This undergraduate textbook “adopts the perspective of organizations ... and clarifies the impact of social media on their different departments or disciplines, while also exploring how organizations use social media to create business value.” The author is an assistant professor at Ghent University (Belgium), where she teaches courses on business process management and social media.

The 20-page introduction serves little but to iterate the author’s objectives and audience. Chapter 2 provides the terminology and overview of media and tools that will serve as the basis for the following discussions. The next two chapters make the business cases for organizational uses of social media, the expected returns, advertising online, and viral media.

Social customer relationship management (CRM) is discussed in chapter 5, and an introduction to search engine optimization (SEO) in chapter 6--which is more of a managerial overview. The next two chapters are provocative, covering related aspects of business intelligence: opinion mining, predictive analysis, social networking data analysis, and sentiment analysis.

Online human resources (HR) recruiting is covered in chapter 9, and crowdfunding in chapter 10. I wish more depth and emphasis had been placed on chapter 11, “Legal and Ethical Issues in Social Media,” before the final wrap-up chapter.

Most chapters end with a self-test for review and a bibliography. Scattered within the chapters are case examples, sometimes questions with potential solutions, and sometimes provocative items to ponder. There is a four-page index to the main body of 245 pages; links to online resources appear within the main body.

There are a plethora of how-to guides to social media management, but this is the first text I know of geared toward nontechnical, undergraduate students in business fields. It is targeted to students in the fields of business and administration, not computer scientists or software engineers. Taught by those with some practical experience, it will meet its goal.