Connected: The Suprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives — How Your Friends' Friends' Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do

payal — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Nicholas A. Christakis, James H. Fowler

Connected is firstly an enjoyable read. There is something compelling about seeing the familiar, mundane details of our every day social life studied from a completely different perspective. Social networks are huge and for the most part we have no idea where we fit into them or just how far they reach. In a way this is Christakis and Fowler's point. What most of us think of as our social network are the people we know and see on a regular basis. In fact, the people who may have the most influence on us, the authors argue, are the people three degrees away in our network: friends of friends. And after three degrees the influence peters out. You are more likely to be happy if your friend's friends are happy than if you win the lottery!

Connected has been criticized for stating the obvious: we are more likely to be around people similar to us (“homophily” if you're a sociologist). But the argument the authors make is that we're not aware of the extent to which these relationships affect us, and most importantly how this impact could be used to better the world. If we are more likely to quit smoking because other people in our network have quit smoking than for any other reason, this is where anti-smoking resources should be directed. Similarly, politicians should focus on encouraging their supporters to recruit people in their networks to get involved rather than trying to reach out to individuals (and the authors argue Obama did this in the federal election).

The results of studies in this book are also sometimes unexpected, especially on the largely unstudied subject of social media. For example, a study was done on a small American town where sixty percent of the residents were given free wi-fi, and the other forty percent went internet free. After two years it was discovered that the households with internet developed deeper and broader connections to other residents, with more neighbourhood ties. Contrary to popular belief this suggests online communication might augment and improve real life relationships, not replace them.

The only issue I had with the social media chapter was that it already seemed a little dated, referring to sites like MySpace and iLike that have been mostly phased out. If anything this is a testament to how quickly changing our modern social networks are, as this book was only published in 2009. If you're ready to take a serious look at the influences that affect your life, most of which are probably beyond your control, read this book and prepare to have a whole new perspective.

Written by: Jennifer Burgess, February 2nd 2011

The Social Media Survival Guide: Strategies, Tactics, and Tools for Succeeding in the Social Web

mandy — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Deltina Hay

Quill Driver Books

If you’re like me, you have a blog and a Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, YouTube and Flickr account, but when someone starts to talk about CMS, metadata, Squidoo lenses, or the semantic web, you quickly tune out. We’re all aware of how vital the social web is for reaching new audiences, but we’re unsure of which tools are best suited to our online objectives, or which tools are the best investment of our time. In The Social Media Survival Guide, Deltina Hay walks you through the basics of using the most popular social media tools and helps you to devise your own strategy to meet your online objectives and hopefully save you time.

An added bonus, this book comes with a very useful CD to help you prepare your own social media strategy plan so that you can add the tools that best suit your needs and expand your social media presence. The CD worksheets and forms are also indispensable for maintaining records and keeping your online information consistent. The Social Media Survival Guide is intended for "do-it-yourselfers, resourceful business owners, motivated authors, innovative publishers, and directors of IT or marketing departments.” However, I could easily see some young self-starters using this book and CD to carve out a niche for themselves among older, more technically-limited business owners.

The Social Media Survival Guide is divided into fifteen chapters and appendices for code lovers with a burning desire to install WordPress or create an RSS Feed or widget from scratch. The book begins with your social media strategy plan, which you will repeatedly return to, and it offers seven sample strategy plans, which are especially helpful if your own profile mirrors one of the samples.

The book can be divided into three different parts. The first applies to the general public and addresses tags, or key terms; RSS feeds and blogs; building a WordPress site; and Pod, Vid, and Webcasting. The entire book is more useful if you have a WordPress blog or website because the subsequent chapters refer to how this Content Management System (CMS) can easily accommodate a large range of social media tools. The second part addresses Social Networking (Facebook) and Micro-blogging (Twitter), Social Bookmarking (Delicious) and Crowd-Sourcing (Digg), Media Communities (image-, video- and document-sharing) and Widgets. Although I thought I knew everything in this section, I still gleaned some useful information about some features on the ever-changing Facebook, and the section on document-sharing is definitely worth a look, particularly if you work in publishing. However, the author should have focused more on StumbleUpon rather than Delicious, whose future is uncertain.

The last section would be most useful to business people, but it’s still worth the read to learn about the other available tools. This section covers the Social Media News Room, other Social Media Tools (geo-tagging, event tools, etc.), Integration and Streamlining Tools, the Future of Social Media (Web 3.0), and How to Measure Success (Analytics, Search Optimization, etc). Deltina Hay uses easy-to-follow language throughout The Social Media Survival Guide. The chapters follow a logical order, and the book itself will serve as a great reference guide if only for eighteen months; by then the social media landscape will transform itself yet again.

After reading this book, which was initially overwhelming, I can honestly say that I learned a lot. I’ve also seen the limitations of Blogger as a CMS and have already made plans to change my blog over to WordPress. However, I wish that the publisher had fleshed out the Vid and Webcasting section and provided a script, as was done for Podcasting.

In the end, I found the book at 450 pages was too long for anyone who was not taking a course in social media at a college or university. Although the author is thorough, I believe that the publisher might be better off to break this text into three separate books to make it more palatable to the social media enthusiast. Otherwise, I fear that this textbook might stay on a to-do list until it’s old news.

Written by: Heather Leighton, January 17th 2011