What Facebook means for the enterprise

It is Facebook’s heyday probably. Every tiny breath of Facebook will attract lots of discussion and review among major media and tech blog. It is successful to some extent if you don’t care its current sheet too much. But can we mirror Facebook’s popularity to Enterprise?

Let’s start with my experiences with Facebook. I’ve got my Facebook account for about 2 years and deployed my first FB app FunnyQ with FBML months ago. Through Cubics advertising network, this single app rewarded me real dollars whose number is same with one famous film actor. :-) I also have accounts in other popular SNS such as MySpace, Hi5, or Xiaonei, 51 in China. Certain living chatting channel and public forum are also in my radar. And if you'd like more info about my FB app experience, take a look at: https://blogs.msdn.com/bali_msft/pages/my-fb-app-development-experience.aspx.

At initial stage, I will logon at least once every day, but now almost once every two weeks. Most of my friends have the similar dropping visit frequency experiences. From the conversation we had, the primary reason is that Facebook is mainly about casual life around you. But it is another story if you work for companies. We are hired to get things done. Can Facebook help you fix bugs automatically? If not, get out of it if you are in a hurry, boy.

But it is true that Facebook is indeed a penetrating and thought-provoking thing to enterprise software. I’d like to talk about this in several ways in the post:

  • Goal/what you care. Primary values FB brings are keeping track of emotional connection with persons people care about in a graceful way. What do we care in the company? Maybe job commitments, career development, project, work life balance, etc. Main differences here are flexibility – You can allocate your time at will in spare time, but you often have to work hard to meet certain deadline at your office. Do we really know what we care?
  • Lightweight One-Stop solution. You know everything about your friends by opening Facebook. But what are tools helping us stay connected with things we care about? You may argue emails. Do you notice people start tired of email overload along with its abuse?
  • Programmability/ Extensibility. Probably Facebook is the most successful end-to-end web programming platform, even better than Salesforce and AWS. Anybody can provide additional functionality to everybody under the framework. Looks like there is long journey before Sharepoint achieves that level, not to mention OWA.
  • Interactive. Who will play games as childish as Parking War without interactivity with friends? Does interactivity mean much for enterprises?
  • Credit system. Do something to earn certain points, and not necessarily real dollars. Virtual currency is a good enough way to encourage participation. This interesting phenomenon could be explained by Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Large enterprises have experts distributed in various areas, but it is not easy to access them. How to get them found/involved?
  • Trusted relationships. People thought trusts coming along with SNS could be great foundation for business, such as better targeted AD. But the disappointing performance of Facebook Marketplace indicates something different. Looks like people love getting to know friends in bars, yet still tends to get down to business in meeting room. Trusts also exist among co-works. Is there any other better way to leverage them?
  • Collaboration. Best collaboration examples for me are Wikipedia and source control system. Two key factor: (1) Clear goal, (2) established rules/framework. Can FB help collaboration given the facts that enterprises often need complete certain clear tasks?
  • Communication. There are various ways to exchange information in Facebook – Wall, feeds, apps, event, video, photo and of course traditional email counterpart, message. All of these are simply there to help you achieve the goal of visiting FB – stay connected with Friends. If the goal is clear in business environment, can we design other rule changing ways to improve our communication?

What Facebook means for the enterprise on earth? Answers may vary from person to person. Here is one of them.

One funny example of Facebook in enterprise

;)