Why corporate wikis beat the pants off Facebook

IBM -- yes, IBM -- is doing some amazing research on corporate intranets (wikis included). In fact, they have their own corporate intranet, called Beehive. A couple of IBM researchers just presented a paper in which they showed how Beehive, well, beats the pants off Facebook in some really important ways.

The gist of their research is that an intranet leads to much more community building than a public social networking site like Facebook. Counterintuitive? Maybe. Here's what they wrote:

This analysis revealed that patterns of use and user motivations differ from users of other social software tools. First, within the protected, closed off environment of the intranet, employees choose to reach out on Beehive to new people rather than only connecting to those they know, which is different than behavior found on Facebook.

Employees also share details of their personal life on Beehive which has not been found with any significant frequency in other enterprise social software tools, such as intranet social bookmarking and blogging.

So users of corporate wikis are more likely to reach out to new people and share more about themselves than, say, Facebook users. We're already seeing that happen on our own corporate wiki, as users from around the world share ideas and themselves. It's a beautiful thing.