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Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Facebook Fridays

A mistitled article - found via Bill Ives on the FastForward blog - Serena Software Adopts Facebook as Corporate Intranet.

The real focus of the article is how Serena Software has adopted a practice called Facebook Fridays:
Each Friday, employees are granted one hour of personal time to spend on their Facebook profiles and connect with co-workers, customers, family and friends. This initiative will start today and will be rolled out in 18 countries where the company has offices.

If you think about it, this is somewhat similar to having a company lunch, but probably much more effective at getting connections to happen in interesting ways. You are more likely to connect farther away from people you know. Although my guess is that you need to do some seeding of ideas and techniques to make it effective.

Of course, it's helpful to have a CEO say things like:
“Social networking tools like Facebook can bring us back together, help us get to know each other as people, help us understand our business and our products, and help us better serve our customers-on demand. A corporate culture that fosters a sense of community and fun will ultimately help us get more done. Companies that do not embrace social networking are making a huge mistake.”

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting approach. In my organisation, anything that is classified as a social network is blocled. Fow a while that included Ning, but somehow the Ning communities have managed to escape the ban.

The PTB look on it as social not-working.

bschlenker said...

This just STINKS of command and control! Its like casual fridays! What a joke!

"Gee, oh thank you Mr. Manager for letting me go to Facebook. I promise to do my job better now"

Companies need to just let it go and learn to trust their employees. I could go on but I won't.

Tony Karrer said...

Wow, Brent, I so disagree with you on this one.

There are going to be a lot of people in companies that have no idea how they could use these tools to network in their companies. This could be a great way to help them.

Further, this really makes the culture of being an open company obvious.

I hear you about control, but I disagree that this smacks of too much control.

Joitske said...

Thanks for this! There seem to be 2 main approaches within organisations - blocking and fear for internet/web2.0 stuff and stimulating it. Would the second type of organisation be more effective/survive better?