Beware of Facebook! It will crush your productivity and hijack your employees!

While we’re at it, why don’t we make employees log in a little diary every phone call they make, for how long, to whom, and what they talked about. Talking with family? Friends? Or a travel agent? Let’s ban it.

Oh yeah, the bathroom. Let’s give each employee one bathroom pass per day with a time limit of no more than 5 minutes for each visit. Better yet, let’s install cameras in the bathroom to ensure they’re using that time wisely instead of gossiping or snorting coke!

I cannot believe we’re still having this conversation, but then again I can; there are a lot of incredibly stupid executives that are badly out of touch with reality. These are the same executives that spend part of their work week on the golf course, or Golf.com. It’s a tired refrain by now, but I keep seeing stories about Facebook and other website bans so it’s worth repeating: don’t ban Facebook, embrace it.

Employees prefer to be treated as adults. Judge their performance and actions instead of counting their minutes spent doing “productive work.”

Trust me, the threat and problems stemming from a ban far exceed the embrace option. Prescient Digital Media’s Julian Mills last week highlighted the findings of one recent survey that warned of the perils of banning Facebook:   

• 39% of 18 to 24 year-olds would consider leaving if they were not allowed to access sites like Facebook and YouTube
• A further 21% indicated that they would feel ‘annoyed’ by such a ban
• The problem is less acute with 25 to 65 year-olds, of whom just 16% would consider leaving and 13% would be annoyed

Telindus conducted the survey of 1,000 European office workers. Can you imagine the results in North America? In Canada, 90% of 18-34 year-olds use Facebook – that's 9 million people! Any company or organization who wants to alienate that employee cohort has rocks for brains and should just fall on their sword now.

Sadly, a majority of big employers have already banned Facebook. In a Sophos poll of 600 workers, 43% revealed that their company was blocking access to Facebook, while an additional seven percent reported that usage of the social networking website was restricted and only those with a specific business requirement were allowed to access it. In contrast, 50% of respondents said that their company did not block access to Facebook, with 8% specifying that the reason was fear of employee backlash.

Employees want it, and you want employees. When you ban Facebook, you mostly screw yourself. So instead of banning it, embrace Facebook with caveats, rules (terms of use) and the appropriate security.

Sophos has produced a solid security guide with recommended privacy settings in Facebook, and shows you how to set more secure levels of privacy and reduce the chance of becoming a victim of online identity theft (see Facebook best practices): 

“Unlike some other social networking sites, Facebook has provided some powerful options to protect you online - but it's up to you to use them! Think carefully about who you allow to become your friend once you have accepted someone as your friend they will be able to access any information about you (including photographs) that you have marked as viewable by your friends. You can remove friends at any time should you change your mind about someone.

 

• Show "limited friends" a cut-down version of your profile - You can choose to make people 'limited friends' who only have access to a cut-down version of your profile if you wish. This can be useful if you have associates who you do not wish to give full friend status to, or feel uncomfortable sharing personal information with.

• Disable options, then open them one by one - Think about how you want to use Facebook. If it's only to keep in touch with people and be able to contact them then maybe it's better to turn off the bells and whistles. It makes a lot of sense to disable an option until you have decided you do want and need it, rather than start with everything accessible.”

The Sophos guide also provides specific advice on different Facebook controls:

• Profile - Controls who can see your profile
• Search - Allows you to decide who can find you
• News feed and mini-feed - Controls what information is published about your activities
• Poke, message and friend request - Controls what information you share with people you contact
• Applications - Controls what information Facebook applications can access and share about you

SPEAKING OF FACEBOOK:

Come join the discussion on Facebook on theIntranet Global Forum.

ADDITIONAL READING:

Facebook used as an ‘underground’ intranet

Speaking of Facebook as an underground intranet…

The ROI of the Facebook intranet

Serena’s Facebook intranet

Microsoft wants Facebook... and its intranet power

The Facebook Revolution

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Did you know that in the ‘guess the jellybeans’ game the average guess of all the guesses is almost always closer than the closest individual guess? It’s a wonderful example illustrating the power and wisdom of the ‘crowd’ – and why Web 2.0 and Intranet 2.0 are proving to be so powerful.

Like Web 2.0, Intranet 2.0 represents the evolving collection of social media tools that are revolutionizing the intranet, and the way organizations and employees connect and collaborate. Specifically, Intranet 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis and social networking sites promote collaboration, people connection, and ongoing dialogues that augment, but not replace the traditional top-down communications model.

Whether you’re ready or not, your organization can no longer ignore Intranet 2.0. Employees are reading blogs on the web, contributing to wikis, listening to podcasts, and networking via Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, or others. Moreover, they’re probably talking about your organization, and you’re not part of the conversation.

Before they implemented their own employee social networking site, MyBT, BT (British Telecom) discovered that 4,000 employees had voluntarily joined a BT Facebook community in their own time. Employees were connecting online, in their own time, talking about BT, and BT wasn’t part of the conversation.

“Many believe that trying to stop social media tools seeping onto intranets is a futile activity anyway, so it is better to introduce them on your terms in a managed way,” says BT’s social media chief Richard Dennison, who’s quite candidly shares this though and BT’s work on his blog Inside out.  

While BT’s management was reluctant to introduce these tools to employees, they really had little choice: employees were already using them and BT was in danger of being left out, and left behind. Adds Dennison: “If you don’t think about what value you can deliver in an enterprise 2.0 environment, you are going to become irrelevant!!”

Intranet 2.0 has indeed exploded at BT. In addition to social networking, BT employees blog, podcast, collaborate in discussion forums, and they wiki too. In fact, the wikis are so popular and successful that there are more than 500,000 employee wikis – and the vast, vast majority of them are dedicated to business topics that help BT compete in the global workplace (I will share a more comprehensive case study on BT’s Intranet 2.0 tools and successes next week).

A study of Prescient Digital Media’s clients who participated in yesterday’s Intranet 2.0 webinar found:

These numbers are very average indeed (though much, much lower in medium size, and small organizations) and echoed by many recent studies: most organizations have not introduced Intranet 2.0 tools, but want to. An additional 50% of the webinar participants (representing a couple dozen organizations) are testing, trialing, evaluating or planning to introduce such social media tools on their intranet in the next year or so.

Many, many others of course have blazed that trail and so while some organizations struggle with the ‘how’, IT and communications managers need only look to the trailblazers like BT, IBM, and many others that have shared their successes (I will link many of these case studies below).

Sabre, the company that runs most of the world’s airline flight reservation systems among many other systems, is an impressive example of the power of Intranet 2.0. With about 9,000 employees, they are a medium-sized company that have embraced Intranet 2.0 with spectacular results. Building from scratch, Sabre launched their own intranet social networking site for employees (built on Ruby on Rails) called SabreTown.

SabreTown has all the features of most social networking sites:

• Employee profiles with lots of details
• Shared photos
• Blogs
• User commenting
• Network connections & feeds
• Enterprise question & answer functionality

On Sabre Town, users can post a question to the entire organization, and the site’s inference or relevance engine will automatically send the question to the 15 most relevant employees (based on what they’ve entered in their profile, blog postings and other Q&As that have been previously posted). The results have been spectacular: 60% of questions are answered within one hour (one hour!); each question receives an average of 9 responses (9 responses!). The system has already led to more than $150,000 in immediate, direct savings for the company, with much greater benefits not yet measured.

SabreTown’s success is summarized in one spectacular metric: 65% of all Sabre employees became active SabreTown members in the first 3 months! More than 90% of employees are active today.

(I’ll provide a more in-depth case study on SabreTown next week. Watch for it as it is worth the wait, and the read).

Intranet 2.0 is no longer the future, it’s now. Many organizations have embraced the new social media technologies for the benefit of both the organization and its employees. If you ignore the potential that Intranet 2.0 offers, you’re doing so at your own risk, and the perhaps to the benefit of your competitors that may have already embraced these tools, or soon will.

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If you have additional questions about today’s Intranet 2.0, or a comment feel free to post them below. You can see a summarized version of the presentation on Slideshare: Intranet 2.0 webinar. 

You can also join the discussion on the Intranet Global Forum (Facebook community requiring free, 30-second registration).

If you’re looking to move to Intranet 2.0, but don’t exactly know how, then have a look at our Intranet 2.0 Blueprint service, or call me at 416.986.2226.

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MORE INTRANET 2.0 CASE STUDIES & READING:

Behind Beehive’s social success @ IBM

Beehive builds buzz at IBM

Intranet case study: Intrawest Placemaking

Serena’s Facebook intranet

Could Facebook be a real intranet? IBM is onto something...

Intranet 2.0: A must-have

Enterprise 2.0 vs. Intranet 2.0

Embracing Enterprise 2.0

Intranet 2.0 on the rise, but barely

Intranet 2.0: social media adoption

Intranet portal solutions die, evolve & move to Web 2.0

Taxonomy driven folksonomy

Social bookmarking the intranet

“Inspired by Top 10 travel guides, and Amazon’s ListMania, we thought that shared lists could be an interesting content type for an enterprise social networking site,” say Geyer, Dugan, DiMicco, Millen, Brownholtz, and Muller, IBM’s collective brain trust behind IBM’s Beehive social networking site for employees[1].

While Beehive is a social networking site that allows employees to connect, track each others’ activities, share photos, and even schedule events, a key viral ingredient of Beehive’s buzz is the ability to create shared lists – “top 5” lists called “Hive5s”.

“We hypothesized that lists in an enterprise would be used to discuss opinions and share information related to the work context, (e.g. “My favorite RSS readers,” “Best lunch places,” or “Useful web design principles.” Since lists allow users to express preferences and opinions, and put items into an order, we envisioned that they would spark controversy between users and provoke social interaction.”

To create a list a “bee” (user) enters five items related to a given topic (e.g. top 5 products) and can insert a photo or a link to any of the five items, can “tag” each list with keywords, and determine whether or not the list is viewable to any employee, or just to direct connections (friends). Additionally, bees can reuse others lists to create their own list for comparison.

“We decided to explicitly support “reuse” of lists in Beehive, i.e. based on another list, a user can create their own list on the same topic linked back to the original list,” say the Beehive creators[1]. “When we designed the shared lists, we thought that users, when reading a list, might feel compelled to create their own list about the same topic, either because they disagree and want to create a list with different items and ordering, or the topic inspired them to share something similar.”

Once a list is published it can be read by others in several places:

• A collection page of recently created lists on the Beehive home page
• A collection page of all the lists of a selected user within the users own profile
• Within search results of a specific topic or “tag” (keywords).

Each list when viewed reveals:

• The text for 5 items
• Any annotated photos
• Any annotated tags
• A ‘reuse map” (who reused it, when, etc.)
• A list of “the buzz” (user comments)
• A note of how many times that list has been viewed by other bees 

The adoption rate is the impressive statistic. Up until August 2007, Beehive was still in ‘trial’ mode and only had a couple of hundred invited users. In the nine months since, Beehive has exploded:

• Over 35,000 registered IBM employees
• Created over 280,000 social network connections to each other
• Posted more than 150,000 comments
• Shared more than 43,000 photos
• Created over 15,000 "Hive5s” fives"
• Hosted over 2000 events

If the “Hive5s” are the key viral ingredient, the “reuse” list is the secret honey. One user comment in IBM’s own internal study sums up the fantastically viral nature of list reuse: “I found it interesting and wanted to reveal and show myself within the community (a specific Beehive community of IBMers) […] and in a sense I wanted to get into this community, so I entered it reusing somebody’s Hive5 and in a friendly way, in some social gesture, reuse the Hive5 and get into the community.” For this bee, and many others, the Hive5 list reuse was an invitation to a community that he wanted to be part of, despite his geographic location.

One early list called “4 truths and a lie” sparked a lot of reuse, dozens of comments, and bubbled over into real-world and face-to-face conversations. “Several times I did it with my team. Like people writing to me and I’m writing to them, saying did you see […] that thing on Beehive, sending the link,” said one user.

In fact, people who don’t know each other are connecting through Beehive, and those that are reusing lists often don’t know each other. “The interview data (from the internal study) suggests that people need not feel any particular connection to the person whose list they reuse” say the creators[1]. “While we found that reuse in itself is not always a social act, there are some reuse trees that have sparked many conversations and have formed ad hoc interest groups”

Beehive clearly demonstrates that employees want to network socially, and that if the employer creates the hive, employees will create the buzz.

Read more about the Beehive social networking site: Beehive builds buzz at IBM.

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On Wednesday: A look at IBM’s other employee social networking tool: Fringe. If Beehive is akin to Facebook, Fringe is akin to LinkedIn. However, Fringe is more of a people-tagging tool that is significantly different than any of the above, but equally impressive.

Tomorrow’s (Tuesday) Intranet 2.0 webinar: if you’re a client of Prescient (or about to become one), then you have a free invitation to this special clients-only webinar that will showcase the latest and greatest in Intranet 2.0 including IBM’s Beehive and Fringe, BT’s employee social networking, and many other leading examples. If you’re a client or about to become one and don’t have the coordinates for this hour long webinar, then please call me right away to get the details (416.986.2226). The webinar starts at 1pmEDT (10am PDT). If you can’t make the webinar but still want to learn more, perhaps we can reprise the webinar for you and your team at a later date (call me to arrange).