Facebook For The Enterprise – Part 3, Groups and Communities

When you get a group of friends or colleagues together in an online community, shared interest groups quickly become a key part of that space. So far, we’ve discussed the profile page and home page of both Facebook and NewsGator’s Social Sites, and today we’ll turn our attention to groups and their role in enterprise social communities.

Facebook groups run the gamut from “1,000,000 Strong for Stephen Colbert,” the wildly popular faux-political group that attracted 1.5 million members, to groups that are focused more on shared interests or activities. Most Facebook users belong to a wide range of groups, from humorous groups to groups about issues they care about, and they use them to leave messages for other group members, utilize discussion boards, and post content such as articles, videos and photos.

Social Sites Communities also enables people to take advantage of the collaborative power of groups and provides for discoverability and easy sharing of content, as well as discussions. Unlike Facebook, however, where you have to either research groups on your own or be invited, Social Sites recommends communities based on colleagues who are already members, as well as similar tags, read content, subscriptions and activities. Apart from recommended groups, Social Sites also displays recently created communities for easily finding new groups, and has a powerful search element for finding groups via tags.

Social Sites Communities also offer a discussion component that includes rich e-mail integration, which allows users to participate in a community without ever logging in to the site. Or, if you love RSS like we do, you can add content to a group via an RSS feed. Additionally, Social Sites simplifies content additions by allowing content to be tagged into the community, added via Social Bookmarks, or uploaded to a community document store. Finally, Social Sites offers Community Tracker which functions much like Colleague Tracker or Facebook News Feed except it collects updates from your communities in one centralized place.

While consumer based groups, such as those offered by Facebook, are a good diversion and a great place to talk about common interests, Social Sites’ Communities bring powerful collaboration and document sharing into the enterprise. Since groups are automatically recommended and easily discoverable, people know that they’re part of groups that facilitate connections with colleagues based on common areas of expertise and shared knowledge. Communities enable companies to really bring together content and people in order to boost collaboration and help people work smarter and more efficiently.