Socializing the Enterprise

By: Paula Bernier (News - Alert)

Social networking sites like Facebook (News - Alert) may soon be coming to an enterprise near you. That could open employees and businesses to a raft of new communications and marketing possibilities.

“This is a once-in-a-century communications platform,” says Paul Dunay, global managing director of services and social marketing at Avaya (News - Alert) and author of “Facebook Marketing for Dummies,” adding that the social networking phenomenon embodied by Facebook is on par with world-changing developments such as the printing press and radio.

Speaking during the Avaya pre-conference seminar “The Social Enterprise – Are You Ready for It?” at the recent ITEXPO (News - Alert) West, Dunay noted that 5 billion minutes per day are spent on Facebook, which has surpassed email in popularity. He added Facebook has 250 million users, which includes one out of five Internet users; is the web’s second largest video site; and lays claim to being the largest photo site, with 1 billion photos uploaded monthly. Because Facebook and sites like it are populated by real people with real interests, marketers can potentially leverage that to deliver more targeted marketing and advertising, search and more, he says.

“It’s not just a social network, it’s a communications platform,” Dunay says.

Playing off that theme, Avaya at the Aug. 31 event in Los Angeles talked about Avaya Facephone, which it described as a prototype application and delivery platform that could help expand the use of social networking into the business world. While Avaya indicated it hasn’t taken definitive steps to productize Facephone, any of the 10,000-plus companies in the Avaya DevConnect (News - Alert) program could probably elect to build applications bringing all or parts of this concept to market.

Introducing Avaya Facephone, Reinhard Klemm, research scientist for collaborative applications research at Avaya Labs (News - Alert) Research, notes that Facebook doesn’t distinguish between work colleagues and friends, and that can be a problem because employees can inadvertently leak company information as a result. But Facephone could be used as an overlay on top of Facebook so when you want to talk to a coworker on this platform you can do so securely, and without first having to “friend” that coworker, says Klemm, adding “What you say in Facephone stays in Facephone.”

This could also enable workers to interface with others in the same industry whom they haven’t even met. One party could send out a note via Facebook requesting help with a specific problem, and Facephone would provide suitable individuals to address the issue. The person with the question could then use Facephone tools to get presence information on those experts, decide on the appropriate method of communications to reach the expert of choice, and launch that communications session without ever leaving Facebook. The expert, meanwhile, could access the profile of the individual asking the question to get a better understanding of who’s making the inquiry.

Beyond employee-to-employee communications, this Facephone idea also addresses customer-to-enterprise communications (enabling a rich two-way customer care channel) and customer-to-customer communications (allowing “expert customers” to sing the praises of a company’s products to others, for example) via social networks, according to Avaya.

As Jon Alperin, director of developer marketing for Avaya DevConnect, notes, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are creating a flurry of entirely new contact channels. “It’s a whole new way of interfacing to the enterprise.”

But while users’ social networks and affiliations facilitated through these services are new, many of the underlying technologies and services that could help social networking move to the next level are already part of the unified communications lexicon. IT

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