Weekend Reading: Social Networking for Businesses, by Rawn Shah

We have talked about the power of utilizing social networks for businesses before in our Weekend Reading series with books like The Facebook Era, by Clara Shih and Crush It!, by Gary Vaynerchuk, and this week we've got another book under a similar vein. Published just last month, Social Networking for Businesses: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs, by Rawn Shah is a guide for companies looking to take advantage of the collaborative communities of social networks to improve their business.

Sponsor

Author Rawn Shah has plenty of experience in this very subject as he is the Best Practices Lead on the Social Software Adoption Team at IBM. In Social Networking for Businesses, Shah breaks down the essentials and methods of modeling social experiences for businesses to get the most out of their users and customers. One of the most important factors to the success of social business experiences is the leadership of those experiences, says Shah, who points to the success of blogs and Wikipedia as examples.

"The success of each blog is a result of the leadership of its owners, who independently set the rules for what to publish and who can contribute," says Shah. Wikipedia, he says, only succeeded when its leadership structure changed to let anyone to contribute, allowing the best content to rise to the top and be curated by public editors.

"This defining change in how people could make decisions on the content and direction of the site -- a leadership model that allowed anyone to become an editor and leader -- drove Wikipedia's overwhelming success," says Shah.

Other topics covered by Shah in his book include building skills to create and manage social experiences, building a social culture within your business, collaborating with customers and users on ideas, and measuring the results of social environments.

"Online communities and social computing software are rapidly appearing both on the Internet and within organizations as a means to allow people to collaborate, although quite frequently without a plan or a link to organizational and business value," says Shah. "By framing collaboration around specific goals and methods instead of herding people towards generic ideas, social computing can help develop and direct innovative development in an organization."

This book is a little more of a deep-dive than some of the other books we've recommended over the last several weeks. If your startup is looking to encourage unique social interaction between your users and your business, this could be a great book to check out.

Disclosure: A review copy of Social Networking for Businesses was provided to ReadWriteWeb by Pearson Education and Wharton School Publishing.

Discuss

http://bit.ly/bH2RNl

Facebook Confirms & Reconsiders Forthcoming Location Feature

Facebook confirmed today that it is working on a Location-based product but said that it has re-evaluated its plans to focus more on Places like restaurants.

As part of a larger blog post about clarifying language around privacy controls, Facebook deputy general counsel Michael Richter said today that the company now has "different ideas" that are "even more exciting" than what it previously planned to do with location. More details will be available, including regarding privacy, as the company finalizes the product.

Sponsor

That doesn't sound like an open product development cycle with privacy policy discussions going on before the product is finalized, but from an innovation perspective it's hard not to be excited about something "more exciting" than simply adding location to posted items.

Anonymous sources told the New York Times earlier this year that Facebook was developing a location feature to be released at the F8 developers conference in April.

Here's the relevant section of today's post:

The last time we updated the Privacy Policy, we included language describing a location feature we might build in the future. At that point, we thought the primary use would be to "add a location to something you post." Now, we've got some different ideas that we think are even more exciting.

So, we've removed the old language and, instead added the concept of a "place" that could refer to a Page, such as one for a local restaurant. As we finalize the product, we look forward to providing more details, including new privacy controls.

The reference to Pages like local restaurants may allude to a very close tie-in with local business advertising at the launch of the location feature.

The difference between location and Place is a significant one. Substantial resources are dedicated by location-aware social networks to determine what "place" your location refers to. That might mean neighborhood, it might mean business name and it might mean recognizing when you are posting from home so that location can be selectively hidden if you so choose.

What kind of "place" analysis does Facebook have in mind that goes beyond location? Time will tell, but hopefully user privacy will be handled effectively. Location disclosure is a very touchy subject and Facebook's recent about-face towards a default all-public privacy stance could cause a substantial backlash when it comes to the mainstreaming of location sharing.

Physical location is one of the most sensitive forms of information we posses and it's going to be very tempting for Facebook to push people towards being more public than they might like. Can the company get the balance right? Privacy and useful features are the two big questions.

See also: Why Facebook Changed Its Privacy Strategy

Discuss

http://bit.ly/a5iGmO

Are Incubators and Angels Gaining Leverage On Larger VC Firms?

Being a resident of the Phoenix area, which is a significant distance from Silicon Valley, I wasn't able to attend the Demo Day show-and-tell pitch-fest at the end of Y Combinator (YC), but luckily, other reporters were there and have been slowly releasing stories about the companies and the event. Peter Kafka of All Things Digital published a video interview Thursday with YC co-founder Paul Graham from Demo Day in which he provides some interesting insights into how the investment community is rebounding and possibly how incubators are beginning to have influence on the larger VC firms.

Sponsor

This group of YC grads included 26 companies, of which 20-25% Graham would expect statistically to go on to receive Series A funding. However, this number could potentially be higher with this newest class as Graham has seen a drastic change in the attitudes of the investors.

"Judging by the reactions of investors, the recessions seems to be over," Graham said in his interview with Kafka. "I don't think we've ever had a batch that had so much investor interest so early as this one."

As Graham points out, some of the companies had spoken with or secured angel funding well before demo day - another surprise, he says. An interesting opinion he shared in his interview included the idea that it is hard to place a statistical number on how many companies emerge from YC to become "successful" businesses. Who defines what "successful" is?

Graham says that historically, 70% of YC companies have raised additional funding since leaving the program, or have not needed to because they managed to become profitable without additional help. But how does Graham truly gauge success for the entrepreneurs? "The founders end up rich, basically. That's the definition," he says.

The other interesting quote Graham gave during his brief interview sparked an interesting thought in my mind about the state of the start-up and investment community as a whole. When Kafka suggested that angel investors tend to get squeezed how by more powerful VC firms that flood companies with cash in future rounds of funding, Graham replied that firms would be foolish to attempt this with YC startups. To paraphrase, Graham basically said, "The firms wouldn't dare squeeze out the angels on YC companies because that would mean they would be squeezing us too, and that wouldn't be wise if they wanted to continue to have access to our alumni."

What this got me thinking about is how the growing popularity of incubator programs like Y Combinator and TechStars is affecting the venture capital community. Are firms less likely to squeeze out angel investors from these kinds of companies because the incubators continually graduate companies with high potential? Is Graham saying that if the VCs want continued access to the best startups around that they had better play nice with the angels?

If so, is this good or bad for the startup community? If this is really having a significant impact on how VC firms approach these companies, then it surely benefits the angel investors, but do the startups ultimately gain anything from it? I wonder if there has been a case of VC firms deciding not to invest in a YC company because they would rather be able to have more control over term negotiations.

I would think that a VC firm would be more interested in the opportunity to work with high-potential companies than in a power struggle in the board room, but I could be wrong. Or I could just be over analyzing a simple quote.

Photo by Flickr user pragdave.

Discuss

http://bit.ly/djVmKs

Need Directions? A Job At Sears? Train Info? Twitter Blog Highlights Novel Uses

It seems almost daily that we run across yet another friend who asks "So wait, what exactly is Twitter? What does it do? Why do I care?" Every time we get these questions, we have to pause, take a deep breath, and figure out why it is, exactly that this particular person would care.

It looks like Twitter itself has started to tackle this issue too, with its Clever Twitter Accounts blog on Posterous.

Sponsor

Louis Gray first noticed the site, which he writes is "full of 'Clever' examples aimed to make you say, 'Now I get it!'". The site is put together by Sean Garrett, Twitter's head of communications, and Jenna Sampson, a communications associate at Twitter. They have been posting different uses of Twitter since the beginning of the month, pretty much culling various media across the Internet looking for Twitter mentions, from the looks of it.

The blog starts out with how people used Twitter in Chile to find missing persons and moves on to a San Francisco specific Twitter account meant to receive 311 complaints.

Gray notes how most things Twitter does explode immediately in popularity, pointing to how many followers both @twitterapi and @twitter have, but so far @cleveraccounts, the account associated with the blog, hasn't given us all that much to chew on quite yet.

So, while getting a nod on the "Clever Twitter Accounts" blog isn't likely to tip your follower scales the way the now-deceased Suggested User List would have, we'll be keeping an eye on it to see if any new twists on Twitter use pop up.

Maybe, the thing is, we already "get it". If you have a friend who doesn't appear to get it yet, though, send 'em on over. Maybe they'll be convinced by knowing they can follow the Japanese prime minister or navigate New York's busy streets - all with the help of Twitter.

Discuss

http://bit.ly/9KLzhu