“…we realized that due to the distributed nature of the company and the growth through acquisition there was little sense of a Serena community. People often worked together for more than a decade, yet knew nothing about each other. And if you think about it, why would they? There was no easy way to learn more about your colleagues. So here we had all these home workers, or employees in satellite offices like Melbourne who we only knew by name. We wanted everyone to feel like they were a part of Serena, we wanted our employees to help us mold what Serena should stand for in a very public way. And we wanted to create a persona for Serena made up of the company’s collective personalities.
At the same time we had just moved into business mashups. And as we looked at ways to train our employees on the value of Web 2.0 and show them how the workforce of the future will interact with software it occurred to us that the best way to learn is first hand. Our CEO and CMO were already avid Facebook users, and had both been into social networking for years so we thought, “what do we have to lose?”

Read the full article at blog.hbs.edu