Item

WaterCooler: Exploring an Organization through Enterprise Social Media

Thumbnail Image

Fulltext URI

Document type

Additional Information

Date

2009

Authors

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Source

Proceedings of the 2009 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

Abstract

As organizations scale up, their collective knowledge increases, and the potential for serendipitous collaboration between members grows dramatically. However, finding people with the right expertise or interests becomes much more difficult. Semi-structured social media, such as blogs, forums, and bookmarking, present a viable platform for collaboration-if enough people participate, and if shared content is easily findable. Within the trusted confines of an organization, users can trade anonymity for a rich identity that carries information about their role, location, and position in its hierarchy.This paper describes WaterCooler, a tool that aggregates shared internal social media and cross-references it with an organization's directory. We deployed WaterCooler in a large global enterprise and present the results of a preliminary user study. Despite the lack of complete social networking affordances, we find that WaterCooler changed users' perceptions of their workplace, made them feel more connected to each other and the company, and redistributed users' attention outside their own business groups.

Description

Brzozowski, Michael J. (2009): WaterCooler: Exploring an Organization through Enterprise Social Media. Proceedings of the 2009 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work. DOI: 10.1145/1531674.1531706. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 219–228. Sanibel Island, Florida, USA

Keywords

attention, social media, organizational issues, collaboration, blogs

Citation

DOI

10.1145/1531674.1531706

URI

URI

https://dl.eusset.eu/handle/20.500.12015/4874

Collections

GROUP 2009

Endorsement

Review

Supplemented By

Referenced By

Number of citations to item: 88

  • Julian Waters-Lynch (2016): ‘It's More Like a Hive than a Hub’ Stigmergic Activity and Governance Dilemmas in Contemporary Coworking Spaces, In: SSRN Electronic Journal, doi:10.2139/ssrn.3211766
  • Anna Kawakami, Shreya Chowdhary, Shamsi T. Iqbal, Q. Vera Liao, Alexandra Olteanu, Jina Suh, Koustuv Saha (2023): Sensing Wellbeing in the Workplace, Why and For Whom? Envisioning Impacts with Organizational Stakeholders, In: Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction CSCW2(7), doi:10.1145/3610207
  • Wietske Van Osch, Charles W Steinfield (2016): Team Boundary Spanning: Strategic Implications for the Implementation and use of Enterprise Social Media, In: Journal of Information Technology 2(31), doi:10.1057/jit.2016.12
  • Joe Bolinger, Jay Ramanathan, Rajiv Ramnath (2010): BlackTie: Injecting elements of formality into enterprise social software, In: 2010 International Symposium on Collaborative Technologies and Systems, doi:10.1109/cts.2010.5478528
  • Sujoy Basu, Sharad Singhal, Jun Li, Bryan Stephenson, Wen Yao (2012): Governance Framework for IT Transformation Projects in Outsourcing, In: 2012 Annual SRII Global Conference, doi:10.1109/srii.2012.31
  • Richard David Evans, Eduardo Ahumada-Tello, Joseph Zammit (2017): Yammer: Investigating its impact on employee knowledge sharing during Product Development, In: 2017 IEEE Technology & Engineering Management Conference (TEMSCON), doi:10.1109/temscon.2017.7998410
  • Karine Roudaut, Nicolas Jullien (2017): Les usages des outils de réseau social par des salariés : Des registres privés et professionnels individualisés, In: Terminal, doi:10.4000/terminal.1610
  • Michael Muller, Werner Geyer, Todd Soule, John Wafer (2014): Geographical and organizational distances in enterprise crowdfunding, In: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing, doi:10.1145/2531602.2531716
  • Shainaz Firfiray, Luis R. Gomez-Mejia (2020): In Pursuit of Socioemotional Wealth: The Affordances of Social Media in Family Firms, In: Exploring Diversity in Entrepreneurship, doi:10.1007/978-3-030-43453-3_10
  • Federico Cabitza, Angela Locoro, Carla Simone (2016): “You Cannot Grow Viscum on Soil”: The “Good” Corporate Social Media Also Fail, In: COOP 2016: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, 23-27 May 2016, Trento, Italy, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-33464-6_4
  • Geetika Sharma, Gautam Shroff, Prasun Dewan (2011): Workplace collaboration in a 3D Virtual Office, In: 2011 IEEE International Symposium on VR Innovation, doi:10.1109/isvri.2011.5759582
  • Stephan M. Schaefer (2022): The corporate social media creep, In: Culture and Organization 2(29), doi:10.1080/14759551.2022.2153129
  • Jean-Charles Pillet, Kevin Daniel André Carillo (2016): Email-free collaboration: An exploratory study on the formation of new work habits among knowledge workers, In: International Journal of Information Management 1(36), doi:10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2015.11.001
  • Halvdan Haugsbakken (2019): A Research Literature Study of Enterprise SocialMedia Platforms in Organizations, In: Beta 1(33), doi:10.18261/issn.1504-3134-2019-01-06
  • Nicole B. Ellison, Jennifer L. Gibbs, Matthew S. Weber (2014): The Use of Enterprise Social Network Sites for Knowledge Sharing in Distributed Organizations, In: American Behavioral Scientist 1(59), doi:10.1177/0002764214540510
  • Munmun De Choudhury, Scott Counts (2013): Understanding affect in the workplace via social media, In: Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work, doi:10.1145/2441776.2441812
  • Uloma Doris Onuoha, Rosaline Oluremi Opeke (2012): Online Social Networks as Correlate of Job Performance and Career Success among Librarians in Nigerian University Libraries, In: African Research & Documentation, doi:10.1017/s0305862x00020434
  • Jayashree Ramanathan, Zhe Xu, Ramiya Venkatachalm, Rajiv Ramnath, Bruce Craig, Tara Paider (2014): Social Network Observatory for Innovation in Enterprise-Employee Engagement, In: 2014 IEEE Fourth International Conference on Big Data and Cloud Computing, doi:10.1109/bdcloud.2014.31
  • Karine Roudaut, Nicolas Jullien (2013): '' Titre Personnel'. Les Usages Des RRseaux Sociaux Nummriques Par Les Professionnels DDUne Entreprise. ('For Personal Matters'. Employees' Uses of Social Network Sites.), In: SSRN Electronic Journal, doi:10.2139/ssrn.2367190
  • Yue Dai, Tuomo Kakkonen, Erkki Sutinen (2011): SoMEST, In: Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments, doi:10.1145/2181037.2181078
  • Deepa Ray (2014): Overcoming cross-cultural barriers to knowledge management using social media, In: Journal of Enterprise Information Management 1(27), doi:10.1108/jeim-09-2012-0053
  • Sven Graupner, Claudio Bartolini, Hamid Motahari, Daniil Mirylenka (2012): When Social Media Meet the Enterprise, In: 2012 IEEE 16th International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference, doi:10.1109/edoc.2012.31
  • Nora Obermayer, Zoltán Gaál, Lajos Szabó, Anikó Csepregi (2017): Leveraging Knowledge Sharing over Social Media Tools, In: Advances in Knowledge Acquisition, Transfer, and Management, doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-0495-5.ch001
  • Paul P. Maglio, Stefan Nusser, Kevin Bishop (2010): A Service Perspective on IBM’s Brand, In: Marketing Review St. Gallen 6(27), doi:10.1007/s11621-010-0098-2
  • Lene Pettersen (2018): Digitalisering, In: Norsk medietidsskrift 4(25), doi:10.18261/issn.0805-9535-2018-04-03
  • Shakiba Kazemian (2018): The Role Micro-Blogging Plays in Informal Communication and Knowledge Sharing Activities Within Universities, In: International Journal of Knowledge and Systems Science 3(9), doi:10.4018/ijkss.2018070102
  • Zhao Cai, Qian Huang, Hefu Liu, Xiaoyan Wang (2018): Improving the agility of employees through enterprise social media: The mediating role of psychological conditions, In: International Journal of Information Management 1(38), doi:10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2017.09.001
  • Michael J. Burns, Brian D. Friedman (2012): A Multidimensional Approach to Characterizing and Visualizing Latent Relationships in Enterprise Social Networks, In: Bell Labs Technical Journal 1(17), doi:10.1002/bltj.21531
  • Heewon Kim, Andrew Pilny (2019): The Use of Enterprise Social Media and Its Disparate Effects on the Social Connectivity of Globally Dispersed Workers, In: International Journal of Business Communication 2(60), doi:10.1177/2329488419877233
  • Paul M. Leonardi, Marleen Huysman, Charles Steinfield (2013): Enterprise Social Media: Definition, History, and Prospects for the Study of Social Technologies in Organizations, In: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 1(19), doi:10.1111/jcc4.12029
  • Jonathan Grudin (2014): Organizational Adoption of New Communication Technologies, In: Computing Handbook, Third Edition, doi:10.1201/b16768-52
  • Nazila Adabavazaeh, Mehrdad Nikbakht (2019): Interpretive Structural Modeling Analysis of Reverse Supply Chain Critical Success Factors in Air Industry, In: 2019 15th Iran International Industrial Engineering Conference (IIIEC), doi:10.1109/iiiec.2019.8720737
  • Jin Cao, Hongyu Gao, Li Erran Li, Brian Friedman (2013): Enterprise social network analysis and modeling: A tale of two graphs, In: 2013 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM, doi:10.1109/infcom.2013.6567043
  • Steven Gordon, Hilla Dotan, Salvatore Parise, Elizabeth Volpe (2012): Does Organizational Support of Social Media Affect Worker Satisfaction, Involvement, and Organizational Knowledge?, In: SSRN Electronic Journal, doi:10.2139/ssrn.2235554
  • Gerald Stei, Alexander Rossmann (2018): Understanding the Determinants of Enterprise Social Network Use, In: 2018 IEEE 4th International Conference on Collaboration and Internet Computing (CIC), doi:10.1109/cic.2018.00049
  • Harsh Jain, Hongmei Chi (2012): A framework for designing an environment science social network, In: Proceedings of the 50th Annual Southeast Regional Conference, doi:10.1145/2184512.2184621
  • Yulia Sidorova, Michela Arnaboldi, Jacopo Radaelli (2016): Social media and performance measurement systems: towards a new model?, In: International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management 2(65), doi:10.1108/ijppm-06-2014-0084
  • Sumita Raghuram, N. Sharon Hill, Jennifer L. Gibbs, Likoebe M. Maruping (2019): Virtual Work: Bridging Research Clusters, In: Academy of Management Annals 1(13), doi:10.5465/annals.2017.0020
  • Aditya Johri (2015): Supporting Global Virtual Work through Blogs and Micro-blogging, In: 2015 48th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, doi:10.1109/hicss.2015.58
  • Claudia García‐Navarro, Manuel Pulido‐Martos, Cristina Pérez‐Lozano (2024): The study of engagement at work from the artificial intelligence perspective: A systematic review, In: Expert Systems 11(41), doi:10.1111/exsy.13673
  • Sue Black, Joanne Jacobs (2010): Using Web 2.0 to improve software quality, In: Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Web 2.0 for Software Engineering, doi:10.1145/1809198.1809201
  • Paul M. Leonardi, Emmanuelle Vaast (2017): Social Media and Their Affordances for Organizing: A Review and Agenda for Research, In: Academy of Management Annals 1(11), doi:10.5465/annals.2015.0144
  • Ioana C. Cristea, Paul M. Leonardi, Emmanuelle Vaast (2019): Social Media and Teamwork, In: The Cambridge Handbook of Technology and Employee Behavior, doi:10.1017/9781108649636.019
  • Lester Holtzblatt, Jill Drury, Daniel Weiss, Laurie Damianos, Donna Cuomo (2012): Evaluation of the uses and benefits of a social business platform, In: CHI '12 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, doi:10.1145/2212776.2212844
  • Slavisa Sovilj, Vojkan Vaskovic (2014): Exploring the Usefulness of Corporate Online Social Networks in the Human Resource Management, In: Management - Journal for theory and practice of management 70(19), doi:10.7595/management.fon.2014.0002
  • Sven Laumer, N. Sadat Shami, Michael Muller, Werner Geyer (2017): The Challenge of Enterprise Social Networking (Non-)Use at Work, In: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, doi:10.1145/2998181.2998309
  • Sven Laqua, M. Angela Sasse, Steven Greenspan, Carrie Gates (2011): Do you know dis?, In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, doi:10.1145/1978942.1979371
  • Michael Muller, N. Sadat Shami, Shion Guha, Mikhil Masli, Werner Geyer, Alan Wild (2016): Influences of Peers, Friends, and Managers on Employee Engagement, In: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Supporting Group Work, doi:10.1145/2957276.2957292
  • Jennifer L. Gibbs, Julia Eisenberg, Nik Ahmad Rozaidi, Anna Gryaznova (2014): The “Megapozitiv” Role of Enterprise Social Media in Enabling Cross-Boundary Communication in a Distributed Russian Organization, In: American Behavioral Scientist 1(59), doi:10.1177/0002764214540511
  • Alessandra Varotto, Luciano Gamberini, Anna Spagnolli, Francesco Martino, Isabella Giovannardi (2016): The Persuasive Effect of Social Network Feedback on Mediated Communication: A Case Study in a Real Organization, In: Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 3(19), doi:10.1089/cyber.2015.0233
  • Suchitra Veeravalli, V. Vijayalakshmi (2019): A morphological review of enterprise social media literature, In: Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce 2(29), doi:10.1080/10919392.2019.1583456
  • Ghulam Murtaza, Jean‐Pierre Neveu, Rahman Khan, Qurat‐ul‐ain Talpur (2022): Gossip 2.0: The role of social media and moral attentiveness on counterproductive work behaviour, In: Applied Psychology 4(72), doi:10.1111/apps.12449
  • Shangui Hu, Jibao Gu, Hefu Liu, Qian Huang (2017): The moderating role of social media usage in the relationship among multicultural experiences, cultural intelligence, and individual creativity, In: Information Technology & People 2(30), doi:10.1108/itp-04-2016-0099
  • Caitlin E. McClurg, Jaimie L. Chen, Alexandra Petruzzelli, Amanda L. Thayer (2017): Challenges and New Directions in Examining Team Cohesion Over Time, In: Research on Managing Groups and Teams, doi:10.1108/s1534-085620160000018011
  • Sarabjot Kaur, Subhas Chandra Misra (2019): Issues and Challenges in Enterprise Social Media, In: Advances in Multimedia and Interactive Technologies, doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-7601-3.ch033
  • Matthew T. Mullarkey (2012): Socially immature organizations, In: Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work Companion, doi:10.1145/2141512.2141604
  • Wietske Van Osch, Leticia Cherchiglia, Elisavet Averkiadi, Yuyang Liang (2021): Enterprise Social Media Use in Classroom Team Project: A Mixed-Methods Exploration of the Effects of Affordances on Team Productivity and Use, In: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, doi:10.1007/978-3-030-77750-0_34
  • Wietske Van Osch, Charles W. Steinfield (2018): Strategic Visibility in Enterprise Social Media: Implications for Network Formation and Boundary Spanning, In: Journal of Management Information Systems 2(35), doi:10.1080/07421222.2018.1451961
  • Somayeh Khatiban (2012): Building reputation and trust using federated search and opinion mining, In: Proceedings of the 35th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, doi:10.1145/2348283.2348418
  • Guanqi Ding, Hefu Liu, Qian Huang, Jibao Gu (2019): Enterprise social networking usage as a moderator of the relationship between work stressors and employee creativity: A multilevel study, In: Information & Management 8(56), doi:10.1016/j.im.2019.04.008
  • Matthew S. Weber, Wei Shi (2016): Enterprise Social Media, In: The International Encyclopedia of Organizational Communication, doi:10.1002/9781118955567.wbieoc072
  • Dhiraj Murthy, Jeremiah P. Lewis (2014): Social Media, Collaboration, and Scientific Organizations, In: American Behavioral Scientist 1(59), doi:10.1177/0002764214540504
  • Koustuv Saha, Manikanta D. Reddy, Stephen Mattingly, Edward Moskal, Anusha Sirigiri, Munmun De Choudhury (2019): LibRA, In: Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction CSCW(3), doi:10.1145/3359239
  • Brian D. Friedman, Michael J. Burns, Jin Cao (2014): Enterprise Social Networking Data Analytics Within Alcatel-Lucent, In: Bell Labs Technical Journal 4(18), doi:10.1002/bltj.21648
  • Michael J. Burns, R. Bruce Craig, Brian D. Friedman, Peter D. Schott, Christophe Senot (2011): Transforming enterprise communications through the blending of social networking and unified communications, In: Bell Labs Technical Journal 1(16), doi:10.1002/bltj.20483
  • Jacqueline N. Lane, Paul M. Leonardi, Noshir S. Contractor, Leslie A. DeChurch (2023): Teams in the Digital Workplace: Technology’s Role for Communication, Collaboration, and Performance, In: Small Group Research 1(55), doi:10.1177/10464964231200015
  • Carla Simone, Angela Locoro, Federico Cabitza (2018): Drift of a Corporate Social Media: The Design and Outcomes of a Longitudinal Study, In: Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-90503-7_15
  • Jeffrey W. Treem, Paul M. Leonardi (2013): Social Media Use in Organizations: Exploring the Affordances of Visibility, Editability, Persistence, and Association, In: Annals of the International Communication Association 1(36), doi:10.1080/23808985.2013.11679130
  • Maurice Kugler, Stefan Smolnik, Philip Raeth (2013): Determining the Factors Influencing Enterprise Social Software Usage: Development of a Measurement Instrument for Empirical Assessment, In: 2013 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, doi:10.1109/hicss.2013.173
  • Majd Saleh, Marie-Helene Abel, Veronique Misseri (2015): Investigating the similarity between collaboration systems and digital ecosystems, In: 2015 IEEE 19th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (CSCWD), doi:10.1109/cscwd.2015.7230929
  • Jennifer L. Gibbs, Nik Ahmad Rozaidi, Julia Eisenberg (2013): Overcoming the “Ideology of Openness”: Probing the Affordances of Social Media for Organizational Knowledge Sharing, In: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 1(19), doi:10.1111/jcc4.12034
  • Sarabjot Kaur, Subhas Chandra Misra (2018): Issues and Challenges in Enterprise Social Media, In: Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, Fourth Edition, doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-2255-3.ch610
  • Hamid Reza Motahari-Nezhad, Claudio Bartolini, Sven Graupner, Susan Spence (2012): Adaptive Case Management in the Social Enterprise, In: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, doi:10.1007/978-3-642-34321-6_39
  • Gerald Stei, Alexander Rossmann (2018): Einfluss von Führung auf die Nutzung von Enterprise Social Networks, In: Disruption und Transformation Management, doi:10.1007/978-3-658-19131-3_18
  • Yingjie Lu, Taotao Pan (2019): The Effect of Employee Participation in Enterprise Social Media on Their Job Performance, In: IEEE Access, doi:10.1109/access.2019.2942998
  • Wietske van Osch, Burcu Bulgurcu (2020): Idea Generation in Enterprise Social Media: Open versus Closed Groups and Their Network Structures, In: Journal of Management Information Systems 4(37), doi:10.1080/07421222.2020.1831760
  • Lars Rölker-Denker (2012): Organizational Learning and Environmental Engineering with Special Focus on Health Care, In: EcoProduction, doi:10.1007/978-3-642-23553-5_17
  • Sven Graupner, Claudio Bartolini, Hamid Motahari, Jamie Erbes (2012): Evolving Social Media into Productivity Platforms, In: 2012 Annual SRII Global Conference, doi:10.1109/srii.2012.29
  • Hesham Allam, Michael Bliemel, James Blustein, Louise Spiteri, Carolyn Watters (2010): A conceptual model for dimensions impacting employees' participation in enterprise social tagging, In: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Modeling Social Media, doi:10.1145/1835980.1835985
  • Michela Ferron, Paolo Massa, Francesca Odella (2011): Analyzing collaborative networks emerging in Enterprise 2.0: the Taolin Platform, In: Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2011.01.010
  • Rong-An Shang, Yuan Sun (2021): So little time for so many ties: Fit between the social capital embedded in enterprise social media and individual learning requirements, In: Computers in Human Behavior, doi:10.1016/j.chb.2020.106615
  • Dhiraj Murthy (2014): Introduction to the Special Issue on Social Media, Collaboration, and Organizations, In: American Behavioral Scientist 1(59), doi:10.1177/0002764214540505
  • Nora Obermayer, Zoltán Gaál, Lajos Szabó, Anikó Csepregi (2020): Leveraging Knowledge Sharing over Social Media Tools, In: Information Diffusion Management and Knowledge Sharing, doi:10.4018/978-1-7998-0417-8.ch038
  • Eduardo Salas, Rebecca Grossman, Ashley M. Hughes, Chris W. Coultas (2015): Measuring Team Cohesion, In: Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 3(57), doi:10.1177/0018720815578267
  • Tanushree Mitra, Michael Muller, N. Sadat Shami, Abbas Golestani, Mikhil Masli (2017): Spread of Employee Engagement in a Large Organizational Network, In: Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction CSCW(1), doi:10.1145/3134716
  • Somayeh Khatiban (2012): Building reputation and trust using federated search and opinion mining, In: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on World Wide Web, doi:10.1145/2187980.2188000
  • Aparna Venugopal, T. N. Krishnan (2016): Mapping the Enterprise Social Network (ESN) Spectrum in Knowledge Management and Product Innovations, In: Advances in Marketing, Customer Relationship Management, and E-Services, doi:10.4018/978-1-4666-9607-5.ch008
  • Ban Al-Ani, Yi Wang, Sabrina Marczak, Erik Trainer, David Redmiles (2012): Distributed Developers and the Non-use of Web 2.0 Technologies: A Proclivity Model, In: 2012 IEEE Seventh International Conference on Global Software Engineering, doi:10.1109/icgse.2012.39
Please note: Providing information about citations is only possible thanks to to the open metadata APIs provided by crossref.org and opencitations.net. These lists may be incomplete due to unavailable citation data.source: opencitations.net, crossref.org