"You Cannot Grow Viscum on Soil": The "Good" Corporate Social Media Also Fail

The paper illustrates the adoption of an Enterprise Social Media in a multinational corporation: the primary goal was to support the sharing of experiences among its members and to facilitate their collaboration. The paper highlights the outcomes and the problems that have been encountered in the effort to link this initiative to the achievement of the goals mentioned above, and tries to summarize the main reasons of these problems. The study adopted a research design in which an online questionnaire was administered to the corporation employee. By analysing the responses, we distilled the major points raised by the employees, among which lack of interest and use. The discussion focuses on the lessons that we drew from this experience on how an Enterprise Social Media should be introduced within organizations, e.g., by considering integration with other systems and the inadequacies emerged during the pilot experience.

[1]  Julian E. Orr,et al.  Narratives at work: story telling as cooperative diagnostic activity , 1986, CSCW '86.

[2]  Jonathan Grudin,et al.  Why CSCW applications fail: problems in the design and evaluationof organizational interfaces , 1988, CSCW '88.

[3]  A. Strauss,et al.  Basics of Qualitative Research , 1992 .

[4]  Claudio U. Ciborra,et al.  De profundis? Deconstructing the concept of strategic alignment , 1997, Scand. J. Inf. Syst..

[5]  S. Ghoshal,et al.  Social Capital, Intellectual Capital, and the Organizational Advantage , 1998 .

[6]  Mark S. Ackerman,et al.  The Intellectual Challenge of CSCW: The Gap Between Social Requirements and Technical Feasibility , 2000, Hum. Comput. Interact..

[7]  Andrew McAfee,et al.  Enterprise 2.0: the dawn of emergent collaboration , 2006, IEEE Engineering Management Review.

[8]  Stefania Bandini,et al.  WWW in the Small , 2007, World Wide Web.

[9]  Michael J. Muller,et al.  Motivations for social networking at work , 2008, CSCW.

[10]  Selmin Nurcan,et al.  BPM and Social Software , 2008, Business Process Management Workshops.

[11]  Blake Ives,et al.  Harnessing the Power of the Crowds with Corporate Social Networking Tools: How IBM Does It , 2009, MIS Q. Executive.

[12]  K. Riemer,et al.  Corporate Social Networking Sites – Modes of Use and Appropriation through Co-Evolution , 2009 .

[13]  Derek L. Hansen,et al.  Analyzing Enterprise Social Media Networks , 2009, 2009 International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering.

[14]  Cliff Lampe,et al.  Bowling online: social networking and social capital within the organization , 2009, C&T.

[15]  Michael J. Brzozowski.  WaterCooler: exploring an organization through enterprise social media , 2009, GROUP.

[16]  C. Steinfield,et al.  Social Capital , ICT Use and Company Performance : Findings from the Medicon Valley Biotech Cluster Keywords : social capital , ICT , business clusters , biotechnology , 2009 .

[17]  A. Kaplan,et al.  Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media , 2010 .

[18]  M. Piskorski,et al.  Social strategies that work. , 2011, Harvard business review.

[19]  Jari Juhani Jussila,et al.  Benefits of social media in business-to-business customer interface in innovation , 2011, MindTrek.

[20]  Carla Simone,et al.  Affording Mechanisms: An Integrated View of Coordination and Knowledge Management , 2012, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

[21]  Alexander Richter,et al.  Eliciting the Anatomy of Technology Appropriation Processes: a Case Study in Enterprise Social Media , 2012, ECIS.

[22]  Gregoris Mentzas,et al.  Using latent topics to enhance search and recommendation in Enterprise Social Software , 2012, Expert Syst. Appl..

[23]  R. Emami,et al.  The Relationship between Organizational Culture and Knowledge Management , 2012 .

[24]  M NandakumarV,et al.  A proportional scrutiny on various training needs analysis methodology; a pragmatic study among five star hotels of kerala , 2013 .

[25]  Jill L. Drury,et al.  Continuously Improving Innovation Management through Enterprise Social Media , 2013 .

[26]  Paul M. Leonardi,et al.  Enterprise Social Media: Definition, History, and Prospects for the Study of Social Technologies in Organizations , 2013, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[27]  Volker Wulf,et al.  Sharing Knowledge and Expertise: The CSCW View of Knowledge Management , 2013, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

[28]  William Ryan,et al.  Organisational approaches to brand identity on social media: Comparing brand websites and Facebook pages , 2014 .

[29]  Carla Simone,et al.  Building Socially Embedded Technologies: Implications About Design , 2015, Designing Socially Embedded Technologies in the Real-World.