What’s in Your [Corporate] Facebook?

A couple of weeks ago we got a message from Mckinsey & Company regarding our online subscription to The McKinsey Quarterly that also mentioned that the company now has a page on Facebook. If Facebook has come of age for a prestigious company like McKinsey, we needed to check it out.

Facebook is an example of a Web 2.0 application that is being embraced by enterprises which makes it part of EW2. McKinsey is an outstanding example of this adoption.

One thing led to another and we did some research. We began with a list of the Fortune 1000 companies by industry plus lists of accounting, management consulting, and law firms. We looked at about 75 Facebook pages; just the largest firms in their respective industries.

Facebook started on college campuses which are communities of your future employees. Many former members of those communities are now in your company. When they registered for Facebook they were asked to list where they work. We only looked at large companies, but we didn’t find a single site where a company had fewer than 100 employees on Facebook.

Several companies had excellent examples of conversations for future employment, but we were surprised by how few. All of your employees on Facebook are communicators and probably proud to be affiliated with your company; the kind of employees you would like to keep. They’re one of your internal communities.

One major accounting firm only has a careers page but it includes information about and links to their corporate responsibility activities, inclusion programs, key questions applicants want answered, and a discussion board about working at the firm that has 132 topics. They have 14,099 fans; that is a large community by any measure.

We found several page sponsored by a subsidiary. Two were from South Africa and one from Hong Kong – these were all American based companies. In none of these cases did the US company have a page. For one of the largest banks, the closest thing they had to a corporate page was one sponsored by a branch in the mid-west.

A common application (provide by Facebook) is a place to list corporate events like trade shows where friends and fans can meet you and get more information. A couple of these offered opportunities to raise questions the company would like to have addressed at presentations and one even had a discussion area to collect opinions and help address some anticipated questions.

Enterprise 2.0, particularly relates to public communities. It looks like it would be a natural for public relations firms to be participating. We did not find a single large firm with a Facebook page other than the one from a Hong Kong office.

A games manufacturer has a list of release dates for new and updated games beyond the end of 2008 and provides downloads of some of the art work. In an earlier assignment we helped a credit card company deal with providing art work for their retailers’ Web sites to protect the card company’s image because Web site developers were borrowing artwork wherever they could find it and the quality was often unacceptable. The games company has a solution.

There was one linked page that is part of a worldwide communication strategy for the company’s 5,000 dealers around the world. The site appears to have been developed by the dealers, not the company.

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One thing we have learned very fast is you cannot get up to speed in EW2 quickly. It is simply too different, too varied, and too extensively to understand and apply quickly. The companies that are in the shallow end of the pool today are learning and some of them are applying what they are learning very well. Perhaps the two best examples we found were Symantec and Ernst & Young Careers.

There are communities out there that are using your name. Most of them to your advantage, but none as well as they could. What’s in your [Corporate] Facebook pages?

Where do you start?

First, Link to Facebook at http://facebook.com and then put your company’s name in the search box and see what you find. Second, get a list of your competitors and collaborators in terms of your public markets and your contract relationships (dealers, suppliers, etc.) Find out what they are doing on Facebook and see what you can learn. Third, pick your targets. This should involve collaboration between marketing, public relations, HR, and IT with a bit of legal and strategic planning thrown in. Fourth, establish a presence on Facebook; this is not high tech. Let your employees know what you are planning and seek their collaboration. Fifth develop a strategy for each area and begin to execute it.

Facebook is a process, not an event. If you are not willing to stay with it, don’t start. Stale pages say “We don’t care about you any more.”

Enterprise 2.0 is 20% technology and 80% culture. You cannot put old wine in new bottles and succeed. You need to focus on communities, participate in conversations and collaborate with your communities to produce results that work for them and you. Facebook is one of the places you can begin to do this.