Several excellent comments came in regarding the Facebook series. I will share them with readers during the course of this week and next. This is the third of several posts:
Mike Hart CXO started out with encouraging words:
“Full disclosure, I’m not a Zayo employee nor a telecomm guy, just someone who reads Dan’s blog for kicks. And I happen to personally know him too. I’m completely on board with social media and my own digital footprint is growing. In its present form I think the use of Facebook as a company tool is a slippery slope. That is unless you want everyone to know everything about you, which few people do. Do you really want to see the banter from my 16-year old niece and her friends? No, even I don’t most of the time, but I want to stay connected with her just the same. As Facebook improves its functionality (i.e. being able to set up a group of people who can view only specific posts) it’s functional usage may also improve, but as Alfred E Einstein notes above, it needs to be organic and shouldn’t be forced.”
But then Mike put a little chill in me:
“Ponder the possibility that one day Zayo will become a public company. Can you imagine the implication for SEC disclosures in public documents given the existence of a “public” Zayo group on Facebook? At the moment I can’t either, but some court case is bound to test it. Or, from an HR perspective when an employee posts a comment to the wall of another employee who takes offense. How would that be handled? For confidential discussion groups within a company there are many ways to handle this electronically without Facebook.”
Your points are valid Mike. Even bearonbusiness will be impacted if Zayo was to go public.
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Mike, I don’t believe the bantering-teenager scenario presents itself given the parameters stated in Dan’s fb post. There appear to be misconceptions as to how groups, pages, networks, and privacy controls are implemented on fb. I believe that Dan is implementing a private group, not a group that’s open for public viewing. Basically, he’s carving out a corporate website using fb as the hosting service.
As opposed to hosting a SharePoint site on a corporate server, Dan is leveraging Facebook.com services in the cloud in the same manner as using services hosted by SalesForce.com, or Google.com/apps.
“Organic,” vs “Forced” — I’m “forced” — I’m currently on contract with a large international corporation which has implemented fb-type services on their corporate website. I’m required to enter in this information (Quoting from Dan’s post) — “name, photo, work location, job title, job description, and a little about your career background. Any additional information is 100% optional.”
Several members of the executive team have blogs on this site….but they don’t announce forward-looking statements from their blogs
…in regards to the SEC concern.
Dan’s not asking Zayo employees to do anything different than most of corporate America already tells us to do. I believe that he just wants to use facebook because its less expensive then implementing and hosting the same services in house.
(As a side note Dan, for the few folks who do not want to expose their professional profile information, to their personal network of fb connections, you may consider establishing a Zayo ‘network’, in addition to the group. This enables additional privacy controls, and the need for some staff to setup a Zayo-only persona account on fb could be avoided).
Dan- thought this was funny and went right along with your recent posts…More info in the great debate
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/07/05/uk.spy.chief.facebook/index.html?iref=newssearch