I’m a user of facebook, like everyone else in the first world.
My mother is a music teacher for a local county school system. She uses facebook.
Her school system has created a ‘facebook-lite’ site that allows their employees to socialize, coordinate and share information on a secure site in a more relaxed setting than the normal workplace. When I asked my mother about her experience using the new site she said it was very similar to the functionality of facebook but it was a hassle having to deal with logging in to that site to make sure she’s up-to-date with the latest info.
Thinking about this, I realized that this is a perfect area of expansion for facebook to go into, corporate facebook networks. Not in it’s current form. Most large businesses are able to restrict access to their ‘network’ on facebook by requiring anyone joining that network to have an appropriate email address. What fb needs to do is have private, secure networks that are managed by the businesses that no one outside this network can see anything that happens within it.
Facebook should allow corporations to set up private networks that work as a subset of the main facebook site. Fb could charge the corporations for this ability and the corporations can benefit from having a very robust, feature-rich, easily accessible site for their employees to socialize and collaborate. For the end-users this is the easiest solution since you could use your normal fb login and have all your corporate activity integrated with you normal social activity.
If fb gave control of layout, features and user management to the the business, it would allow each business to be responsible only to themselves for all user management. This could be a major source of revenue for fb which appears to rely almost solely on banner advertisements. Even charging just a couple dollars a month per user could greatly boost their cash flow and profit margins.
Just my two cents.
Till Next Time
Tags: business, corporate, facebook, fb, networks, school, social networks