About this book

"if you're interested in using social media in your organization, and you should be,
Social by Social is the real deal."
- Craig Newmark, Founder of Craigslist

Social by Social is a practical guide to using new technologies to create social impact. It makes accessible the tools you need to engage a community, offer services, scale up activities and sustain projects. Whoever you are, it shows you how to take technology and turn it into real world benefits.

We want to help people in the public and third sectors do more good, by showing them the power of these technologies and how to access them. In the process, we hope we can also educate funders and policy workers about the huge shift of mindset and expectations needed to commission these projects successfully, to give the innovators more space to work.

Whether you’re a small charity wanting cheap web tools to support your work, a large organisation seeking to engage more effectively with your community, a civil servant charged with making public services more efficient, or just a concerned citizen on a personal mission, we hope there’s something here for you.

If you’re coming to this for the first time, you may just want to read about successful projects or get a view of the direction we think things are moving. Others of you may just want to skip to the practical bits and use the resources and tools we’ve collected to help you through the tricky bits in your project. Or you might just want to put the book on your coffee table to impress your friends. Throughout though, we’ve tried to signpost related content that you might find relevant to you so wherever you start, we’ll steer you in the right direction.

Social by Social isn’t a manual in the classic sense. This work is still pretty new and there isn’t a simple model to follow. Instead, it asks you the questions which you will need to answer, shares some of the routes other people have tried, and offers signposts to help you find your way. And it invites you to join an ongoing conversation as we all find the way together.

We’ve chosen the ‘old’ technology of print to communicate with you because we wanted to reach people who aren’t doing everything online already, and because we felt it was the most appropriate technology to meet our purpose: creating an educational resource and reference guide to new technologies. We've taken an innovative approach to printing and distributing the handbook by offering all the content for free online, in its entirety, via this commentable Drupal website and Wordpress blog. NESTA have printed some colour copies to give away, and you can buy a semi-colour version via digital print-on-demand, enabling us to sell the book around the world through printers in the UK, US and Belgium, without the need to stock copies. Design and editorial was by Sociability, and print and publication by OpenMute.

We hope you like it.

Social by Social
2009
ISBN 978-1-906496-41-8

by Andy Gibson, Nigel Courtney, Amy Sample Ward, David Wilcox and Professor Clive Holtham

All original content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, and is attributable to the named section or quotation authors.

 

Commissioned by NESTA
Design by Sangeet Gyawali and Sociability
Typesetting and website by OpenMute
Published in the UK by OpenMute

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