Social Glass » social networking

The Future of Facebook for the Enterprise

Jeremy Thomas — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 04:46:04 +0000

Shiv Sing makes an interesting point about the Microsoft investment in Facebook, where he says “What does this mean from an enterprise perspective? Quite simply that Facebook can get into the intranet market”. I couldn’t agree more. Susan Scrupski points out that Microsoft is very serious about Web 2.0 with recent deals negotiated with Atlassian and Newsgator to integrate their tools into Sharepoint.

Microsoft’s new association with Facebook will only strengthen its position in the Enterprise 2.0 space – that is if Facebook is actually willing to engage in the enterprise market. If it is, Microsoft, which is already entrenched in most of the Fortune 1000 companies, will be a good conduit through which “Facebook for the Enterprise” can be introduced. I’m going to be keeping my eye on this as it develops. Next year could be very interesting.

Community Equity

Jeremy Thomas — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 05:46:56 +0000

“Wouldn’t it be interesting to have a way to measure the Social Capital in an enterprise?” This question is posed by Peter Riser where he outlines the idea of community equity over on his blog, Riser 2.0. Peter is working with a team building an application called “Customer Engineering 2.0″ (CE2.0) (recently showcased at the Sun Customer Engineering Conference in Las Vegas), and community equity is used to calculate a sort of user reputation based on four functional areas:

Contribution
Participation
Skills
Role

CE2.0 is an “enterprise facebook” application (and I don’t think it’s available yet) and looks intriguing. It’s ability to measure community equity will go a long way to encourage uptake as users compete for top equity scores. I’ll definitelyh be keeping an eye on this app as it seems very promising.

Weak Ties

Jeremy Thomas — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 00:08:46 +0000

Andrew McAfee makes an insightful point about the value of social networking within the enterprise. He discusses the strength of weak ties and shows how casual relationships broaden the diversity of knowledge available to a knowledge worker. Strong ties result from “long-term, frequent, and sustained interactions”, whereas weak ties arise “from infrequent and more casual” interactions.

Given that knowledge workers “A”, “B” and “C” work for a given company, McAfee goes on to show that:

This might be a good thing in many ways, but it’s bad news if A needs a piece of knowledge that she can’t find inside her own friendship circle. Because of the overlap, B’s circle is likely to be redundant with A’s, and so unhelpful to her. In other words, her tie to B does her little good in her search for knowledge. If A and C have a weak tie, however, many of C’s friends are likely to be strangers to A, and so are good resources as she looks to inform herself.

I’m a visual learner and have drawn a simple diagram to illustrate this point. It shows that knowledge workers A and B, who share a strong tie and have a substantial overlap in their social networks, have access to a non-redundant group of knowledge workers through a weak tie between A and C. This relationship broadens the scope of information access for all groups, and this is very important for companies that rely on their knowledge workers to innovate.