Social Collaboration For Dummies

Introduction

This book is about getting work done with social media and social networking technologies. This is what’s often described as the use of “an internal Facebook” or “Facebook inside the enterprise” — even though many of those who work with the technology have grown to hate the comparison as trivializing what they do.

What is true is that social collaboration products humanize the online workplace by putting a friendlier face on it. We get to know our online collaborators better in something like the way we get to know our Facebook friends and friends of friends. Public social networks are great for the joy of discovering a long-lost high school friend or making a connection with a favorite author. The business equivalent would be connecting with others around the company whom you may never have met in person but who share a professional interest or are willing to share tips and make helpful introductions.

The more expansive enterprise social networking platforms go far beyond cloning Facebook, also including tools for maintaining internal blogs, wikis, document repositories, and project workspaces.

Because this is a book about a category of software products and cloud services, rather than any single social collaboration platform, I can’t promise detailed instructions on how to perform every task or configure every feature, although I do provide examples.

Consider this your guidebook to what is possible with social collaboration and how to get the most out of it.