Paul Adams

This book explores the world of social media from a high-level insider's perspective and comes away with surprising conclusions that will impact the way marketers and advertisers will do business going forward.

How Small Groups of Friends are the Key to Influence on the Social Web

Grouped

The web is undergoing a fundamental change. It is moving away from its current structure of documents and pages linked together, and towards a new structure that is built around people. This is a profound change that will affect how we create business strategy, design, marketing, and advertising. The reason for this shift is simple. For tens of thousands of years we’ve been social animals. The web, which is only 20 years old, is simply catching up with offline life. From travel to news to commerce, smart businesses are reorienting their efforts around people–around the social behavior of their customers and potential customers. In order to be successful, businesses will need to understand how people are connected, how their social network influences them, how the people closest to them influence them the most, and how it’s more important for marketers to focus on small, connected groups of friends rather than looking for overly influential individuals. This book pulls together the latest research from leading universities and technology companies to describe how people are connected, and how ideas and brand messages spread through social networks. It shows readers how to rebuild their business around social behavior, and create products that people tell their friends about.

How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web

Ellen Chisa

If you're working on products, and you think you want to do anything social (you do) please read Grouped. One of my big pet peeves recently has been the overwhelming feeling that to make something "social" you just post to Twitter or Facebook. That isn't what social is. Grouped does a great job of explaining how you can use peoples' connections to actually create value, and deals with the topic at a much deeper level. I'm not going to try to summarize everything here, because the book is already concise and more eloquent than I am.

If you read the book and want more (or can't wait for the book to arrive) he has fantastic insights around how social interactions will shape the web in a deck here: http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-... or in this fantastic talk from the Adapative Path UX week: http://vimeo.com/29576241

Please. For my sanity if I ever have to work with you on something, read this book.

Grouped How Small Groups of Friends are the Key to Influence on the Social Web

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