Should Facebook Be Banned from Work? Gardner’s Nikos Drakos versus Ray Valdes

Facebook has taken over from blogs to become the poster child for consumer social media with over 68 million users. Many of the consumer web 2.0 tools, including blogs, have successfully migrated to the workplace. At the same a huge industry have emerged to create business versions of these consumer tools. Many of these business tools have taken features of the consumer tools and combined them for greater business effectiveness. This is our strategy at Connectbeam, combining social bookmarking with social networking and adding business focused features.

Where does Facebook fit into this picture? A recent debate at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2008 on April 7 was summarized on eWeek. Gartner analyst Nikos Drakos took the position that Facebook should be banned, while Gartner's Ray Valdes defended the social network, saying it should be regulated. Drakos essentially said that Facebook is a distraction from company business and increases the liability for disclosure of inappropriate and inconsistent company information. Valdes counters that company regulations can govern these inappropriate uses.

This debate can take emotional turns given the high loyalty to Facebook. However, we have to remember the question, Should Facebook Be Banned from Work? It is not should social media be banned from work. Facebook is a consumer tool designed to maximize its marketing revenue. Facebook has opened up its APIs for third party developers and unleashed a gold rush in widget development. However, these widgets are not generally designed for business and they often broadcast information without the user’s realization.

Let’s look at Facebook's Beacon experiment as an example the business implications of Facebook’s goal of maximize its marketing revenue. Here is a nice summary of the transitions and back pedaling, The Evolution of Facebook’s Beacon, from the New York times Bits blog. The problem comes from the tracking of your actions on sites other than Facebook and then putting what happens in your news feed that goes out to all your Facebook friends. Like many people I am not excited for this information to be distributed without my control. While I have nothing to hide, I see this as just clutter that can be spam to my Facebook friends.

The problem and outcry occurred because Facebook made it very hard to control this feature. Despite numerous protests, Facebook refused for a while to allow for a universal opt off capability. You had to disallow each broadcast separately. It was also unclear how to do this nor did you have much time to make the stop before it went out. The reason for this initial disregard of user’s wishes lies in Facebook’s desire for the increased ad revenue that could come through this feature. This unattended broadcast can occur with many of the other Facebook widgets. They can be worse that the email “reply all” button.

Why would you want to give a tool designed to generate consumer eyeballs and increase its marketing revenue room to operate freely in your business? I am a Facebook fan and a user but I would rather have social media tools that are designed for business use operating within my enterprise. I think that regulation is the wrong approach. Why pick a tool that requires such regulation? Regulation is the exact antithesis of Web 2.0. I do not think we should confuse Facebook with all of social media. To ban Facebook in your business is not to ban social media. There are many social media tools that offer the networking capabilities similar to those within Facebook. I have to side with Nikos on this one.

I added a more on the topic in this post, The Role of Facebook in the Enterprise: A Post Script, where I did say there could be a role for Facebook in an enterprise and we do not ban it here at Connectbeam. The post explains why.