I’ve been following Facebook closely since the platform launch in May, especially the enterprise aspects and Facebook as an alternative to LinkedIn for professionals. Rather than do a giant brain dump, I’ll post a piece each day (or so) until I’m tapped.
The best place to start is with the platform. I covered this briefly in another post; Jeff Nolan and Jason Wood also addressed the platform. Dennis Howlett has a couple posts (in his blog and on ZDNet) about it. The key takeaway is that the social network as a platform is a disruptive force. How enterprises deal with the disruption will plot their courses as early adopters, followers or apathetics (i.e. they get out of the way).
Banning is not the answer. Embracing is. Smart companies are recruiting on Facebook; really smart companies know they are being watched by prospective employees on Facebook. Nick O’Neill (his allfacebook blog is a great read) calls for transparency from companies; new graduates are performing due diligence on prospective employers using Facebook, browsing work networks, interacting with employees, collecting information. You can tell a lot about a company’s culture from its presence (or lack thereof) on Facebook.
Back to Dennis, who makes the same point my fellow AppsLabber Rich made:
I am convinced now more than ever that the
MySpaceFacebook generation are going to obliterate a lot of what we understand about business today.
Dennis struck MySpace, but the platform isn’t lost on the competition. Both MySpace and LinkedIn have soft-announced their own platforms recently.
We’re seeing a paradigm shift here people. The new enterprise centers around people not transactions. People do work. People run businesses.
My next Facebook post will be about the kerfuffle around applications.
