Socialsama

So what’s Facebook’s place inside the business?  I mean on a day to day basis? I have heard a few social media experts* attest to the collaborative potential and productivity gains available by using Facebook for business.  They suggest scenarios such as sales people across organizations both internally and externally learning from each other and helping one another.  And perhaps such a situation is possible.  However, I think much about institutional business structure would have to evolve to make such internal sharing remotely feasible, and much about human nature might need to also.  Sales people don’t like to share secrets even internally; companies don’t like to share anything externally.  And I have seen people use Facebook; nothing about it implies time savings in anything.  Currently, if you are not a marketer at a company, you should not be on Facebook during the day; otherwise you are simply wasting company time.  That’s not a productivity improvement. It is much easier for corporate IT departments and CEO’s to simply shut off access to Facebook from the office, rather than do enormous change management and process re-engineering to gain benefits from employees using it.

I do think Facebook wants to become the first and last place people visit when they hit the web – the portal of old.  And while that might work for a while for them, I think it will eventually lose some appeal to the general population (see what happened to Yahoo, MSN, and AOL).  Something else could come along to supplant them.  That perhaps is why they are pushing Facebook Connect (and why they were so sensitive to Twitter over 2009).  I think they recognize that eventually some system will be the default single sign on for the internet, and they would like to be it.  I am not entirely sure how they monetize that position, but I could see it’s appeal to Facebook – if someone else becomes the single-sign on system of record and attaches social data to that login, then the jig is up for Facebook.  They no longer are the only ones with your data.  That other platform may even be open source, and no one ends up making windfall profits from it.

*Everyone is a social media expert.  Just ask them.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 11:55 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.