Let’s review the good, the bad, and the ugly about this development.
THE GOOD:
- It is Facebook for work. There are groups, messaging, chats, video calling, events. Everything you love (or hate) about Facebook is in Workplace. And it has the same user experience, so it’s instantly recognizable and intuitive for anyone who uses Facebook. And that number stands at… like, everyone.
- My favorite feature is the pricing. You only pay per monthly active user (MAU), defined as anyone who has engaged in the past month, which is the standard community management best practice. I love this model because it’s so transparent. The community manager still needs to hold up the organization’s side of the bargain, doing things to encourage engagement, but the vendor assumes risk for not providing an engaging platform. I actually predicted a few years ago that vendors would start pricing this way. So far, to the best of my knowledge, Slack and Workplace do.
- Continuing on pricing, it’s relatively inexpensive. The cheapest version of Slack is $8 per MAU per month. The most expensive pricing level for Workplace is $3 per MAU per month.
- It’s secure. One of the reasons that Workplace is so late to the party is that it had to be vetted by security minded experts, as a key market for Workplace is government agencies. The government of Singapore is already using Workspace.
- You can invite non-employees to collaborate. So your freelance web vendor and graphic artist can collaborate with your employees. Bringing this to the association space, in this model, an organization could run a member facing online community through Workspace, gaining all the familiarity of Facebook and only paying for MAUs.
THE BAD:
- The millennials have left Facebook in droves, and many have never signed up. It’s not as familiar to them as other social media sites, so Workplace will be less familiar for them overall; at least at first, when adoption is so critical.
- This is an opinion, but I believe there will be significant user confusion over the link between Facebook and Workplace. Will my work stuff now show up in my Facebook news feed? Will I see ads about work stuff on Facebook? Will I get Workplace friend requests in Facebook? If you read the FAQs on Workplace, you’ll understand that Workplace and Facebook are completely separate. But how many people actually take the time to read FAQs?
THE UGLY:
- Let’s follow the money. $1-3 per MAU isn’t a lot of cash according to analysts. Clearly Workplace is in business to make money. So how will they do it? Well at Facebook, the parent company, here are a few ways they do it: (1) aggregate your engagement data with a billion other people and sell data analysis to those willing to pay top dollar for it, (2) reduce the organic reach of posts so that companies have to pay for sponsored posts to have their content viewed, and (3) advertise and retarget you based on your social graph. How do we know Workplace won’t employ similar tactics down the road to make a few million bucks?
- I’m suspicious of Workplace because of its affiliation with Facebook. Facebook is notorious for changing the rules, algorithms, features, and other aspects of the software to benefit their bottom line — often to the detriment of its users. Why should we think Workplace will behave any differently?
