When I wrote about how Facebook itself wasn’t neccessarily a great intranet, but Facebook-type systems would be, Emmanuele pointed me toward Workbook, a Facebook application which creates a secure Facebook for the enterprise. The idea is that if you can create a secure Facebook area to connect with work colleagues, you get a social networking intranet with the look and feel of Facebook that users know and love, as well as a system pre-populated with all your contacts. Therefore Facebook can be used as a corporate intranet.

This raised the following thoughts:

1. Irrespective of whether or not you use Facebook or an internal Facebook-type system, the point about seeding content is 100% valid. Adoption will significantly increase if a user’s contacts are pre-loaded rather than requiring him or her to manually add them. As I’m sure Dvir will tell you, there is some great technology coming out of organisations such as IBM which not only would pre-populate a system from a corporate directory, but also would analyse users’ email, instant messaging, SMS, phone and voicemail records to deduce a contact list (including external contacts), and pre-populate accordingly.
2. I’m still not entirely convinced that having a corporate system appear exactly as Facebook is a good idea. Whilst it may appear to Gen-Y, we still have a job to do in getting the digitial immigrant generation to use social networking tools. If the corporate version looks identical to Facebook, this may actually put them off! As long as the UI is intuitive, Gen-Y will get it. The compromise between Facebook functionality, but corporate branding I think is the best bet to get adoption from both sides of the digital divide.
3. Whilst the line between a professional and personal contact is blurring, some users still see value, and actively wish to keep the two separate. Again, this is important in keeping the digitial immigrants on board.
4. I still believe that the corporate-Facebook has different functionality than the social-Facebook. This is because they solve fundamentally different problems. Facebook is a way of keeping in touch with people with very low effort. I am in frequent touch with friends who have moved away or on to different lives where previously the relationship would be reduced to sending a Christmas card every year, “just to stay in touch”. Corporate-Facebook is about finding expertise, reaching out to people you don’t know and evaluating whether they are a trustworthy person with whom it is worth sharing knowledge and expertise. So where Facebook revolves around photos, corporate-Facebook systems revolve around link-sharing. Facebook focuses on “what you are doing right now” whereas corporate-Facebook focuses more on “what you know (and who you know ) right now”. So whilst there are obvious functional similarities (embedded instant messaging for starters) their purpose is very different.

Thanks to Emanuele for raising these questions that made me revisit this topic! Whichever side of the fence you sit on whether corporates should use Facebook itself or systems such as IBM Connections or Microsoft Sharepoint which offer Facebook-style functionality, there’s certainly a consenus growing that social software is useful!

He makes a great point around using Facebook to market your company outside your organisation, that “people join Facebook because they don’t want to hear from your company”. The same could be true of using Facebook internally, even in the meeting with the customer just recently we already started talking about the potential need to have two Facebook identities, one personal and one work related. Using Facebook as the official intranet actually starts to get very confusing indeed.

Instead, organisations should identify exactly what the problem is in their organisation that needs solving, then identify the elements of social-networking sites that could provide a solution and look to implement those inside the firewall. There’s no point trying to take advantage of Facebook’s ability to connect people if everyone knows everyone within the company. There’s also no point in deploying the ability to share information with your colleagues if the problem is that the workforce is geographically distrubuted and large enough that people don’t actually know who they should be collaborating with.

My attitude is best summed up by Byrne’s conclusion – company culture needs to start with “how can we help our employees be more effective?” If the best way to make them effective is to give them tools which can be abused, then so be it. The benefits of mobile phones and internal internet access far outweigh the risks that employees will misuse them. The same is true of Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0/whatever you want to call it collaboration tools. Specifically, Byrne says, the attitude needs to be “how can we support them [our employees] in the way they really want to work (as opposed to the way we think they want to work)?” This captures the influx of Generation Y employees who would struggle to communicated without instant messaging or access to Facebook as well as our focus on the fact that tools need to provide value to employees if you want to have any hope of widespread adoption. You need to focus on exactly what the problem is, put the tools that solve these problems in the hands of the workforce, and watch. The useful ones will be used, and the low value ones will fall by the wayside.

This sounds similar in philosophy to Google’s 20% time, where engineers are encouraged to spend 1 day a week on projects they find interesting. “Encourage” is probably the wrong word, it’s actually part of their performance review, so it’s almost mandatory! Could this happen at Serena? Employees being reviewed on how they have used Facebook in an innovative way to recruit someone to the company, collaborate with an employee or customer? You could imagine that if someone refused to use email it would be brought up during an appraisal, so how long until using social networking sites becomes as key a skill as using Office or Outlook?