Sean R. Nicholson
Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about whether Facebook is a suitable platform for organizations to build a corporate intranet. The fact that most employees are already on Facebook, combined with the low pricepoint (aka Free) often leads fiscally-focused executives to make statements like “Why build an Intranet, we can just use Facebook.” To see some interesting opinions on the topic, I suggest you check out this thread on the WorldWide Intranet Challenge LinkedIn group.
If you have ever thought about building your organizational intranet on Facebook, I suggest you stop and take a moment to read the following paragraph:
Facebook has no interest in being your organizational Intranet. They don’t care about your privacy or your organizational Intellectual Property. Facebook cares about attracting as many visitors to their site each day as possible so they can increase their ad buy and make more money. They love to release security-flawed features to generate lots of buzz in the press, which generates more traffic and makes them more money.
So, let’s put this issue to rest, once and for all. Facebook is not a corporate Intranet platform. Facebook does not care about your business. Facebook doesn’t care about your employees. If you want to trust your organizational information and intellectual property to a company like Facebook, then please let me know so I can stay as far away from your stock and products as possible.
Be sure to check out the other articles in this Facebook as an Intranet series:
Facebook as an Intranet Part 2: More Reasons NOT To Select Use Facebook As An Intranet
Facebook as an Intranet Part 3: 10 More Reasons Not To Consider Facebook For Your Intranet Platform
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Social Media Strategist, Tech Geek, Attorney, coffee addict. I connect people, enhance the workplace, & drive business
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Absolutely Sean. Would be an utter nightmare building your entire intranet using facebook!
But let’s not forget the relevance of Facebook as part of internal communication and collaboration. Collegues who are friends with each other will almost certainly use it to communicate in some way at some point – even if it’s just a “running late for 9am meeting” or “working from home today”.
And just as organisations use fan pages to feed relevant content directly into the news streams of their facebook followers, organisations could feed their employees on FB teasers to to intranet content.
I not going to recommend using Facebook, but I see facebook being used daily by people to communicate job related messages to collegues (and usually everyone else!) and i’ve seen my fair share of employee groups (more often than not not created by int comms)
Facebook is a reality that intranet managers have to keep their eye on (and ponder it’s use)
Absolutely agree, Facebook would be a disastrous platform for an Intranet.
However, the concept of a social networking platform as the basis of an Intranet makes perfect sense to me. After all, the Intranet is all about communication and collaboration.
Security concerns are probably the main thing standing in the way of “Intranet as a service”, but it would only seem a matter of time before these security concerns are behind us, and “Intranet as a service” becomes a reality.
Building a company Intranet site using Facebook has never occurred to me and at first glance seems ridiculous as a viable business Intranet tool. Our company has a Facebook page, but it is solely for current and ex staff to post more personal information and to chat about non-work related issues. Our company blog and Intranet sites however are used for business related issues and topics with far more control and security in place.
Yea, Bad idea all around. You can use Facebook to get some ideas though. For example, their photo area is well done. Pull out the pieces and use it in your intranet don,t use Facebook as your intranet.