Facebook breaks through office clampdowns on the social website

As more and more businesses take steps to block facebook from the working environment I have been wondering how facebook would react.

It is obvious that Facebook needs to retain communication with facebook users in a spam free manner in order to maintain their interest and loyalty. So a new small feature may have the power to engage employees once more. I have discovered that facebook will now let people reply to their status udates via email.

I wonder how this will affect Facebooks usership in South Africa. I already know many people who work in ‘facebook free‘ office environments and who are kept out of the loop when it comes to what happens with friends on Facebook.

It is most likely that over time we will see Facebook rolling out email replying capability to other aspects of facebook (inbox, photo comments, etc) although this has not been publicly announced in any way.

As Facebook becomes more email friendly will the business world accept that employees can interact via email or will they try to clamp down on that as well.

Marketing Implications?

It will take a bit of time to see the full effect of a feature like this however anything that increases the possiblility of further interaction with people online should always produce some sort of positive  opportunity. Although this new feature may decrease the traffic to the site which would decrease the value of Facebook advertising.

What are your thoughts to how this may impact marketing on Facebook? (Feel free to comment below)