Social Media: Is Enterprise Software Destined to Mirror Facebook?

It looks like the answer is ‘yes’.  Every vendor from SAP to Microsoft is hatching a plan for adding more collaboration features into their software.   But whether a copy of Facebook-style Social Networking is the right answer for better enterprise operations is still a bit of an experiment.

Salesforce.com is a recent high-volume advocate of using Social Networking capabilities in the enterprise.

“Why isn’t all Enterprise software like Facebook?” asks Marc Benioff, CEO of salesforce.com.

I quit my job at Oracle in 1999 because I couldn’t stop thinking about a simple question: “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com”  Why couldn’t applications be run from a simple website, without software or hardware to install, and pricy consultants to hire? Why couldn’t we just compute in the Internet, or the cloud, and get away from the data center and all its complexity. Simply put, I wanted to simplify the enterprise. It was a pretty straight-forward idea, but from the confines in which I sat, there wasn’t anything close to a straight-forward solution.That vision led to the founding of salesforce.com…

We need to transform the business conversation the same way Facebook has changed the consumer conversation. Market shifts happen in real time, deals are won and lost in real time, and data changes in real time. Yet the software we use to run our enterprises is in anything but real time. We need tools that work smarter, make better use of new technology (like the mobile devices in everyone?s hands), and fully leverage the opportunities of the Internet.

Well, some of this is Benioff-hype around Salesforce’s introduction of Facebook-like capabilities with the new Salesforce add-on called Chatter.  And with 400 million users, it’s clear that Facebook has done something right in building a Social Networking tool for the consumer space.  But does that something translate immediately to the business space?

It’s not clear.  The average Facebook user spends 55 minutes per day inside of Facebook.  Maybe that’s not much considering that many workers today spend most of their business day using email clients like Outlook.  Presumably, the introduction of enterprise social networking would shift some amount of time previously spent on email-based collaboration tools into time spent using social networking ones.

But the jury is out.  While collaboration tools like blogs and wikis have shown that they can add value to the enterprise, the ROTI (Return on time investment) gains from social networking features back to the enterprise is still uncharted territory.