[Air-L] Virtual community building and maintenance in the social media age

[David Brake]

Dear colleagues,

I will be teaching a course next semester on virtual community building and management, blending theory and practice. A few years ago, I felt pretty confident that I could put together a reading list of books on virtual community management and be comfortable it would cover what is needed. But that was before social media. Now (depending on the purpose of a virtual community itself) I might not even recommend a website-based virtual community at all – for all of the vexed issues of platform ownership, a Facebook group or even Twitter hashtag might be a better solution for some groups. Are you aware of any good books and articles (preferably academic but not necessarily) which bring virtual community advice up-to-date to take into consideration managing virtual communities spread across multiple platforms, some of which a virtual community manager has no direct control over?

The books I am currently considering teaching from are:

Kim, A. J. (2000). Community building on the Web. Berkeley, CA: Peachpit Press. 
Powazek, D. M. (2002). Design for community: the art of connecting real people in virtual places. Indianapolis, Ind.: New Riders. 
O'Keefe, P. (2008). Managing online forums: everything you need to know to create and run successful community discussion boards. New York: AMACOM. 
Bacon, J. (2012). The art of community: Building the new age of participation (2nd ed.). Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media, Inc. Retrieved from http://www.artofcommunityonline.org/ <http://www.artofcommunityonline.org/>
Kraut, R. E., Resnick, P., & Kiesler, S. (2012). Building successful online communities evidence-based social design. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 

I am also considering:

Howard, T.W. (2010). Design to thrive: Creating social networks and online communities that last. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann

He talks about social networks vs online communities but seems to suggest they are mutually exclusive while I would say you can layer an online community on top of a social network or use the latter to bring people into the former.

Anyway, I am keen either to find a book that properly takes the new social media options into account when talking about virtual community or at least a book or article that gestures towards the existing conventional wisdom and suggests what the new social media can add.

I will happily feed back to the list or interested people the curated list that results...

Any ideas?

Regards,

David
--
Dr David Brake, Researcher and Educator http://davidbrake.org/, @drbrake
Author of "Sharing Our Lives Online: Risks and Exposure in Social Media” https://www.facebook.com/sharingourlivesonline <https://www.facebook.com/sharingourlivesonline>