Last week I had an interesting conversation with Eric Schurr, VP of Marketing and Direct sales at Awareness. We discussed their recently announced Facebook integration through their Awareness Facebook Application Framework. I have written about Awareness a number of times here and elsewhere (see Awareness – Enterprise 2.0 Social Media Platform). I have also been writing a bit about Facebook on this blog (e.g., Enterprise 2.0 is not Web 2.0 nor is it an Oxymoron). I discussed how Facebook is not a business-oriented platform for solving business problems inside the enterprise, with rare exceptions, as it is a consumer web application with different objectives. However, I also said, picking up from Puneet Gupta, that Facebook can play a role in the enterprise when it is used appropriately as a social networking vehicle.

I have also written about how a number of firms have provided a means to integrate social software (aka enterprise 2.0) with traditional enterprise applications. Now Awareness, an enterprise social software platform, has taken things the other way by allowing for the integration of their business oriented social software platform with the consumer web platform, Facebook. They are doing this to combine the robust business oriented capabilities of their program with the networking capabilities of Facebook to allow firms to build better communities, primarily for business to consumer communities. I think this is a smart move and a good use of Facebook for business out in the consumer web.

Many of us know what Facebook brings to the table for groups and communities. It certainly has become the dominant player in this space so we are on it because our friends are. I am a member for that reason, as well as its enhanced social networking capabilities. Awareness comes to the table with a single architecture for all forms of user-generated content (e.g., text, video, photos, etc.) that operates in a uniform fashion across all forms of social media (e.g., blogs, wikis, discussion groups, forums, mashups, etc.). User-generated content is also captured and stored with profile information about the user who generated it. This allows you to gather content through any channel (e.g., blog. wiki) and share it thorough any other channel, while retaining the context of the author who generated it.

These are clearly not capabilities within Facebook but they are capabilities that are very useful for a business oriented B2C community. Awareness builds a branded Facebook application for each customer. The resulting Facebook application is unique to each customer’s community. The benefit of having an Awarness-powered Facebook application is that it “extends” their community into Facebook and they can use Facebook’s viral marketing tools. I asked Eric to elaborate on this. He made several points:

1. You are in complete control. You establish the rules for the community dynamics – moderation, security, permissioning, etc. – and you can change them as your needs evolve. You can control who can do what, who can see what, what content is appropriate or not, etc.

2, It’s your content, and you can use it anyway you want. You can mine the content for valuable trends and insights; you can analyze participation metrics; you can access it via APIs and reuse it elsewhere as they do on their own Awareness site.

3. You can extend your community to other places where your users “live.” If you build a group in Facebook or some other social site, it will be there and only there. However, if you have an Awareness-powered community, you can also extend your community to Facebook (via the Awareness Facebook Application Framework) and eventually other social sites so your community can “live” in more than one place.

4. You can modify the community to meet your users’ needs. You can change the look and feel, incorporate new features (tagging, mapping, calendars, etc) to adjust to your users’ needs.

5. You can integrate it with your enterprise environment. Integrate with SSO/identity management systems, enterprise search, third party applications, etc.

6. You can monetize your community. It’s yours to do as you please. If you want to run ads on it or some other form of monetization, you can.

7. The community is in your brand image and style and strengthens your web presence. It’s your URL, your look/feel, and can be a seamless part of your web presence. Their Awareness site is an example of this (you can’t tell where the community ends and the website begins).

Eric offered an example of an Awareness powered Facebook community run by The Port Charlotte Voice, a New York Times Regional newspaper. It is their first customer to implement the Awareness Facebook Application Framework and the Facebook group is in its early stages. The newspaper can now present a variety of headlines, user-generated content and more from its online Awareness-powered social media community directly into Facebook. You can see the Port Charlotte Voice Facebook application with the link in this sentence.

The consumer web has brought a lot to the enterprise. Companies have taken many concepts from the consumer web to create business tools such as Awareness. It is nice to see some of the robustness of these new business tools going back into the consumer web to make it more robust for business.