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A Reading List for Social Media and Community Managers

Last weekend, the CommunityCamp 2012 took place in Berlin. The CommunityCamp is a barcamp for social media and community managers. You can have a glance at the conversations surrounding the event by looking at the Twitter stream with the hashtag #ccb12. Here is one of the few blog posts in English about the event, written by Monica Zaldivar.

Doing research on the use of social media and online communities in organizations, I was thrilled to be there. Listening closely to some of the discussions, I was able to identify a number of issues that I have previously come across in the literature. As a delayed contribution to the barcamp, I thought I could provide a small reading list for practitioners. I consider the references below to be of high practical relevance. They provide answers to questions such as:

What is an online community?
How to manage an online community?
What are relevant psychological and social aspects when dealing with online communities?
Where to position community management within the organization?
Which tools may be used for connecting different kinds of stakeholders?

If you know of additional material that should be listed here, please feel free to drop me a line. Providing an overview of recent literature on the topic is probably a nice idea for next year’s CommunityCamp.

Here are my suggestions:

Faraj, S., Jarvenpaa, S. L., & Majchrzak, A. (2011). Knowledge Collaboration in Online Communities. Organization Science, 22(5), 1224–1239. doi:10.1287/orsc.1100.0614

Kane, G. C., Fichman, R. G., Gallaugher, J., & Glaser, J. (2009). Community Relations 2.0. Harvard Business Review, 87(11), 45–50. Retrieved from http://hbr.org/2009/11/community-relations-20/ar/1

Kietzmann, J. H., Hermkens, K., McCarthy, I. P., & Silvestre, B. S. (2011). Social Media? Get Serious! Understanding the Functional Building Blocks of Social Media. Business Horizons, 54(3), 241–251. doi:10.1016/j.bushor.2011.01.005

Kraut, R. E., & Resnick, P. (2011). Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design. MIT Press.

McAfee, A. (2009). Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges. Harvard Business School Press.

Wallace, P. M. (2001). The Psychology of the Internet. Cambridge University Press.

A Barcamp Experience: The KnowledgeCamp in Karlsruhe

On October 12 and 13, 2012, the KnowledgeCamp took place in Karlsruhe, Germany. It was the first barcamp, or unconference, I attended. For those of you who are not familiar with this type of event, here is the the corresponding Wikipedia article. On one hand, I went because I was curious to see how such a barcamp works. On the other, I wanted to offer a session in order to present and discuss a paper a colleague and myself have been working on recently.

My general impression of the barcamp was very positive. One of the greatest features is the selection of the sessions by the participants themselves. This procedure guarantees that the content offerered is relevant to the people attending the barcamp. While I was worried that my own session may not be suitable for the crowd present, I was pleased to see a number of hands go up once I introduced the topic. Hosts are further free to choose how they conduct their sessions. Continue reading A Barcamp Experience: The KnowledgeCamp in Karlsruhe

Computational Social Science, Big Data, and its Commercial Applications

There is a new scientific discpline emerging out of the rich data produced by social media applications. It goes by the name of computational social science and is nicely described in this article written by Jim Giles, published in the journal Nature (full reference below). Here is a short quote from the article:

“It’s been really transformative,” says Michael Macy, a social scientist at Cornell and one of 15 co-authors of a 2009 manifesto seeking to raise the profile of the new discipline. “We were limited before to surveys, which are retrospective, and lab experiments, which are almost always done on small numbers of college sophomores.” Now, he says, the digital data-streams promise a portrait of individual and group behaviour at unprecedented scales and levels of detail.

This new scientific discipline has significant business implications as well. You can now find hundreds of commercial products on the market trying to leverage so called Big Data (here is a recent blog post by the Harvard Business Review on mining big customer data). One niche in this market is the measurement of online influence, which has been summarized in an article by the New York Times as follows:

Companies with names like Klout, PeerIndex and Twitter Grader are in the process of scoring millions, eventually billions, of people on their level of influence — or in the lingo, rating “influencers.” Yet the companies are not simply looking at the number of followers or friends you’ve amassed. Rather, they are beginning to measure influence in more nuanced ways, and posting their judgments — in the form of a score — online.

Klout seems to be the market leader in this niche. Here is some press coverage on how Klout works from the wired magazine and The Economist. Very recently, William Ward, Social Media Professor of Syracruse University, pointed my to an interesting video interview by Brian Solis with Klout’s CEO, Joe Fernandez. I have embedded the interview below.

via dr4ward.com

References:

Giles, J. (2012). Computational Social Science: Making the Links. Nature, 488(7412), 448–450. doi:10.1038/488448a

Scholars in Organizational Behavior: An Interview with Richard Hackman

The Academy of Management‘s Organizational Behavior Division has recently established a Social Media Committee which is headed by Richard Landers of Old Dominion University and Michael Johnson of the University of Washington.

The mission of this committee is to produce and promote Internet-based materials and resources to better showcase the activities and scholarship of the OB division to the division’s members and to the public.

Continue reading Scholars in Organizational Behavior: An Interview with Richard Hackman

Dynamic Capabilities: A Definition, Visualization, and some References

The PhD program I am enrolled in is called ‘Dynamic Capabilities and Relationships’. One question I hear frequently from both colleagues and friends is: What are these dynamic capabilities? This post aims at providing a definition, a graph, and some references that I can refer people to when I hear this question again in the future.

Dynamic capabilities have emerged as a major stream in the field of strategy research over the past 15 years (Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000; Hodgkinson and Healey, 2011; Teece, Pisano, and Shuen, 1997). They are defined as “the firm’s processes that use resources – specifically the processes to integrate, reconfigure, gain and release resources – to match and even create market change. Dynamic capabilities thus are the organizational and strategic routines by which firms achieve new resource configurations as markets emerge, collide, split, evolve, and die” (Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000, p. 1107). At their core, the development of dynamic capabilities is the response of strategy researchers to an ever-changing world. Continue reading Dynamic Capabilities: A Definition, Visualization, and some References