19 posts tagged “facebook”

Taking advantage of the new web in business - after all it's ultimately about the bottom line for business - is increasingly important. Forrester thinks that E2.0 could be a $4.6bn industry in the next five years. [Correction - make that $1.8bn - thanks Niall]

Enter Google - the world's biggest brand and cool enough and relevant enough to be more than a verb: Google links Gen X and Y. The former know its the de facto search engine, and for e-mail and maps, and the latter for a host of innovative applications and mash-up fodder.

Google has launched a new sandbox for iGoogle - and Scott Gilbertson believes it looks suspiciously like a proto-type social networking site. Scoble called it earlier this month, when he wrote how Google's five year plan to get into Enterprise was taking shape. Microsoft won't be too far behind.

Facebook has a real threat as heir-apparent to becoming the default social media homepage.

Michael Idinopulos writes that SocialText may have come up with the Facebook equivalent for the enterprise. It's SocialText people platform allows people to organise content around what their experience says about them rather than around people and relationships. It is in the flow and very much a part of everyday working life, and could be an answer to what is the killer app for E2.0.

The organisation of in-the flow content is vital. Seth Godin points out in What happens when we organise?: "Wikipedia works because so many contributors figured out how to self-organize into a group that produced something far more useful than a traditionally organized document."

Techcrunch underlines that the organising ability of SocialText is simple and compelling: "For a lot of enterprise employees, having a single dashboard with secure company information alongside fun or useful outside services on a single dashboard is exactly what they need. It also makes SocialText the center of a worker’s day, which means they far less likely to ever lose the customer."

If Facebook is the social media frontpage, has SocialText delivered the front page for business?

With content, comment and communities increasingly distributed, it seems that Zuckerberg and co are doing all they can to attract the social media community together by turning Facebook into a single source of conversation.

Alongside a chat facility, Facebook has managed to commoditise Twitter, Flickr, del.icio.us and such like into features on their system, as opposed to discreet systems in their own right. The Palo Alto group is also benefitting from a new application from Six Apart - Blog It - designed to broadcast content from Facebook to Tumblr, Twitter, Pownce, Vox et al.

Facebook fatigue was all the rage around the turn of the year, but these moves will be welcomed by many. All your social media are belong to us.

The developments brought to mind Tom Matrullo's recent great post An adjacency of opposites, in which he looks at Clare Hart’s and David Weinberger’s talks at FASTforward08. Hadley Reynolds highlights better than I could the relevant part of the post:

"For David, the core idea of his powerfully evoked image of 'the new front page' is that we have shifted the control of the structure of our information engagement from the owners of the content to ourselves as the community of users of the content."

And if Facebook is the new front page for social media and it's easier to start a conversation with many different communities simultaneously, then what happens next will prove interesting precisely because they are different communities.

Forget whether people ask if Facebook is for business or for the older generation. Microsoft's investment shows that Facebook is not only for business, but can be viewed as the final proof of life for Web2.0.

The move was widely flagged, the reasons are fairly sound, and include this insight from Jeremiah Owyang:

"...imagine fluidity between enterprise collaboration tools. We already know that many Microsoft employees are using Facebook, and this is becoming an identity tool that Microsoft has always wanted (remember Passport?). Microsoft will experiment with connecting Facebook, looking for alignments to daily work and personal lifestyles, and combine where appropriate."

Hopefully, this move will add a little more credibility to the reasons why companies should allow Facebook-style networking into the enterprise.

And just in case there is any doubt that Microsoft doesn't get social media, have a look at this video.

Is Enterprise2.0 for every business?

It is not difficult to find examples where it works.

Yet Nassim Taleb points out in The Black Swan that "a series of corroborative facts is not necessarily evidence...It is misleading to build a general rule from observed facts."

An example of social media and business a little at odds (at a stretch, what Taleb calls 'negative empiricism') was recently provided by Lucy Kellaway's agony aunt column in the Financial Times: How can I turn down my boss's Facebook invitation?

While I agree that, in general, all generalisations are untrue, the responses to this little quandary provided hope that more people see a difference between social media and E2.0, and that even Facebook could work for business.

It seems as if Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer just doesn't understand social networking. Robert Scoble - former Microsoft employee and co-author of Naked Conversations - covers the issue deftly. His thoughts may remind you of your boss. Here's one quote from Ballmer reported in The Times:

"I think these things [social networks] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

Yet Ballmer, who will never live this down, may not be quite so naive, says Matthew Ingram, given Microsoft's recent talks with Facebook and what happened to eBay/Skype.

While Ballmer plays dumb, the likes of Yahoo are making real progress.

The latest edition of Management Today describes social networking sites as the 'latest interent craze', but they are here for good. Yet big companies are not listening and so are fading. And fast. As Seth Godin points out, it (almost) always happens this way.

So what's the management of today's excuse for not using, say Facebook? Enter fear, uncertainty and doubt, aka FUD.

• The fear is the company will screw up. They might. Wal-Mart did, yet picked itself up and tried again. Quickly. Mind, even a specialist can get it really, really wrong.
• Uncertainty comes in the form of not knowing what to do. Join the club! But there's a lot of good, solid tips out there for getting something rolling. The impact may be a little like a donut!
• The doubt is will it add any value? Well, look at Ernst & Young's Facebook page and you decide.

So what's the corporate alibi? As Nassim Taleb says in The Black Swan: "We do not spontaneously learn that we don't learn that we don't learn."

A week may be a long time in politics, but trying to keep up with the pace of change in social media is just as mad. Even as mid-size companies get to grips with Web2.0, and corporate blogging reaches a tipping point, up pops an interesting look at what the blog of the future could be like!

The pace of change can be seductive and/or discouraging, yet really understanding what can help you, how and how to do it is critical. A few luminaries have shone their torches recently on information about systems that should help when considering these key questions:

• Chris Brogan on Facebook
• Jeremiah Oywang on Twitter
• Bill Ives on Wikis

You might be waiting for all of separate systems to be fully integrated, easy to update and simple to find. Maybe you are waiting for Microsoft's unified communications product Live Communication? In the meantime, social media is here and now, and no longer something that only your secretary should know about.

What do Wal Mart and A&P Supermarkets have in common? Both are seeing the impact of social media up close and personal.

Wal Mart authored their own fate by starting a Facebook page. Not everyone likes Wal Mart - and now they had an outlet for their views. What did Wal Mart do? Well, as Jerimiah Owyang reports here and here - not too much. They could have taken down the page, but haven't - so at least they know that you can't stop the interweb.

Which is more than A&P Supermarkets. They are asking for a parody video filmed by two teenagers in one of their stores to be taken down, and have filed a seven-figure lawsuit. B.L. Ochman and Shel Holtz cover the debacle well.

Shel also suggests that corporate blogging - one of the higher-profile forms of social media - may have reached its tipping point, as a company joining the conversation doesn't make massive headlines anymore. The flip of this normalizing is that attention shifts to companies - such as A&P Supermarkets - that get the even the basics horribly wrong.

Both Cadbury's and HSBC have got a wave of good press in the past couple of weeks for listening.

The global chocolate manufacturer is bringing back its Wispa bar after a concerted campagin (reported here by Shel Holtz) by those looking for a 'smoother, more velvety chocolate', while HSBC, the self-proclaimed 'world's local bank', has decided not to take away interest-free overdrafts from student's as soon as they leave university - again because of a campaign on Facebook.

Reading Jeremiah Owyang's post proclaiming that if you want a wave then drop a pebble, it seems that is what consumers did - and the wave caught both Cadbury's and HSBC.

The causal relationship is not too different for companies. If businesses really want to open up a two way conversation with their workforce, then let the employees drop a pebble. To kick-start matters, maybe internal communicators - who themselves should be early-adopters - can set up their own Eneterprise2.0 placeholder - a Twitter account, blog, Facebook page etc - for employees with different levels of adoption to come to you with thoughts and opinions. Yes, it bypasses the organisation, but it keeps the 'I' in ROI low and does mean that the ripples from more employees can reach you more quickly.