Kent, who is generally smart, goes off the tracks in response to the newest flap about Facebook costing corporations millions in lost productivity (see /Message: Facebook Is Bankrupting Our Business! Shut It Down! Shut It Down!). He suggests that I made a case for the use of Facebook as a corporate tool, which I didn't, at least not explicitly. Here's Kent:
[from Newsome.Org]Stowe Boyd muses naively about Facebook as the big corporate business tool that it ain't. First of all, one look at just about anybody's Facebook page will tell you that unless you're selling beer, iPhones or webcams, there are better ponds to fish for customers. Secondly, I can think of very few reasons anyone in a real business setting needs to be farting around on Facebook all day, particularly those not in sales or marketing (the blogosphere seems to believe wrongly that 99% of the workforce is involved in one or the other). Finally, there's a troubling, though probably true in many cases, assumption that it's perfectly normal to use Facebook primarily to sell a bill of goods, so to speak, to your "friends." Poking for profit. Or something like that.
What I said was that corporations have a tendency to distrust new communication technologies when they appear. It has happened everytime: telephones, email, IM, the Web. Whatever. Corporate types resist the adoption of these technologies, and then, subsequent embrace them.
Individuals, notably, adopt them for their own purposes. This is the Social = Me First meme, I have spoken on widely. The gist of the idea is that people adopt social tools, initially, for some highly personal reasons, but stick with them for the social connectedness that they gain from them. This is because people can only discover themselves, can only realize their potential, through relatedness with others.
Important to the corporation is the degree to which our striving for personal awareness and self-discover overlaps with business goals. It is only the most narrow-mind and short-sighted of management that actively ignores the primary motivations of human apsiration. Anything like enlightened management will actively support personal development to the degree that it does nothing destructive, and it should, within limits, be willing to bear the apparent costs incurred. This is why companies allow employees to make personal phone calls, why they underwrite education and training, and invest to create pleasant environments. These costs are real, but accepted.
In the specific case, people adopt Facebook for some personal motivation: to stay connected with an online network of interesting people, let's say. This is much like the motivation that drove instant messaging adoption: another trend that conventional business logic tried to stamp out. Only later did it become obvious that networked connection was a productivity enhancer, and companies now accept it as routine.
So, the same will prove true for Facebook and whatever other social streaming applications emerge. It is the far-sighted companies that will accept the time loss as the inevitable investment in employee connectedness, and realize that the basis for future competitive advantage will not be blind, grinding efficiency but the highest degree of connectedness.
And I don't think that this is naïve, although it might be idealistic and forward-looking. In a few years, when 'workstreaming' has become the norm in business, it will become the conventional wisdom to support it. Today, it smacks of faddishness. So did blogging a few years ago, but now corporate types get tattooed in business school with the phrase "markets are conversations." That has become dogma.
Brain Solis makes a contribution to this discussion in his recent post
[from Facebook is the Hub for Your Personal Brand][...]
Facebook is much more than a social network. Its infrastructure facilitates profile and presence aggregation, channeling all online activity through one main hub. Simply said, it becomes a repository for every social media product, which ultimately transitions from a static profile into a dynamic destination for your personal and professional brand.
And, with lifestreams and data streams creating additional channels to broadcast social activity, Facebook also further contributes to the "river of relevance" by allowing people to create a visually-rich, centralized dashboard that also helps to tell your story and spark conversations.
With social tools adapting their services to Facebook through the use of widgets , we can easily share a wealth of integrated activity including twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce for microblogging, RSS readers for sharing relevant stories, flickr for sharing pictures, "video" or kyte for adding live or packaged video, upcoming.org for sharing events, and the list goes on and on.
I believe that companies will directly benefit from individuals building their reputation in their markets and industries through social means, as provided by Facebook and others. Consider the recent hiring of Jeremiah Owyang by Forrester as the direct consequence of his personal branding as a web strategist, and how they intend to take advantage of that intangible asset that he has developed. Or the more well-known case of Steve Rubel.
In the final analysis, Facebook and its cousins are inevitably going to be business tools, because business people are too smart to not adopt better technologies to help them get their work done. In a hyperconnected world, getting things done increasingly means harnessing the network, not just doing piecework.
Again, the companies that get wise to this fastest will be the first to benefit; and those that wait will lose.
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