Setting up an internal Facebook might just solve your company’s communications and engagement problems

By Daniel J. Pritchett on March 20, 2009

Updated 10/2009: If you’re looking to set up a Facebook-style network inside of your organization please take a look at this new post on internal Facebooks and expert location. You’ll find some advice you can act on there! - Daniel

I got pretty excited and tweeted about this throughout the day.

I got pretty excited and tweeted about this throughout the day.

Who knew I was looking for diversity?

This morning I had the privilege of participating in a breakfast for the industry-leading “diversity and inclusion” initiative at the office. Since I work for a Fortune 100 company there is a lot of weight behind our diversity initiatives. I was especially glad to hear about a desire to promote inter-generational and cross-divisional inclusion. In other words, our workforce spans 4 generations and even more levels of organizational leadership, and everyone wants the best ideas at the company to be shared as freely as possible so that we can weather the recession.

You won’t be surprised to hear that I think enterprise social networking can cure most of the problems we discussed in the meeting. I jotted down my notes on some of the biggest inclusion problems identified by our group this morning, and the following chart explains the ways an in-house social network can alleviate them. Notice that several cells link to past posts on this blog which should further explain the details:

Problem Solution
Hard getting face time with the manager Post status updates and requests for help online, manager can resolve them asynchronously
Want to know more about operations of divisions other than my own Read up on the last few weeks’ work from another group’s web-based project management group site
We can no longer afford to spend millions of dollars to run a yearly survey to track employee egagement Push insta-polls on the internal social network and/or track emotionally-laden keywords in forum/wiki/blog posts
Some associates are uncomfortable sharing Online sharing allows for contributions at one’s own pace and without having to talk face to face
Different communication styles for different people Provide many different avenues to access the company network (i.e. blogs, forums, wikis, IM, phone numbers
Need to encourage the sharing of business ideas from all levels of the organization Company-wide discussion forums allow people to gravitate to the topics that interest them, regardless of their current position
Event-based inclusion and career planning can be insufficient on the days when the work group is not meeting Social networking allows for continuous collaboration and update tracking

Great, how are we going to get this in-house?

Let’s imagine I download and install fbOpen, the open source version of the Facebook software.

Can we get fbOpen up and running in-house? I know I’d rather we just used the real Facebook or something like it, but anything that gets us past the “can’t share this with the outside world” and “don’t want to deal with constant distractions” arguments against social networks is a plus. So let’s start here, and then see where we can go. I’ve expressed my extreme gratitude at being included in this morning’s breakfast, and I believe I’ve elicited a promise to stand up a SharePoint-based collaboration destination for the participants int his morning’s meeting.

With a bit of luck I might be able to use this destination to showcase a lot of the industry best practices in social networking, expert location, and knowledge sharing. I’ve referred a few of my fellow social networking enthusiasts to the inclusion breakfast series, and I sincerely hope we can make a difference. Wish us luck!

I’ve been trying to figure out exactly how to promote web-based collaboration and socialization tools at work for the better part of a year now, and I’m starting to think that my initial approach of working the problem from within my IT organization might be the wrong one. We IT types are trained to approach IT problems in terms of risk management and cost savings. Neither of those are obvious strong points for social software, even though they may be great productivity boosts in the future. Perhaps this diversity and inclusion angle is exactly what we need to get some more social collaboration champions on board!

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  • Kendall Mulligan
    1. Will FB administrators be able to get ahold of our internal, personal & confidential data, even if it is located within a gated firewall.

    2. How does FB benefit by offering this platform to corporations?

    Before I pitch the idea, I want to ensure there aren't any legal repercussions. Any advice you have is much appreciated.

    Thank you!
  • If you're specifically asking about the fbOpen platform:

    No, Facebook won't have access to your private data if you run your own fbOpen server inhouse. That said, your security team should do a code audit to verify this claim.

    Facebook benefits from open sourcing this platform in the same way any company does: Goodwill from the tech community along with a bit of free testing and tech support if anyone tries to use it and identifies problems. Anything that increases Facebook's footprint in the identity/social markets is good for business.

    All that said, you should really look at using an off the shelf or pay-per-month Facebook-style solution instead such as Jive or Newsgator.

    Good luck!
  • djekels
    did you ever get this to work, and how was the acceptance in the office?
  • We are moving towards a Sharepoint rollout (MOSS 2007) and I'm getting myself involved as much as possible in hopes of keeping the sociability of the platform high.

    For existing implementations you might want to check Deloitte (D Street as seen here http://www.slideshare.net/whatidiscover/managing-expertise-at-deloitte) and Lockheed Martin - they both have MOSS-based Facebook-style applications working in house.

    For the "internal facebook" question the big benefit seems to be in expert location. I addressed that to some extent here: http://www.sharingatwork.com/2009/08/presentation-new-wave-collaboration-and-enterprise-2-0/

    Let me know if you'd like help getting in touch with people closer to live implementations of the internal facebook idea.
  • If you're specifically looking to harness the best ideas of your workforce, take a look at innovation management tools. Blogger friend Hutch Carpenter has recently announced his employment with Spigit, a provider of innovation management.

    Hutch's latest post touches on the products IdeaSpigit, InnovationSpigit, and PredictionSpigit. I am particularly interested in the use of internal prediction markets to improve company performance. This is something we've seen before in the excellent mass collaboration book Wikinomics, and I'd love to see PMs become more widespread.
  • Tug
    Interesting discussion. I'm looking for the perfect blend between facebook and wiki for use in the workplace. Currently using MOSS which gets the wiki part done but just doesn't seem to get me the social networking interaction. I will be checking back to see how you get on! Good luck!
  • Have you checked out the socnet addons for Moss such as the Newsgator
    group tool? I'm on by iPod now but I will run down some links for you
    later.
  • Tug
    Had a look at Newsgator and a few other add ons and looks good - not sure on licence costs though. Have you or anyone used newsgator's socnet solution with any success?Any idea on costs?

    I'm also looking at non-MS solutions (e.g. cyn.in). One of the challenges is we are creating common global content which is then published to 30 country variation sites which are then localised by in-country teams - often translated as well. MOSS does this well but does work out expensive for this added functionlity. I'm looking to see if i can get that publication functionality more cheaply with some better socnet in other products. Look forward to your other socnet add on links - thanks.
  • Lawrence Liu of Telligent recommended Mindtouch in a tweet just now. Have you seen it, Tug?
  • It sounds like a MOSS solution will become pretty unwieldy as you scale it out to 30 localized sites and a huge infrastructure. If you absolutely insist on getting it done that way, I'd suggest you read up on Sharepoint Joel - he's a longtime SP consultant and former Microsoft SP team member. http://www.sharepointjoel.com/default.aspx

    You may find yourself better off switching to a standalone solution from a SaaS provider. I believe Atlassian, Telligent, and Jive all have different takes on this.

    When it comes to off the shelf Enterprise 2.0 solutions you'll probably need to ask dedicated consultants in the space like Susan Scrupski (@itsinsider on Twitter) or employees of E2.0 firms such as @bhc3 and @lliu. As interested as I am in these topics, I do not have the dedicated E2.0 professional's experience in the area.
  • Great idea,
    The only thing is that it probably won't work in many organizations. Besides, you still keep your plans and communications in two separate places. So you need to copy information back and forth. Another option here could be checking out project management 2.0 tools that integrate communications with project planning. Tools like Wrike for example.
  • Thanks for the Wrike link, Daria.
    It certainly makes sense to integrate project planning with collaborations
    tools on a single destination site. What we've got now is something far
    different - thick client MS Project for planning and a combination of
    network file shares and Lotus Notes databases for project tracking and
    collaboration documents.

    My initial goal is just to get as much of this workflow as possible moved to
    transparent web-based services. It might be the best solution to jump
    straight to something like your tool, but even a Facebook/other ecosystem is
    a big jump from where we are today.
  • How would something like this compare with MS Sharepoint?
  • Pretty different, I'd say. SharePoint has document management and
    automatically created user accounts thanks to LDAP or the Active Directory.
    Facebook has... groups and email and photo/video management. I figure they
    could coexist somewhat peacefully on a network if necessary.
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Daniel J. Pritchett
Memphis, TN

Enterprise collaboration blogger, Fortune 100 Business Intelligence developer, father, husband.

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