own interest in the field - marketing, visual design, theory etc.

1. The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success - Lon Safko


2. Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter - read a sample online from Safari Books
   


3. Building Social Web Applications: Establishing Community at the Heart of Your Site - Gavin Bell - covers moving from building a web site/application to building a social application that encourages visitor interaction


4. The Social Media Strategist: Build a Successful Program from the Inside Out - Christopher Barger - views social media success within a large company - Barger was the SM director who built successful programs at both GM and IBM - deals with corporate culture, legal barriers, and the kind of bureaucratic resistance that that are unique to large organizations.
   


5. Power Friending: Demystifying Social Media to Grow Your Business - Amber MacArthur - with many business examples, looks at targeting the right networks, seeding & building a community, enngaging with customers/fans and managing online "friendships"on a budget


6. Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone - patterns, principles, and best practices for starting a social website - has more of a software and design focus


7. Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices - Christopher Locke


8. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations - Clay Shirky


9. Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected, Connect Your Business to Everyone.


10. Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies - Charlene Li


11. Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide: Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations - Amy Shuen


12. The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future - S. Craig Watkins


13. Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone. - Mitch Joel - a business focus on using Net marketing, esp. free tools and services


14. Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee ~ Web 2.0 for the enterprise


15. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation - Tim Brown


16. The Cluetrain Manifesto - though ten years old, the authors' 95 theses about the networked marketplace probably make more sense today. Observations about business in America and how the Internet will continue to change it.


17. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins. This book puts web 2.0 technologies and trends into a much larger historical context of participatory culture.


18. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green


19. What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis is his first book that looked at Google's abilities to harness the power of the Internet Age and how businesses—especially media and entertainment industries—can continue to evolve and profit by using Google's strategies.  


20. Jarvis' newest book is perhaps more relevant - Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live looks at privacy and publicness and how our new sense of publicness changes business, society, and life as profoundly as Gutenberg’s invention, shifting power from old institutions to us all. (He also has a short Kindle Single Gutenberg the Geek about the "original technology entrepreneur and disruptor."


21. The B2B Social Media Book: Become a Marketing Superstar by Generating Leads with Blogging, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Email, and More Bodnar & Cohen - SM's specific application to B2B companies and how it can be leveraged to drive leads and revenue.


22. Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business - by Erik Qualman
    Socialnomics—where consumers and the societies they create online have a profound influence on our economy and the businesses that operate within it. Online word of mouth and the powerful influence of peer groups have already made many traditional marketing strategies obsolete. Today's best businesses and marketers are learning to profitably navigate this new landscape.

Do you have a suggestion for titles to be added? Post titles, comments or links in the comments area.

Facebook has unveiled Groups for Schools https://www.facebook.com/about/groups/schools which hopes to further connect students and faculty at colleges and universities.

Groups for Schools allows online communities in Facebook where users can send messages to other members in groups and sub-groups. It also allows you to share files such as lectures, schedules and assignments (up to 25 MB), and create and post events.

They envision Groups being used for classes, dorms, campus clubs etc.  The members of groups do not need to be Facebook friends although it will probably drive some holdouts on campus to make the move.

Schools are already using Facebook in this way via fan and "follow" pages but this gives a more controlled platform with additional features. There are customizable privacy settings, including open, which makes the group available to anyone, closed, which allows anyone to see the group and its members, but requires membership to view or post material, and secret, which only allows members to see the group and who's in it.

As you can see in my screenshot from the NJIT group, it is aimed more at students than at faculty (which makes sense) although faculty could use it. (Beware the creepy treehouse...)

You can see from a menu your friends' groups, all groups, your groups, and suggested groups. To access Groups you must have an active .edu e-mail address. To find out if a group has already been created for a school, you can enter your school name on the Groups for Schools page and search. If your college isn't thee yet, you can be alerted when a group is set up.

Groups for Schools was tested at Brown and Vanderbilt universities in December 2011. The Vanderbilt and Brown groups that are the largest are all graduating class groups (Class of 2014 etc.).

Although this is not new ground for Facebook or for colleges, it does show that Facebook is thinking more about getting into education - particularly higher education, which was their original user base.

As Brandon Croke says on the Inigral blog: "While this may be Facebook’s attempt to tame the wild west of runaway university Pages and Groups, it doesn’t look like schools will have any control or authority of their branded communities." Inigral is a company that works with schools on using social networks to increase student engagement and use community building as a path to improved student success.

I think that at some point post-IPO, we will see Facebook move into creating a platform that is much like our current LMSs which will allow courses to be taught using Facebook software. The courses won't be in the Facebook that we know, but will have strong technology ties to that community. If something like that was offered as "free" (probably not as open source) to schools (with advertising, publishers and other ties as the business model) it would be very tempting for schools. I actually expected Google to move into this area a year ago, but it hasn't happened. Then again, Google has been running behind Facebook when it comes to social for awhile now, so...