ANTenna Blog -- Hardware & Software

As social networking tools go, Facebook is probably at the top of many people's lists. As a business tool, I would venture to guess that, for most managers, the social networking site is at or close to the bottom of most of their lists. But it looks like it won't stay there for long. Facebook is, at last, worming its way into the enterprise in ways that actually make sense.

At the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, the question was on everybody's lips: Are there legitimate business uses for Facebook?

Irwin Lazar, principal research analyst and program director at Nemertes Research, was the moderator of the session entitled, Collaborating through Facebook, and he put it best for those of us in the audience who were there with a chip on our shoulder: "Can Facebook be more than a place where college students plan parties and take movie trivia quizzes?"

The movie trivia quizzes is the site's most popular app. Business tool indeed.

But Lazar made an interesting case for the site. The traditional workplace is no more. Employees are working all over the place so how does a company create a community that will foster collaboration. How do you get that water cooler effect without the water cooler? As he noted, you don’t get to know people if you talk to them once a month on a conference call.

Lazar presented some interesting research which indicated that -- in addition to noting that the few companies that encouraged social networking use were in the healthcare, university, and telecom sectors -- the main concern among companies about social networking sites was surprisingly not the time wasting factor but the control factor. How can they ensure compliance and governance?

Among the panelists were Clara Shih, the founder of Faceforce and product line director for salesforce.com; David Lavenda, vice president of marketing and product strategy for WorkLight; and, Kyle Arteaga, vice president of corporate communications for Serena Software.

For smaller businesses, Arteaga presented an interesting angle: His company dumpled its corporate intranet for Facebook. The company has offices in 18 countries and lest you think it's a bunch of just out of college kids think again: The average age of the employee is 44. The effort started six months ago and it started with three people. There is currently 93 percent penetration.
The obvious question here is, Why Facebook?

Arteaga said that in his company this was a way for people to connect, exchange information, and get educated. He added: "A lot of our employees are mainframe developers moving into Web 2.0. This was the best way to educate them."

Another benefit is that Facebook has provided an equalizing element to the company. The CEO loves to write what Arteaga terms "long diatribes" on his page. Everyone can comment, and they do. Most significantly, over the past six months employee satisfaction rose by 50 percent and e-mail traffic went down by 20 percent.
(One side note: Arteaga said that recent changes made by Facebook to its network have the company considering a move to another social networking site.)

As for security, Arteaga said the company has one policy for Facebook: Be smart. They considered coming up with a longer, more involved one but realized that no one would use it if they did. "You'll never get adoption if there are lots of hurdles," he said. So far less than four percent of the data on Facebook was proprietary and it occurred among a few people who Arteaga said were "educated" to what can be shared and how. Also, Arteaga noted that the type of communication use for proprietary information is document management. "The type of communication in Facebook is not usually proprietary," he said.

His comment that caused the most reaction: "I think security concerns [about social networking sites] are overblown."

For those with security concerns, Lavenda promoted his company's application, Workbook, which enables safe collaboration within Facebook. According to Lavenda, "You can pull in friends but the information stays within the firewall."

Collaboration, sharing information, and building a community appear to be where smaller businesses will find value in a site like Facebook. Interestingly, Arteaga noted that Facebook was not excited to see Serena use Facebook in its business because he said the company doesn't have an enterprise strategy.

If they don't develop one soon, there will eventually be another social networking site that does. As Lavenda concluded, "People want to use consumer tools. They want to access their information wherever they are. Facebook is popular but there will probably be others."