Facebook for the Enterprise – Part 1

Although Facebook began as a social networking site for college students – a site where they could upload pictures of their friends and write on one another's wall – it has quickly evolved into a wildly popular social network for high school students, professionals and everyone in between, with a valuation in the billions. As its popularity has skyrocketed, users have come to realize that Facebook has several very attractive collaboration and networking attributes including:

• Rich user profiles

• Easy discovery of friends to build a social graph

• Easy creation and joining of groups

• Easy content generation

• Intuitive display of updates based on social graph

Today, many businesses are seeing employees apply these social elements of Facebook to their jobs, forming Facebook groups around work projects and job interests. Looking to take advantage of this high-level collaboration and the power of the social graph, companies are now bringing Facebook-like features behind the firewall.

Over the next few weeks, we'll discuss the ways in which a Facebook-type network for the enterprise benefits both businesses and workers, and what the important distinctions are between Facebook and a social network built specifically for the enterprise, such as NewsGator's Social Sites (to get a brief summary of the latest release, here’s a brief Computerworld article that gives a good introduction). We'll cover the various aspects of social networks including the profile page, the home page, groups, news feeds, privacy features and sharing, and how these elements can support effective business communication and increased productivity.

The Facebook profile page contains information about a user that can be viewed by their friends and people in their network. Facebook users can customize their profile pages to include photos, favorite movies and books, interesting articles or videos from across the Web, and career and education history. The Facebook profile page also includes a mini-feed that shows recent activity and links to a user’s friends and groups.

Similarly, NewsGator Social Sites’ profile page contains information about a user that people in their company can tap into in order to get a sense of who they are and with whom and what they're working on.  

The Social Sites profile page includes a person’s photo, interests, work and education history, work communities, favorite subscriptions, and clipped articles.  The profile page also shows the user’s most recent activity within the company’s intranet/portal (i.e. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007).  And notably, although the page is customizable, much of the content is automatically generated through a user's daily authoring, tagging and reading, so he or she doesn't have to update information constantly. When users are given easy access to information about what someone in a certain role is reading, what they're interested in and what they've done most recently on SharePoint, further connections and collaborative relationships happen effortlessly.

One of our clients, CME Federal Credit Union, provides banking services to 26,000 members from multiple branches located throughout Ohio. With a highly distributed workforce, it was often difficult for CME’s branch personnel to find and connect with other employees. CME implemented Social Sites profile pages to facilitate collaboration and make it easier for branch employees to find subject matter experts.  This enterprise application of social networks, combined with other social computing features, enabled CME to improve productivity and realize a time savings of 30 minutes per day per employee.

The bottom line is that social networks in the enterprise enable people to find one another through shared connections and interests that they otherwise wouldn't know they had in common. And when minds come together to tackle a common problem, the business benefit is great indeed.