McAfee on Facebook
Andrew McAfee, the Harvard professor who coined "Enterprise 2.0", has an interesting post on his experiences with Facebook. Notable quotes:
Rachel said that not using Facebook was a "social liability" these days at Harvard, and Sameer said that he doens’t really think whether he’s using the site for purely social purposes or more academic ones; he just "uses Facebook." This is in part because the site offers something close to one-stop shopping for many of the things students are interested in—uploading media, blogging, calendaring, communicating, catching up and checking in, sharing information, etc.
All of which got me thinking—isn’t this very close to what employes within a company also want to do? And if so, doesn’t Facebook provide a demonstrably powerful, popular, and easy-enough-to-use infrastructure for doing it?
So what are the Enterprise 2.0 lessons from Facebook? I think one is the power of one-stop shopping, or an integrated collaboration environment. My current Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 interactions are scattered across a number of tools. While it’s not an overwhelming hassle to check them all throughout the day, it is a bit of work. I got the impression from Rachel and Sameer that a lot of undergrads are doing the bulk of their online interacting within Facebook. Shouldn’t we expect employees within a company to do the same, given the opportunity?
A more fundamental lesson concerns the incentives to participate in online communities. Some of the questions I get asked most often about E2.0 concern motivating and encouraging participation. Lots of companies have introduced technologies intended to facilitate collaboration, and most of them have been disappointed by the resulting levels of adoption and use. So collaborationware that spreads like wildfire is extraordinarily interesting, even before we delve into what it’s used for.