Nike, HBO, Sony Tap FMYI For Collaboration

Nike's (NKE) Shambhala initiative, which kicked off in 1999, aimed to transform Nike's approach to social and environmental issues. A series of workshops brought together sustainability gurus, speakers, and more than 50 managers from across Nike's many divisions to discuss ways to push the envelope on internal and product-focused sustainability. The events were hugely successful, but the challenge, says Justin Yuen, a former intranet developer turned corporate social responsibility manager at Nike, was finding a way to keep that sense of community and engagement among individual participants after they returned to their teams.

Traditionally, employees had two methods of communicating with one another: e-mail and the company intranet. The former, while dynamic enough to support actual work, lacked transparency, longevity, and opportunities for collaboration. The intranet, on the other hand, was great for sharing static information across teams and individuals. Neither, however, reflected how people actually worked together. So in 2004, Yuen left his position in Nike's corporate social responsibility team and set out on his own to develop a product that could do better. The result was fmyi—as in, "for my information"—and it's a rare success story in the Web 2.0 landscape: a social media-infused enterprise collaboration tool that has been profitable since two years after its founding.