With Friend.ly, you begin typing a question that you’d like to ask of your Facebook friends, and if you can’t think of one, you can browse questions that others have asked; additionally, you can see others’ answers to those questions.

Friend.ly is different from other Q&A services because it uses Facebook’s interest graph to suggest relevant questions to the end-user.  For example, if you list photography as one of your interests on Facebook, Friend.ly may suggest a question like “What are the best brands for digital SLR cameras?” – if you answer this, your friends could see your answer and gain some valuable info when they’re shopping around for cameras.

Applying this to the enterprise world can be rather powerful for enhancing collaboration efforts, knowledge management, and building company culture.  With this service, questions that you ask could be directed to subject matter experts within the organization, increasing the quality and relevancy of the information that you get back.

Say a sales person is looking for some good talking points to bring to his next meeting with a prospect in the high-tech industry.  He could throw the question out there – without having to guess which people to send it to on e-mail (or worse sending it to a list-serve of people) or where to post it on the internal network (e.g. Chatter, Jive, Intranets and forums) – and, based on profile fields (e.g. marketing, sales support, technology), his question could find the right colleagues across the organization.

In building company culture, a service like this could be used for new hires to get familiar others at the company, or for all employees to get to know who has similar interests, talents or skills.  Questions like “What’s the best band of all time?”, “What do you think about the new iPhone that just came out?”, “Where’s a good place around here for lunch?”, “Why did you join the company?”, or “Where’s the best place that you’ve ever traveled?” can contribute to employees getting to know each other and find like-minded colleagues without having to wait for the next company holiday party.

How could your company use a service like Friend.ly?

Cyndi is a senior consultant specializing in Cloud Sherpas' Social Enterprise division. She has worked on a variety of online interactive, social media and technology and community-based projects with several major publishers, consumer brands, global financial services firms and smaller service-based businesses.