If my boss notices that I have Facebook open on my laptop at the office, and I tell him it's for wor...

1. Everything You Need To Know About Facebook At Work and
Enterprise Social Networks
If my boss notices that I have Facebook open on my laptop at the office, and I tell him it's for work,
he does something unusual. He believes me.
This attitude is common at Hootsuite, but in most professional environments, social networks are
often seen as distractions--unless your job title has the words "social media" in it. This is why this
week's news of Facebook launching a separate network aimed specifically at enterprise has been
met with mixed reactions.
However, Facebook At Work is far from being the first social network to focus on professional
collaboration; it's joining a big family of enterprise social products. If that last sentence made little
sense to you and you're interested in learning more about both, read on.
What is Facebook at Work?
Facebook At Work is a standalone enterprise social networking tool, which allows people within the
same company to get work-related updates and chat with colleagues online. It has most of the
familiar functionalities of Facebook: users have access to a News Feed with updates within the
company, collaboration within groups, messaging other colleagues, and organizing events.
The Facebook at Work network for a particular company will appear as a separate site with the
domain name such as "company.facebook.com," accessible only to people in the organization. The
network is expected to take form of a desktop version, iOS and Android app, as well as a mobile web
browser version--all very much reminiscent of the Facebook we know and love. According to
Facebook's director of engineering, Lars Rasmussen, the biggest difference in appearance will be a
move away from Facebook's signature blue colour scheme. Screenshots of Facebook At Work in the
App Store show off a classy light gray interface.

2. Facebook at Work user profiles will be entirely separate from personal Facebook accounts, and
information such as name, job title and work contact info will be set up automatically by the
administrator of your company's network. Users with both a personal and a work account will be
able to switch between two, similar to the way one can switch between viewing and commenting as
a user or a Page administrator. However, Rasmussen stressed in several interviews that there will be
no crossover between the two accounts, even if the employee chooses to link something from
personal to business. Posts within the company's Facebook At Work network will be accessible only
to employees; TechCrunch reports that administrators of Facebook At Work at the company will be
able to access anything users share on their work account. The product is targeted to organizations
with 100 or more employees, which is a clear sign of Facebook's desire to expand into the territory
of enterprise social.
The enterprise social network
The phrase 'enterprise social' has been used over the past decade to describe social collaboration
and communication tools designed specifically with a workplace environment in mind. Enterprise
social networks such as Convo, Jive, or Microsoft's Yammer have already broken into the market,
with many Fortune 1000 companies using similar tools among their employees. These networks
allow companies to exchange messages, post updates to the network, share documents, and follow
company news. If this sounds familiar even if you've never logged into an enterprise social network,
it's because these tools aren't that different from the capabilities of Facebook or Google+. The key
distinguishing factor is the blank slate factor, your employer's knowledge that your enterprise social
profile is work-related by nature.
While we have tried to break the association between "'social network' equals 'distraction' and 'lack
of productivity'" in the past, the possibility of temptation to check a personal message or scroll down

3. the News Feed for a couple of minutes is always there. Proponents of enterprise social adoption
argue that networks such as the one Facebook At Work aims to be take advantage of our existing
social network behavior and put it to good use for professional collaboration. CEO of Icreon Tech
Himanshu Sareen, in his Wired article on enterprise social, specifically focuses on the benefits of
workplace-exclusive networks for the current generation entering the workforce, Millennials for
whom social media use is second nature. Other sources give examples of enterprise social removing
barriers in document sharing or subject matter expert location processes, by simply providing a
social channel that allows people to reach out to multiple coworkers at once, unobscured by the
exclusivity of an email chain.
Experts in the field are not surprised by Facebook's move into enterprise social. They mention
Facebook's advantages, such as the biggest user pool and familiarity with the interface, in
conversations with TechCrunch on the recent announcement. With the enterprise social space
changing rapidly as more and more organizations look into adoption, the market is ripe for a major
player to introduce more competition for enterprise clients between the existing networks.
Important elements of enterprise social networks
The field of enterprise social is by no means a new one, especially from a social media standpoint.
There have been multiple attempts to make workplace collaboration tools that mimic personal social
media use, with varying degrees of success. As Brent Leary of CRM Essentials told TechCrunch,
enterprise social use has never caught on in a big way, in some ways due to poorly defined
expectations about how they should contribute to an organization.
Some elements necessary for enterprise social networks to have the positive effect on productivity
and collaboration are corporate directory synchronization, external product integration, and
document sharing capabilities.
Corporate directory synchronization instantly sets enterprise networks apart from personal
accounts, as it places employees within an existing organizational hierarchy, and allows users to
better understand their own role, and make it easier to search for subject matter experts within the
company. Networks such as Yammer allow users to search for people and groups
An industry analysis from last year stressed that the recent change in the enterprise social market
was largely driven by the need to have social workflow embedded across enterprise systems, and
compatible with external business apps. Thus, enterprise collaboration apps that have better third-
party app integration rank higher in the analysis. For example, Tibbr, which allows the use of apps
such as Dropbox, SharePoint and Skype, was included in the "Leaders" category of the report.
Finally, to decrease process times around collaborative projects, an enterprise social network should

4. include extensive file sharing capabilities. IBM Connections, for example, has a dedicated content
library designed to share and revise content within the company. Another popular enterprise
network, Convo, allows users to share files of different types directly in their conversation windows.
Whether it's submitting a file for evaluation by multiple stakeholders, or share an internal asset that
brought about a company win, file sharing is an essential collaboration tool for an enterprise social
network.
If Facebook At Work is indeed meant to have most of Facebook's currently available features--which
dovetail nicely into all the essential elements of enterprise network collaboration--it's very likely that
the meaning of the phrase "browsing Facebook in the office" will change to assume productivity,
instead of distraction.
Does your employer use an enterprise social network? What do you think of Facebook At Work?
Share your thoughts with us in the comments below, or tweet at @Hootsuite!
http://blog.hootsuite.com/facebook-at-work-enterprise-social-networks/