Facebook’s soaring success presents CIOs with something of a dilemma. With 900 million users, it’s impossible to ignore. It has a growing presence in the workplace, where many people use Facebook to communicate and collaborate. Companies themselves spend a lot of money advertising on Facebook, cultivating communities of users and fans, managing their relationships within those groups, and mining them for data. Yet despite those connections between Facebook and the enterprise, Facebook doesn’t offer enterprise class products the way other consumer tech companies from Google to Amazon and Apple do.
And Facebook doesn’t appear to have any immediate plans to develop an enterprise version of its platform, says Brian Blau, a research director with Gartner’s consumer technology and markets group. As part of a research project in spring 2011, Blau asked Facebook whether it had any intention of entering the market for enterprise social networking. “They said they had no intention of doing that,” Blau told CIO Journal.
But CIOs still need to accept the fact that Facebook will be an increasingly important part of their world, even though it lacks the management tools and controls that other consumer tech companies have provided. While many organizations – half, according to some estimates – still ban the use of Facebook in the workplace, CIOs should be looking for ways to use Facebook as a business tool: to amplify their marketing messages through their employees, and to help employees find one another and collaborate on work together.
Employees are already on Facebook, and use Facebook during work hours, and can access it via their mobile devices even if their employers have blocked Facebook on the corporate network. And that presence is a good thing, according to Charlene Li, an analyst with Altimeter Group, a consultancy specialized in social media. “People go on Facebook to get work done, they go on Facebook to get expertise. If I have a well-developed network on Facebook, it’s just another channel for networking and getting work done,” she tells CIO Journal.
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At a minimum, companies should give their employees guidelines on what to say when they’re on Facebook. For instance, how should employees handle inquiries from Facebook friends who want recommendations about the products and services that the employee’s company sells? Companies should advise employees on what, if anything they should say. “Saying something or not saying something, or having a canned statement that says I can’t comment on that – it all says something,” said Li. And very few companies have guidelines on how to handle these requests.
Companies also can encourage their employees to subscribe to their brand or company page, and ask employees to “Like” posts to the page that they actually do like. “If you can get five thousand employees to like a post, it has an impact. Employee advocacy can be incredibly powerful,” she said.
More adventurous companies are creating private groups on Facebook, but Li says that can be hard to manage. “It tends to be employees and alumni,” she said, because companies can’t remove people from the group once they’ve left the company.
Facebook doesn’t have the technology or sales force to create a pure business product, but Li says Facebook could help businesses, and generate a bit of revenue, by giving businesses tools to manage those groups, by allowing them to create official, sanctioned groups and to manage those groups using the company’s employee directory.
Facebook already offers Facebook Connect, which other companies can use as a means for verifying the identify of their own online users.
“Facebook clearly has legs into the enterprise, even if it doesn’t offer enterprise social networking itself,” Blau says.
At the moment, “Facebook’s simply isn’t architected for the enterprise,” says Adam Marcus, managing director with OpenView Venture Partners, of Boston, which funds expansion stage technology companies. He said Facebook lacks the security and compliance features that companies often value, because they want to control who their employees communicate with and what they say about the company and its products. There are alternatives—such as Yammer, Jive and Chatter—that are more specifically designed with those needs in mind. The market for business social networking is expected to be worth $4.5 billion by 2016, according to market research firm IDC.
Over time, Facebook may be forced to enter the enterprise market in a more significant way, according to Blau, of Gartner. Consumer Internet companies such as Google and Apple waited quite some time before they offered enterprise products, but eventually their consumer offerings became so embedded in the corporation that they had little choice to make a full-on commitment. “I expect Facebook may follow along the same path,” Blau says.
Source: CIO JOURNAL