Why Social Business IS NOT Facebook for the Enterprise Two days ago, Jive CEO Tony Zingale spoke at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Santa Clara. His main message to the audience was that Facebook, while a great social platform that changed how we interact in our personal lives, is not the right social *business* strategy. This is a topic of huge importance to me, as my mission as head of engineering at Jive is to translate and apply consumer space innovation to change the way work gets done. I think everyone agrees that a critical key to Facebook’s success is their application platform. By exposing the social graph to developers, Facebook has enabled applications and games that are truly engaging and collaborative in new ways. And with access to the activity stream, applications are given a powerful viral marketing mechanism that radically lowers the cost of adoption. In addition, Facebook has ridden the wave of radically reduced cost models for software hosting and Web 2.0 user experience by leveraging the web standards and innovations in the cloud such as Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine. The net result is that a few developers in a garage now can deliver and scale a major hosted software application with bare minimum CapEx, marketing or sales. Zynga is the perfect case study for masterfully using all of these principles to create success. This new model (along with a remarkably similar model for iPhone) has caused a massive wave of innovation in the consumer software marketplace. Contrast this with the current state of the enterprise market. It’s a world of boring software, little innovation and a huge barriers to entry. The sheer cost of building an enterprise sales force that can compete against the likes of IBM, HP and Oracle stops most startups in their tracks. VCs have looked at these high start-up costs and risky returns, and have redirected most of their dollars to consumer-oriented startups. This has gone on for so long that enterprise software feels a decade behind the current models. It’s tempting to say that all enterprise technology vendors need to do is bolt on a new “Facebook for the enterprise” offering to make them current. But this ignores the challenges that enterprises face: huge challenges like security, governance, application integration and privacy. And it ignores that these solutions need to scale beyond small work groups to cut across a company’s entire ecosystem, including employees, customers, partners, vendors and the social web. But most of all, it ignores the fact that the way people are doing work is changing and they need new, fundamentally different tools to support them.