For those who thought they could avoid joining the more than 400 million residents of Planet Facebook, abandon all hope. Social media - complete with Facebook-like status updates, profile pages and networks of social connections - is coming to your office cubicle.
Palo Alto, California-based Socialtext and other smaller companies already supply workplaces with the same sort of online social tools that Facebook, Wikipedia and Twitter brought into the mainstream in recent years - features such as networks of personal connections, internal wikis that allow groups of employees to collaborate, and Twitter-like microblogs that co-workers can follow.
But with Microsoft, the 800-pound gorilla of office software, set to push deeper into the market with its SharePoint 2010 release on May 12, analysts say online social networking is crossing over from something you do for fun with friends and family to something you increasingly will do with co-workers as part of your job.
"People are bringing their Facebook experience into the enterprise,'' said Rob Koplowitz, an analyst with the research firm Forrester who says the presence of giants like IBM and Microsoft will make 2010 "a defining year'' in the crossover of social networking to the workplace.
By that, Koplowitz doesn't mean logging onto Facebook at your desk and uploading your photos from Maui while the boss is looking the other way.
Rather, companies like Socialtext, Microsoft and IBM say their social networking software can help workers find the right colleague to help them complete a task, can help organize and locate internal data more easily and can boost productivity and reduce redundancy by better sharing what everyone is doing.
For example, Microsoft's new SharePoint 2010 and Socialtext allow workers to maintain their own profile page - a familiar Facebook feature - which inlcudes personal information like the employee's name, title, photo, contact information, the college they attended, birthday, hobbies and a thumbnail account of their experience with the company.
Facebook's "Friends'' become "Colleagues'' on SharePoint 2010. Echoing another Facebook feature - Microsoft owns a share of Facebook - workers can type a real-time status update on their profile page to let others within the organization know what they are up to, such as, "Meeting with sales team in Dallas.''
Most of the programs focus not only on improving communication, but also on organizing and archiving each employee's personal data and external contacts - meaning knowledge doesn't walk out the door with an employee.
Employees have the option of keeping some documents private, though much of it is shared.
The company intranet has long been a foundation of internal communications, but the new social enterprise software packages are designed to be less hierarchical, and to allow employees to search out and forge their own connections with co-workers.
Socialtext says that when colleagues share more about themselves, it builds trust in a company, which leads to the right people working together.
"The explosive growth of social networking in the consumer space has created a sea change in readiness in the enterprise,'' said Eugene Lee, CEO of Socialtext, which was founded in 2002.
"I would say that Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn have had a much bigger impact on the readiness of companies and employees to use social media at work, than the somewhat later entrance of the larger companies.''
Privately-held Socialtext does not disclose detailed financial numbers, but said it enjoyed strong growth in 2009, with its software bookings up 200 percent over the year, and a stable of more than 6500 clients that includes Oxford University Press and Meredith Corp., publisher of magazines such as Ladies' Home Journal.
For big corporations such as IBM, where more than 40 percent of employees work outside the office, often scattered around the world, social networking has proved crucial, said Carol Sormilic, IBM's vice president of social media. The company used its own experience to produce Lotus Connections.
When the company launched a service Sormilic described as "IBM's version of Facebook,'' she said, "You wouldn't believe how quickly it took off. It demonstrates how people were wanting to touch each other.''
Sormilic says she still encounters doubters who question the value of having workers put their kids' photos on their workplace profile page, but she said companies must replace face-to-face contact if they are to accommodate a work force that expects the freedom to set hours or work from home.
"When you walk in my office, you'd see the certificates on the wall; you'd see my thoughts on the whiteboard; you'd see if it's messy or neat. You'd walk into my office, and in 10 seconds you'd know me a little,'' she said. "And that's what some aspects of social media do. It really facilitates social relationships, whether it's across continents or time zones.''
