Reading About Designing Social Media

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.


Now, Groups for Schools from Facebook - and down the road?



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...




Social Search

When someone says "social search", I think of two things. One is the ability to search social sites and media. Two would be search that is coupled with a social aspect.

Greplin deals with the former and allows you to search for things in your online social life. When you put in a search term, it searches your personal accounts including Gmail, Google Apps, Facebook, LinkedIn, Evernote, Dropbox, and Yammer.(It requires registration so that it can get to those accounts.) You can add indexes of your favorite websites and search all your data in one place.

You need to set up an account which is free for 200MB of storage. They offers a premium account with 500MB of storage for $4.99/month and Premium Plus is $14.99/month for even more storage and services. They have an extensive privacy policy page which is a good idea because users are entrusting their account information.

But I think that our traditional search engines like Google and Bing will be adding social search capabilities. Google Plus connected to your email and other Google apps would make that possible to a degree already. Facebook will probably open its search capabilities in the other direction - out from their social world to other places (social or not) that you allow them to connect to.

And I suspect that those big players will add those tools for free in order to get a deeper bite of the data in your social graph for their own marketing purposes.

So, is Greplin a good idea? Yes?  Will people be willing to pay for it? Probably not. Unless the competition doesn't offer it - or they convince us that they are a safer keeper of our privacy than the others. Will people be willing to pay for privacy? Maybe.


Will Edmodo be the social learning network for K12 education?

If you still think social networks have nothing to do with learning, Edmodo hopes to change your mind.

Edmodo has more than 2 million users and will try to use social network tools for K-12 classrooms. Part of their pitch is that students already know how to use this interface, so it's a natural for students to communicate with teachers and each other around assignments and class topics. 

The teachers can post about assignments, add related materials or further discussion beyond class. The updates are shown in Facebook-looking stream. Add in the ability to turn in digital assignments and a gradebook and it starts to sound like many other course management systems already out there.

Yes, Edmodo has document libraries on Social Studies, Biology and other topics. It has social aspects like sharing with teachers from other schools and even those game-like badges that sites like Foursquare offer.

So what would make you venture into their platform? The business model is free. Edmodo is not charging for teachers or students to use the service, but will add revenue from publisher promotions of classroom textbooks or materials.

Edmodo is going after individual teachers rather than schools or districts which might backfire if the school/district uses another service or doesn't allow teachers to use these types of tools.

Updates via http://blog.edmodo.com