It should come as no surprise that Facebook is exploring the enterprise with Facebook at Work. They’re certainly not the only consumer behemoth making moves towards the enterprise (Dropbox also comes to mind as a consumer-first company making the enterprise push). The media coverage of the coming launch was swift but divided with many reporters either feeling like Facebook is the likely winner in the enterprise social networking arena hands down or thinking this is a DOA idea given how many companies already regulate Facebook use in the office (remember, just five years ago 54% of businesses were found to block Facebook at work).
Facebook has several hurdles out of the gate with this endeavor: the pervasive lack of trust by the enterprise , understanding the true needs of the enterprise when it comes to messaging versus social networking’s collaboration opportunity, and the unique challenges of selling into the enterprise and understanding that audience ADNC -4.03%, for which they are not yet equipped.
Facebook is Not Trusted as an Internal Business System
The first and really central challenge for Facebook is that it’s untrusted by the enterprise. Trust, in this case, relates both to the potential impact on employee productivity and the privacy of corporate information. Can Facebook turn this sentiment around with Facebook at Work? Not only is Facebook considered a place where people lose hours of their lives each day, but it’s also where information can be easily or accidentally shared and where user data is used with abandon (with apologies often only coming after someone realizes what’s going on).
While corporate social networks are trendy right now, none actually solve the problem they’re purported to – that problem being asynchronous communication between employees, teams and departments. I’ve used everything from Chatter to Yammer to WebEx Social and while true workplace collaboration sounds ideal, Facebook represents sharing opinions and liking those of others. If there’s one thing businesses hate, it’s employees sitting around not actively working towards a common business goal. When tools such as Chatter or Yammer see success it’s most often because they’re bundled with other, more essential business products.
The opportunity that’s more interesting to me is based on Facebook recently separating out Messenger from the core Facebook application and acquiring WhatsApp for $19B. The importance of this consideration was even discussed in Mark Zuckerberg’s recent Q&A session, in which he explained why the messenger system was separated from the overall Facebook app:
“Messaging is becoming increasingly important. On mobile, each app can only focus on doing one thing well, we think. The primary purpose of the Facebook app is News Feed. Messaging was this behavior people were doing more and more. 10 billion messages are sent per day, but in order to get to it you had to wait for the app to load and go to a separate tab. We saw that the top messaging apps people were using were their own app. These apps that are fast and just focused on messaging. You’re probably messaging people 15 times per day. Having to go into an app and take a bunch of steps to get to messaging is a lot of friction.”
By separating the capabilities, Facebook clearly showed that the two functionalities shouldn’t be accessed via the same application – the value in messaging came from speed. In the business view, that can be read as social networking slowing work down for most people while messaging brings action and answers to the forefront of employee activity. That’s where the value proposition is. Come January, when Facebook at Work is launched, the feature set they decide on will show where they see the greatest value and if they believe, as I do, that the real value add that enterprises are looking for today is action and access to institutional knowledge.
Enterprise Sales are a Very Different Beast Than Selling to a Consumer Audience
Lastly, and most tactically, Facebook at Work requires selling into the enterprise. The market and customer is very different from Facebook’s consumer and advertising play today. This is not to be entered into lightly when the goals of a closed enterprise system are vastly different from the open interests of brand advertisers reaching new audiences through their social graph.
As Facebook at Work rolls out in the coming months it will be interesting to watch if Facebook is able to secure early buyers (I’m assuming they will charge for it). Afterall, in creating an enterprise solution they’re also going to require an enterprise sales team, which requires a deep understanding of the enterprise market and customer base. While Facebook has proven that they understand the consumer market and behaviors, we see a lot of consumer-first companies pivot to provide an enterprise offer without a plan for the unique challenges that brings.
If anyone can pull off a successful social network for the workplace, it’s Facebook. Their superior knowledge of social networking psychology, alongside their proven effective platform positions them as the most capable company to make the attempt. However, when it comes to true enterprise messaging and driving productivity in the workplace, Facebook needs to overcome these serious hurdles.
