Facebook as Enterprise Collaboration Platform: Let's brainstorm

I received surprisingly pleasant feedback on my last post Facebook in an Enterprise: Weird thought or an untapped potential?, so I thought of taking a step further and tried drilling down if my 'weird thought' can take realistic shape and if Facebook has the right ingredients to evolve as an enterprise collaboration / social media platform.

When its comes to enterprise collaboration / social media platform, enterprises usually expect the system to provide following functionalities, which add value to their business. Wikipedia and AIIM define this in following broad terms:

• Search: allowing users to search for other users or content
• Links: grouping similar users or content together
• Authoring: including blogs and wikis
• Tags: Allowing users to tag content
• Extensions: recommendations of users; or content based on profile
• Signals: allowing people to subscribe to users or content with RSS feeds

Facebook in an Enterprise: Weird thought or an untapped potential?

I was in a meeting with my existing ECM customer last week and during the course of our discussion we picked on a very interesting subject, Social Media in an enterprise. The CEO of this multi-billion dollar company had assigned the task to his IT manager to study the possibility and adaptability of implementing social media solution in the company.

For a moment i thought the CEO wants to increase social media presence of the company, since though he runs a large company, but that enterprise is not very known to people outside the industry domain and naturally a CEO would be interested to increase the brand value of the company by putting-up a brand building campaign on social media networks which might help him to increase the share value of company (that's the only thing every CEO is concerned about all the time :)). But I was wrong, the CEO wanted to bring a social collaboration culture within the organization, which doesn't just rely on information exchanged through email or posted on the intranet portal.

So what does the modern day CEO wants?