Came across another use for Facebook yesterday – my basketball team needs to get photo licenses for a tournament we are entering which we don’t usually need to do.  Cue dramatic scenes at practice with someone bringing in a digital camera at the last minute to try and get passport photos.  But not everyone was there and some were unhappy because “they hadn’t shaved”.

Deadline fast approaching, but Facebook to the rescue.  Loads of photos to be downloaded, printed onto a license card and sent off.  Not that they’re necessarily the most flattering photos in the world…

Was talking to a friend at the weekend who works for one of the big four as a tax advisor.  Luckily for her, she was going on a business trip to the Bahamas, which would span over the weekend.  Problem was, her team was coming back on the Friday and she would be stuck with the Bahaman team, who she didn’t know.  Asking what they were doing at the weekend could be problematic as they might already have plans.  Here is a great example of where Enterprise 2.0 could help with more productive meetings with people in a large company who you don’t know.  If there was a corporate Facebook-style application, my friend could get to know her colleagues before she flew out there, so that social interaction would be a lot easier, which would lead to a more productive working relationship, and a much more productive trip.

I experienced this first hand when I went out to Varese – having interacted with Stewart, Luis and Emanuele ahead of time on Twitter and Skype, made it much easier to ‘break the ice’ and make more productive use of our limited time together.

Social software, both in the enterprise and in consumer world, is not about virtual relationships with people you never meet.  It’s about reducing the friction in those relationships where you only see each other infrequently – keeping a social connection which would otherwise fade over time, meaning that you feel less inhibited to call on someone who might be able to help you, and the time you do spend physically together is more productive.

Haven’t posted about Facebook for a while but this comment from Emmanuele raised some interesting points which I felt deserved their own post.

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!

I was with a customer last week discussing the options available in building a corporate intranet that would encourage the social elements of on-line collaboration (posting photos from the company Christmas party, recruiting the company 5-aside football team, even photos from employees’ holidays). Sharepoint had been tried and had failed and the conclusion was to just use Facebook. Now, whilst creating a group on Facebook for employees only is interesting, and I would more than advocate doing so as a pilot or experiment, I’m not entirely convinced that Facebook should become “the Intranet”. I found a great article on CMS Watch, by Tony Byrne, “Is Facebook in the Enterprise an Oxymoron?”

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.

A recent Computing magazine article made the case for Facebook in the Enterprise. As well as the usual points around digital natives expecting to use these tools as business communication applications, Mark Samuels adds one I hadn’t thought about until now – Storage Space.
The argument goes that instead of storing personal messages and photos on corporate systems, employees should be encouraged to place them on Facebook. I have certainly worked in organisations where entire file servers are dedicated to sharing mp3 files (although I don’t think Facebook would be too happy if it’s services were used to share illegal files) so this did cause me to pause for thought.
It doesn’t grab me as a silver bullet for corporate use of Facebook though. I’d be interested in just how much corporate storage is used for personal media – my intuitive belief is not much but would happily be proved wrong. Is lack of storage really such a concern for organisations at the moment and does personal media take up such a percentage that offloading it to Facebook would make a difference? Doesn’t really work for me…

Back from Orlando – in body if not in mind…

Just saw this article about fighting anti-semitism with Facebook. It’s great to hear a positive story around this as usually Facebook is blamed for encouraging hate groups…

I have been slightly wary of the whole targeted ads on Facebook thing – I wasn’t sure how it was going to affect my use of it or whether it would actually work. However, an ad appeared on my home page today which made me stop and thing – wow, that’s clever!

As some of you may no I am engaged to be married, and my Facebook status reflects that. The ad (as you can see) was for weddings abroad. Facebook obviously knows I’m engaged but can’t know that we are actually planning to get married abroad (can it…!?!) but the effectiveness of this ad on the long tail of Facebook engaged users who are thinking about getting married abroad (and I know of at least two other couples who are) must be highly effective. I’d be fascinated to know what the click-through rate is.

Not only is this idea very clever, it’s also exceptionally simple. I saw a video of Facebook’s presentation to the advertising community when they launched this feature – and it’s as simple as providing the image, the link to your site, and then filter the people who you want to see it. In this case – where status = engaged! Must have taken the company under 30 seconds to set this campaign up…

So – what’s Google going to do about it?

A while back, when email started to get really popular, there was a large amount of “manual viruses” that went round. You would receive an email that went along the lines of

“Microsoft has today released a warning about the xyz virus. This is a very harmful virus that will automatically send itself to everyone in your Inbox. Please forward this mail to everyone you know so that they do not open an email with the subject xyz”.

The virus usually didn’t exist. What did everyone who received it do? Forwarded it to everyone in their contacts list which is exactly what the virus was purported to do. There were some amusing ones which claimed it would send your ex-girlfriend your new phone number etc. There is a good summary of these hoaxes here.

If they wern’t playing on the fear of catching a computer virus, they played on the emotional heartstrings – sign this petition to end cruelty to women under the Taliban etc. The irony is that these particular petitions are often designed to disrupt an email address – so when everyone forwards their ’signature’ onto the (sometimes genuine) email address (in the Taliban case someone with the title Special Advisor on Gender Issues and the Advancement of Women) which is either non-existent or worse, floods the Inbox and actually prevents the Special Advisor from doing his or her job.

Soon – most people got wise to the idea – then web site phishing came along where people were asked to give their bank (or, more likely, eBay) login details, and again, people got wise to it.

Why, then, are people again falling for Facebook hoaxes which are breathtakingly not possible. As with the email ones they play on fear and emotional blackmail. Eg a recent popular post on Funwall is around a gang initiation in London whereby gangs drive around with their lights off and have to shoot the driver of the first car to flash them. Obviously you have to pass this on to your friends and tell them not to flash anyone who has their lights off. This warning claims to come from various sources, one of which is the London Ambulance Service who posted this denial on their website. There are various others claiming that Make A Wish foundation will donate 7 cents every time a message of support for a sick child is passed on. Just think for a second. Why would they do this? How would they know how many times it has been passed on? Is this really the best way to support Make A Wish foundation?

The craziest one yet is a post alleging to be from Mark Zuckerberg himself (therefore it must be true!) This is worth reproducing in its entirety:

Attention all Facebook membeRs.
Facebook is recently becoming very overpopulated,
There have been many members complaining that Facebook
is becoming very slow.Record shows that the reason is
that there are too many non-active Facebook members
And on the other side too many new Facebook members.
We will be sending this messages around to see if the
Members are active or not,If you’re active please send
to other users using Copy+Paste to show that you are active
Those who do not send this message within 2 weeks,
The user will be deleted without hesitation to create more space,
If Facebook is still overpopulated we kindly ask for donations but until then send this message to all your friends and make sure you send
this message to show me that your active and not deleted.

Founder of Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg

Where do we start with this? Facebook is becoming slow because of inactive members???? Just think about this for one second. Why is your gym busy? Is it because of all those people who have joined and don’t show up? And Facebook don’t know who is active and who is inactive? And the best way they have of determining this is for you to send a message to other users and send a copy to Mark? Why do you need to send it on to all your friends? And why is it going around Funwall? Can’t Facebook just put a message in everyone’s Inbox? And are you seriously telling me Facebook can’t tell which users are active? Back to the gym, don’t you think that they might know who comes in and out of the building for marketing purposes? How does Facebook make its money? Advertising. Who is active and what they are looking it is the most valuable piece of information Facebook holds. Without it, they’d lose money.

Oh, and of course, they’ll delete your account in 2 weeks. Even if you’ve been away on holdiay for two weeks and not logged in. That will go down well with their users. Doesn’t anyone remember the phishing scams of a few years ago “we’ll close your bank account unless you send us your username and password within 48 hours”. Of course, the irony is I have seen some walls with this posted 6 or 7 times. Don’t these people see that by doing what they are doing they are contributing to the problem?? No wonder Facebook has been so slow recently…

This caught my eye recently, amongst all the press about companies banning Facebook and it being generally bad for productivity and business, Serena Software has launched Facebook Fridays. The idea is that for one hour every Friday employees should spend time on Facebook, collaborating with colleagues and customers and recruiting. Interestingly, the approach includes one of the key components to a successful internal collaboration project, which is sponsorship. Not just in terms of warm words, but actual engagement from senior management. In this case, a Senior VP and the CEO are using their profiles on Facebook as an example of what they are looking for from their staff.

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?

Wow – a long delay in posting, a serious crime in the blog scene but I have some excuses.

1) Work continues to take up a huge amount of time, we had a fantastic seminar at Cisco’s headquarters last week with over 70 in attendence.

2) Am moving to St Albans and leaving behind my beloved 0207 area code.

3) I got engaged!

There is actually a web 2.0 angle to this as well. Claire only got really excited about the engagement once she was able to change her status on Facebook! Apparently that made it ‘official’. Is this the new announcement in the Times?