Organizations that have been scared away from letting employees use mainstream social media at work have a new option for leveraging the power of social networks privately.

Chatter.com, which became available to the public today, is a free Web site used exclusively by businesses to create their own protected social networks. When signing up, employees enter their work email address and are directed to other users who share the same domain name, or the part of the email address following the "at" symbol.

The new site was developed by Salesforce.com, an enterprise cloud computing company that's hoping its caché in the business world will enhance Chatter's appealing.

According to Salesforce, Chatter will be featured in the company's first ever broadcast advertisements to debut this Sunday, February 6. A Youtube teaser of the commercials starring will.i.am, of Black Eyed Peas fame—and more recently, the newly appointed director of creative innovation at Intel —appeared earlier today.

Like the most well-known online social networking, Facebook, Chatter.com lets users establish a profile, write status updates, partake in discussions, and see feeds in real time. Users can follow the online lives of people, groups, and even documents. A more direct competitor than Facebook is Yammer.com, which also caters to organizations looking to leverage social media in a private setting.

Proponents of social media in the workplace will be pleased to see a highly reputable company touting the benefits of connecting people online, such as increasing the speed at which people find information by 49 percent and increasing collaboration by as much as 36 percent. However, what's lost when social networks are restricted to internal employees only is the ability to crowdsource information and ideas from people outside the business, who may have different knowledge, data sources, and ways of thinking.

Although the site was made available to the public today, a number of companies in business with Salesforce have already been using the tool for some time, including Dell, NBC Universal, and Nikon.