For the past several years, social networking services Facebook and LinkedIn have catered almost exclusively to the needs of the individual. By helping individuals share photos, links, and statuses; reconnect with friends; and find jobs, both services have built up substantial userbases. From an enterprise perspective, Facebook and LinkedIn have historically been criticized as nothing more than time wasters of the workday. However, recently there has been a marked shift by both services toward trying to provide value to enterprises. Both Facebook and LinkedIn have added or bolstered their networking, community, and collaboration capabilities in ways that will get the attention of some enterprises and yet will continue to fall short of enterprise-class for others.
Personal and Professional Networking
With more than 200 million users, Facebook is the world's largest social networking platform. What began as a way for college students to interact has become an attractive—if still somewhat experimental—business tool as well. Facebook users recognize that the platform's people-finding, relationship-building, and messaging capabilities are similar to what enterprises have long tried to create through custom or commercially purchased intranet applications (and it's fun).
While Facebook has amassed a network of social networkers, LinkedIn has established itself as the de facto professional networking tool. While other social networking tools have placed a priority on sharing photos, videos, and game playing, LinkedIn's approach emphasizes business networking. LinkedIn serves as an online Rolodex, resume, and place to go to ask your contacts for help—particularly help in meeting others.
Facebook and LinkedIn have been slowly making changes to their systems in direct response to each other and also in response to the perceived needs of enterprise workers.
Enterprise Networking
Within the enterprise, internal networking can be just as important a requirement as external networking. As enterprises get larger, employee ties grow looser, if extant at all. Research has shown, however, that "loose ties" in an enterprise can become quite powerful. Through internal networking, employees can leverage a network effect among people who aren't directly connected.
This requires an ability to find and interact with people you may not otherwise know. Perhaps you need to locate expertise or learn more about someone with whom you're sharing a conference call (or a wiki page). One of the side effects is to enable a "virtual watercooler," where a previous absence of ties can be made into loose connections, and weak ties can be made stronger. Enterprise networking does not always entail a specific purpose around a topic or thread. The goal is to connect people for ad hoc reasons or simply for its own sake.
LinkedIn News is a feature that the company describes as an "online version of the company watercooler." LinkedIn News is a feed that appears on the LinkedIn homepage that takes a more proactive approach to bookmarking and link sharing. The feed shows news and articles that other people in your current company have read or shared. LinkedIn allows users to promote and comment on articles. These discussions are semiprivate; only confirmed members of your company can view or contribute to the discussions. LinkedIn's social bookmark services can supplement enterprise intranets lacking such features.
Facebook has the notion of "networks," which can be based around groups of any sort, be they academic, professional, or otherwise. A workplace network can serve as a people-finding tool, but this is only effective if there is broad adoption from employees. Also, networks might retain former employees, which obviously can get a bit sticky. While Facebook networks may help employees find each other, any type of sharing of knowledge is still public.
Communities of Practice
Many enterprises look to social software to foster communities of practice. In this case, communities may take a form similar to what you might see in project-oriented collaboration. Instead of centering around a project, they organize around a "practice" or a particular topic of some kind (i.e., Java developers, plant managers, or salespeople).
Communities may build a knowledgebase and spawn projects, perhaps enterprisewide. However, they typically entail a more fluid mix of experience building, information exchange, and subjective conversation than do more structured scenarios.
Facebook provides "groups" as a way of collaborating with multiple people. Groups can be open (anyone can find the group and join), closed (anyone can find the group, but an administrator of the group must approve new members), or secret (membership is by invitation only and group information will not appear in search results). In groups, users can participate in discussion boards, post comments on a group wall, and share photos, videos, or links. Group administrators can message all members.
Many users complain that it's difficult to keep track of what's happening within a group. There is no way of receiving notification of group activity. It can be a tedious task to have to visit the group area regularly to check to see if someone posted something new.
LinkedIn's groups feature provides much more value than Facebook's similar offering. Like Facebook, membership in LinkedIn groups can be open to anyone or contingent upon approval by a group owner. Group members can participate in discussions and can post links to news stories or to sites for all group members to post comments on and see. One of the nicer features that distinguishes LinkedIn from Facebook is the ability of a group member to choose to receive daily or weekly group activity summaries. Even if you choose not to receive email summaries, group activity can still be monitored on your portal-style LinkedIn homepage.
Project and Enterprise Collaboration
It is logical that many enterprises are turning to social software to assist collaboration as more informal discussion and communication around file exchange can lead to much more efficient interaction.
It is the project and enterprise collaboration areas, however, that reveal the current biggest shortcoming of both Facebook and LinkedIn in meeting the needs of enterprise workers. Beyond the fact that there are no ways to run either service behind the corporate firewall, there are no native document collaboration services within Facebook or LinkedIn. Likewise, neither platform provides the blog, wiki, or project-tracking services that support broader enterprise collaboration.
In Facebook, applications have been created to try to fill these gaps, including some from vendors that specialize in document management, such as Alfresco Software, Inc. or FilesAnywhere.com. The problem with these—and all applications—is that they're bound to an individual profile and not a group or network. Thus, you can't really use documents in a collaborative way.
In order to collaborate on projects, enterprise users need to be able to post documents within groups and apply versioning. Document-centric collaboration in Facebook will continue to be a struggle until group file-sharing capabilities improve.
Unlike Facebook (which allows any developer to post applications for people to utilize within their Facebook experience), LinkedIn has chosen to slowly control the release of several approved applications. Its initial rollout featured nine applications with several that were aimed at enterprise users, such as SlideShare, Google Slides, a blog aggregator, and even Huddle, which provides lightweight file sharing and collaboration.
These applications have a ways to go before being considered enterprise-level, but for some firms with lightweight needs and small budgets, there's potential in both the groups and applications features. Enterprises could use groups as internal discussion boards or link-sharing areas. Groups also provide the ability to search among their members to find specific colleagues. In LinkedIn, you can post documents to groups—a nice first step—but there is no concept of version control.
Certainly, Facebook and LinkedIn need a lot of work to be truly enterprise-class. However, both continue to add increasing value to the enterprise. Not surprisingly, at this point it seems as though LinkedIn is taking a more calculated and strategic approach to cater to its mostly professional userbase. But Facebook will surely continue to adapt and refine its services to provide more enterprise value, especially as its userbase matures. We have yet to see any enterprises officially adopt the LinkedIn platform as an intranet alternative, but we see these new LinkedIn features challenging, if not surpassing, the similar offerings of Facebook, which has already garnered some enterprise usage.