I’m writing a book. It’s due out in August. Here’s an elevator pitch – I’d love feedback:
Social Circles
How offline relationships influence online behavior, and what it means for design and marketing
We are witnessing a fundamental shift in the structure of the web. We’re moving from a world of content and consumption, to a world where almost all websites will support person to person communication. In hindsight, this shift is an obvious evolution. Since we first walked the Earth, humans have been hard wired to connect and communicate.
Currently, many companies are trying things on the social web without a strong understanding of the underlying human behaviors and motivations. Their success is limited, and to improve, we’ll all need to build an understanding of sociability. Sociability is about how, and why, people communicate.
Understanding sociability is complex, it involves many disciplines: sociology, network science, psychology, design. Although none of us can be experts in all of these areas, there are some fundamentals about how people communicate that we can all understand and leverage.
To date, these fundamentals have been hard for the majority of us to learn, as they have either been spread across many books, or are described in books that are heavy on theory, and therefore hard for busy professionals to take the time necessary to read and comprehend.
This book gives you those fundamentals in a couple of hours. It is fast to read and easy to understand. And it is actionable. It contains pragmatic things you can do with these fundamentals, to make your actions on the social web successful, starting tomorrow.
Tags: Book
Great news! I’m delighted Put me down for a copy.
Best of luck with it.
Des
Sounds like a great idea. I don’t even know what heavy, theoretical books you’re talking about — so for you to identify them, read them, digest them, and assemble the useful bits with your own thinking on it in a short book — happy days.
That’s fantastic – looking forward to seeing the book later this year!
Thanks guys – any feedback on specific things you would find useful in your day to day jobs?
Paul, this sounds like is could really fill a gap. Certainly we’re always keen to educate our clients on how they can make social work, and this book sounds like it could be an important part of that education.
In terms of specifics, actionable steps always seem to resonate, plus the ability to create and manage pilot programmes and build a business case. Plus practical examples of response matrices, core platform roadmaps and so on would seem to work. Finally case studies of course are pretty powerful – we have some pretty great stories (as I am sure everyone above and below does..) – with companies who aren’t the usual suspects ( and are outside the US) – let me know if you want to hear their stories.
Good luck, Paul
Great idea, Paul. Good to see you on the Future Social Media group and will be feeding some ideas through from UK, based on our experience of the shifting social media cultures here and with our research work with university academics.
Best of luck,
Tim
Paul, I am so thrilled that you are writing this book. From a marketing communications perspective, there are so many books, theories and viewpoints about social media and where it will go. Social Circles promises a well researched, succinct update on the future of communication and the web. How quickly can I get a copy??! Darina
[...] 作者Paul Adams，其就职于Google UX团队从事用户体验研究工作。今年年初他开始写作一本社会化网络方面的书，期间的历程在其博客上有具体介绍，预计8月会正式发布。 [...]
[...] is van Paul Adams, Senior User Experience Researcher bij Google. Een boek van zijn hand, Social Circles, verschijnt in [...]
I read your presentation in slideshow, you present a great ideas to improve the social networking fields, but who saw your presentation feels that you don’t like the facebook
, facebook stay a good experience that improve the social network fields by it’s development platform and it’s news options and ideas, the question is facebook can improve it’s methods to be a social network of the web 3.0 ?
in the end I want to say the facebook it’s just a way to represent social module in the web it’s not the reference