Social Networking behemoth
More and more these days I find myself relating concepts commonly found in Facebook to my day-to-day dealings with SharePoint. Although at times it can be tough work convincing the more senior members of my team of its business value within an Enterprise context, I find the challenge almost a duty to my generation (I am 25 years old). Strangely enough the fastest growing demographic on Facebook are those 35 years old and older. You would think it would be easy to convince them then, right? Wrong!
A generalization perhaps… or at least I hope so.
However I do find it naive that more senior employees are somewhat ignoring the relationship between the Social Networking revolution and the SharePoint revolution. To the mindful eye, SharePoint and Facebook are in fact two peas in a pod. It bewilders me how the basic Social Networking tools and principals applied and proven to be successful in Facebook go unutilised in failing SharePoint implementations.
Corollary, in a series of posts over the coming weeks, I will explore the SharePoint/Facebook similarities – a case study, if you will – to explain how Facebook, in getting it so right, can solve recurring problems seen worldwide in SharePoint implementations.
I really look forward to exploring this issue further with you. Do you face the same obstinance when it comes to talking about Facebook in the same light as SharePoint? Let me know your experiences and I will aspire to address them in this series of posts.
In the meantime, here is 2 statistics you can use on your boss when he chooses to ignore the application of Facebook-like concepts in a SharePoint world:
“More than 3 billion minutes [are] spent on Facebook each day worldwide” (Facebook, April 2009)
“[Facebook has] more than 175 million active users” (Facebook, April 2009)
Scary, no?
Next: SharePoint 2007 and Facebook – Applications >>
- Facebook Statistics, http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics, accessed 7/4/2009
Tags: Design, Enterprise 2.0, Facebook, MOSS 2007, Social Networking
