Microsoft last week announced a connector between Microsoft Outlook, and profile information in Facebook. The service works by matching a user’s e-mail address to their Facebook profile. So if one of your contacts in Outlook is on Facebook, you will see whatever information is publicly available from their profile within Outlook (or whatever information you can access if you are “friends”).Microsoft previously announced a similar integration between Outlook at LinkedIn.
Microsoft’s move creates new challenges for organizations trying to balance the need to embrace the world of social software with concerns over security, compliance, privacy and productivity. Our 2010 benchmark of over 200 companies shows that 40% block access to public social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, but often are forced to back off blanket bans due to employee demand or business justifications to participate in public social communities. Meanwhile, only 23% have a formal social strategy.
Allowing employees to engage with public social networks can provide real benefits in terms of building personal relationships with customers, partners, and suppliers, but of course carries risk and must be implemented with respect to information protection requirements (See Socialware’s recently released Guide to Facebook Social Networking Compliance).
We continue to spend a lot of time working with our clients to try and help them balance the need for openness with the reality of governance. Enterprise managers should take efforts by Microsoft and others to poke holes in the social firewall as further justification for a proactive enterprise social strategy.
Given the rapid growth of Facebook over the last year it’s no wonder that many companies are embracing it to create communities for their customers, partners, and fans. But before deciding to use Facebook for your public facing community, or if you already using Facebook, think again.
Cubetree launched a free collaboration suite designed to bring the capabilities of Facebook to the enterprise. But Cubetree’s offering goes a bit further that social computing by integrating more traditional collaboraton capabilities such as file sharing, as well as Web 2.0 services such as blogs and wikis into a complete SaaS-based collaboration offering. There’s a trend here, underscored by commercial products such as Telligent Community Server and IBM Lotus Connections to bring Facebook-like capabilities to the enterprise market, but where is Facebook itself in all of this?
Hiya all! A quick blog post to let everyone know that we’re putting more fuel into our Twitter account - @e2conf
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Yammer was announced with great fanfare at the Techcrunch50 conference last fall, and David Sacks, the CEO, has had the opportunity to work closely with a large and growing list of enterprise clients since. He and I recently caught up, and the time was well spent:
A few of the insights I gained:
Yammer was called “Twitter for enterprises, or Twitter with a business model”, he recounted, but it is evolving into a larger service with more collaborative support.
As far as Twitter goes, David doesn’t see them as a direct competitor, since it is so geared to open discourse. Selling private areas for business discussion doesn’t fit with that model, he feels, so Twitter might not go there ever. Yammer, on the other hand, is geared to privacy as the default, which makes more sense in the business context.
Yammer also dropped the 140 character limit that defines Twitter, and which makes sense for a consumer and SMS-integrated product.
David points out that the buyers of technology in the enterprise market are not necessary the end users. Yammer has developed a wide range of administration tools — privacy, usage policies, user management — that appeal to the IT buyers or management. But end users really want to use web 2.0 style tools even while at work.
Yammer supports ‘bootleg’ adoption, since anyone with an ‘company.com’ email address can start using the product, so it doesn’t require corporate sign-off, but the admin tools do.
David has found a greater willingness by users and management to try new SAS models, which favors start-ups and leads to innovation.
Businesses have clearly come to the realization they shouldn’t necessarily own or manage their own software, David thinks. But the hybrid, viral model that comes with a product like Yammer means that companies don’t have to make any decision about buying until it has become widely used and popular.
Yammer seems to have an immediate impact on the way work gets done. In his experience, in traditional large companies people really don’t know what people are working on. “If you think about how tools like Facebook and Twitter allow people to remain connected with large groups of friends, and think about how that could work in business, I think its going to make companies more efficient [...] and they will have much more engaged employees because the employees will feel much more connected to their colleagues and what is happening in the company.”
While David is an unabashed evangelist for Yammer’s specific offering, I found his thoughts practical and not at all bubbling with marketing hyperbole.
Tools like Yammer represent a real turning point for business, I think, where more open social discourse (even given the privacy constraints of business) and ambient awareness become foreground activities, displacing fully closed discourse tools like email, and the batch mode mindset of org charts and monthly management reports.
For those brand managers seeking advice on how to build a fan base around your company’s Facebook page/ public profile, the folks over at Facebook just posted a perky video from Wildfire Interactive advising how to drive your number of fans up and create a movement within the network.
There’s also an intriguing case study from Adobe that’s worth reading. Bottom line - providing your fanbase with the opportunity to interact via promotions, giveaways or contests will lead to more community enthusiasm and perpetuate the viral nature of Facebook.
Brendan Gahan over at GigaOm writes today about Facebook’s upcoming interface changes, suggesting that Facebook is launching an effort to subvert the growing popularity of Twitter by giving Facebook users more opportunity for real-time interaction.
The New York Times reports this morning that Facebook is set to expand “Facebook Connect”, the controversial service that reports your activities on external sites to your Facebook profile. Facebook caused a stir a while ago when it launched this service without giving users the ability to control updates, leading to people finding out that their shopping habits were now open to their Facebook friends. While Facebook has addressed privacy issues, this move is sure to spark a wider war for ownership of on-line identity.
The Enterprise 2.0 Blog is affiliated with the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, an event focusing on social tools and technologies that help make companies more creative, agile and productive.
Jul 16th, 2010 |
