“To design an interaction you must commit to writing a narrative of human behavior mediated through time and space.”
To discuss social media strategy in the context of design choices affecting application design, functions, as well as user-centricity in social media design, the unique attributes of online communication which can only steer individual and aggregate engagement within the social network through cues, incentives and community enforced social norms must be well understood. Further, to discuss strategy and design patterns in social media site architecture/design and their impact on human behavior requires at the very least a general understanding of the writing on topics concerning sociology, social networking theory, anthropology and marketing. Taken one step further — to adequately advise companies seeking to leverage social media effectively as part of their customer communications and marketing strategy requires a rigorous, and not haphazard understanding of these new channels – attributes unique to them, because they are social in nature.
Until now, at least, I have not seen a list compiled of essential reading. Many people herald themselves and promote others as ‘experts’ and ‘gurus’ when it comes to social software, social media, and the design of strategies, platforms and solutions around these topics for enterprises and government entitites. I thought to myself that this expertise must be born of something more significant and tangible than simply writing a blog about the topic, or having a vast number of connections (friends?) on Facebook or Twitter. I needed some metric, some standard by which I could discern charlatans from strategists. This is my measuring stick. When I rant/rage/ruminate about social media douchebags, I should define my terms and set my standards. This list is an effort to do so. You certainly don’t need to read these – but these are how I measure. To toss around social media douchebag with no standard by which to hurl such an accusation would be as intellectually bankrupt as those that would seek to raid the coffers of well-meaning companies without the skill, passion, or empathy required to deliver real results. This is my list. This is my yard stick.
Needless to say, I just included the Amazon.com reviews or descriptions for lack of time, but all these come highly recommended. These are definite (actually – not quite, but this is all I have read) – these are the shit!
If you have recommendations to add to this list – please chime in, because it’s important. This list is a living organism that must be fed.
13 Books You Must Read – Social Software, Social Networks and Social Media Primer
Designing for the Social Web (Voices That Matter)
Designing for the Social Web
Description: Josh is a web designer, researcher, and writer living in Newburyport, MA, USA. He run a web design and consulting company called Bokardo Design. From Amazon: No matter what type of web site or application you’re building, social interaction among the people who use it will be key to its success. They will talk about it, invite their friends, complain, sing its high praises, and dissect it in countless ways. With the right design strategy you can use this social interaction to get people signing up, coming back regularly, and bringing others into the fold. With tons of examples from real-world interfaces and a touch of the underlying social psychology theory, Joshua Porter shows you how to design your next great social web application.
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Electronic Tribes: The Virtual Worlds of Geeks, Gamers, Shamans, and Scammers
by Tyrone L. Adams (Editor), Stephen A. Smith (Editor)
Electronic Tribes
Review: The major contribution of this book is that the idea of ‘tribe’ is fully and robustly explicated in ways that challenge existing wisdom, particularly the idea that Internet users are best understood as communities. . . . The richness of diverse research resources is evident in every chapter. I particularly commend the editors on the international perspective and the inclusion of such a surprising array of subcultures. (H. L. Goodall Jr., Director, Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, Arizona State University )
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First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game
by Noah Wardrip-Fruin
First Person
Review: “You have entered the rotunda of a gleaming, new conference center. Above you hangs a banner: ‘Welcome to First Person.’ In front of you, you see doors leading into separate conference rooms, each of which is marked with a sign in large, Futura Bold letters: ‘Cyberdrama, ‘ ‘Ludology, ‘ ‘Simulation, ‘ ‘Hypertext and Interactives, ‘ and so on. You soon discover that every room in this virtual conference called First Person is filled with informed discussion and lively controversy from major figures in the emerging field of Game Studies. Some are arguing that digital games (as the heirs of the novel and of film) constitute the next great arena for storytelling; others respond that games are not narratives at all and require a different theoretical framework and a new discipline. Still others are describing their own exciting contributions to interactive fiction, poetry, or visual/verbal art. By the time you return from this virtual tour of the world of Game Studies, you realize that all of these rooms (and all these topics) are connected in an intricate and compelling architecture of ideas. You begin to understand the rich possibilities that computer games offer . . . as drama, narrative, and simulation. You come to appreciate the great theoretical task that lies before us in exploring both the formal properties and the cultural significance of computer games.” –Jay David Bolter, Wesley Professor of New Media, Georgia Institute of Technology
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Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
by Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff
Groundswell
Description: Corporate executives are struggling with a new trend: people using online social technologies (blogs, social networking sites, YouTube, podcasts) to discuss products and companies, write their own news, and find their own deals. This groundswell is global, it s unstoppable, it affects every industry and it s utterly foreign to the powerful companies running things now.
When consumers you ve never met are rating your company s products in public forums with which you have no experience or influence, your company is vulnerable. In Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester, Inc. explain how to turn this threat into an opportunity.
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Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means
Linked
Review: How is the human brain like the AIDS epidemic? Ask physicist Albert-László Barabási and he’ll explain them both in terms of networks of individual nodes connected via complex but understandable relationships. Linked: The New Science of Networks is his bright, accessible guide to the fundamentals underlying neurology, epidemiology, Internet traffic, and many other fields united by complexity. Barabási’s gift for concrete, non-mathematical explanations and penchant for eccentric humor would make the book thoroughly enjoyable even if the content weren’t engaging. But the results of Barabási’s research into the behavior of networks are deeply compelling. Not all networks are created equal, he says, and he shows how even fairly robust systems like the Internet could be crippled by taking out a few super-connected nodes, or hubs. His mathematical descriptions of this behavior are helping doctors, programmers, and security professionals design systems better suited to their needs. Linked presents the next step in complexity theory–from understanding chaos to practical applications.
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Networked Publics
by Kazys Varnelis
Networked Publics
Review: “Networked Publics is a lucid, timely, and broadly interdisciplinary look at the most important technological and social change of our time: the sudden wiring and un-wiring of the planet into a broadband network, with communication devices in the pockets of a significant proportion of the world’s population. There is very little that is more important, more discussed, and less widely understood than the meaning of the emerging technosocial networks that are adopting digital media for a wide range of social, cultural, political, and economic ends. Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of anthropologists, economists, educators, designers, political scientists, computer scientists, legal and policy experts—the Networked Publics group—was the only way to try to capture the meaning of a phenomenon that is interdisciplinary by its nature. The team project blog was a beacon of clear thinking while the project was in progress, and the book is a sound foundation for debates about what networked publics mean, how they can be encouraged, how they should be regulated, how to protect against their dangerous aspects.”
—Howard Rheingold, author of Smartbombs: The Next Social Revolution
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The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
Description: A study of human behavior in social situations and the way we appear to others. Dr. Goffman has employed as a framework the metaphor of theatrical performance. Discussions of social techniques are based upon detailed research and observation of social customs in many regions.
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Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (Open Market Edition)
Six Degrees
Review: You may be only six degrees away from Kevin Bacon, but would he let you borrow his car? It depends on the structures within the network that links you. When the power goes out, when we find that a stranger knows someone we know, when dot-com stocks soar in price, networks are evident. In Six Degrees, sociologist Duncan Watts examines networks like these: what they are, how they’re being studied, and what we can use them for. To illustrate the often complicated mathematics that describe such structures, Watts uses plenty of examples from life, without which this book would quickly move beyond a general science readership. Small chapters make each thought-provoking conclusion easy to swallow, though some are hard to digest.
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Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness (Princeton Studies in Complexity)
Small Worlds
Review: An engaging and informative introduction. Science Playfully and clearly written… [Watts] uses examples adroitly, and mixes abstract theory with real-world anecdotes with superb skill… I have not enjoyed reading a book this much in a long time. — Peter Kareiva Quarterly Review of Biology [Small Worlds] will be seized on by those seeking a first rough map of this fascinating new mathematical land. Those entering can expect to find some amazing connections between areas of research with apparently nothing in common, such as neurology to business studies. But then, it’s a small world. — Robert Matthews New Scientist Informally written and aimed at a wide audience, this book shows how mathematics yields new vistas on ubiquitous and seemingly familiar aspects of our world
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The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You
The Social Atom
Description: Buchanan (Ubiquity: The Science of History) reaches out to the audience for pop social science like The Tipping Point and Freakonomics with the concept of “social physics,” a scientific model for the patterns that emerge from the interactions among large groups of people. Though his observations that people excel at imitating the successful behavior of others and will often form collective bonds over such fundamental pretenses as shared ethnic heritage aren’t startling, Buchanan leans on his background in theoretical physics and treats these ideas as “a quantum revolution in the social sciences.” His presentation is muted by a tendency to talk around the subject, recapping prior discussions and promising future developments instead of establishing a clear, compelling thread. Though the real-life scenarios he uses to illustrate his theories—such as the unexpected revival of Times Square or the outbreak of ethnic violence in the former Yugoslavia—are engaging, some sections draw upon computer simulations of arbitrary behavior that illustrate his thesis but don’t command equal interest. This is a great idea for a magazine article, but awkward at book length. (June)
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Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us
by Seth Godin
Tribes
Description: A tribe is any group of people, large or small, who are connected to one another, a leader, and an idea. For millions of years, humans have joined tribes, be they religious, ethnic, political, or even musical (think of the Deadheads). It’s our nature. Now the Internet has eliminated the barriers of geography, cost, and time. All those blogs and social networking sites are helping existing tribes get bigger and enabling new tribes to be born – groups of ten or ten million who care about a political campaign, or a new way to fight global warming.
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The Wisdom of Crowds
The Wisdom of Crowds
Description: While our culture generally trusts experts and distrusts the wisdom of the masses, New Yorker business columnist Surowiecki argues that “under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.” To support this almost counter-intuitive proposition, Surowiecki explores problems involving cognition (we’re all trying to identify a correct answer), coordination (we need to synchronize our individual activities with others) and cooperation (we have to act together despite our self-interest). His rubric, then, covers a range of problems, including driving in traffic, competing on TV game shows, maximizing stock market performance, voting for political candidates, navigating busy sidewalks, tracking SARS and designing Internet search engines like Google. If four basic conditions are met, a crowd’s “collective intelligence” will produce better outcomes than a small group of experts, Surowiecki says, even if members of the crowd don’t know all the facts or choose, individually, to act irrationally. “Wise crowds” need (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions. The diversity brings in different information; independence keeps people from being swayed by a single opinion leader; people’s errors balance each other out; and including all opinions guarantees that the results are “smarter” than if a single expert had been in charge. Surowiecki’s style is pleasantly informal, a tactical disguise for what might otherwise be rather dense material. He offers a great introduction to applied behavioral economics and game theory.
The Cluetrain Manifesto
by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, David Weinberger
Cluetrain Manifesto
Description: The Cluetrain Manifesto began as a Web site (www.cluetrain.com) in 1999 when the authors, who have worked variously at IBM, Sun Microsystems, the Linux Journal, and NPR, posted 95 theses that pronounced what they felt was the new reality of the networked marketplace. For example, thesis no. 2: “Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors”; thesis no. 20: “Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them”; thesis no. 62: “Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall”; thesis no. 74: “We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.” The book enlarges on these themes through seven essays filled with dozens of stories and observations about how business gets done in America and how the Internet will change it all. While Cluetrain will strike many as loud and over the top, the message itself remains quite relevant and unique. This book is for anyone interested in the Internet and e-commerce, and is especially important for those businesses struggling to navigate the topography of the wired marketplace. All aboard! –Harry C. Edwards –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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