Social Media in Organizations

Transcription

1 Social Media in Organizations GAVIN BAXTER University of the West of Scotland, UK Evolution of the Web TheearlyconceptualevolutionoftheWorldWide Web commenced with the concept referred to as Web 1.0, which is also known as the static web and relates to a specific period of the web where individuals could only read and consume the content that was published on a particular website. Furthermore, the majority of webpages in the Web 1.0 era were not editable by those who read them, with most webpages containing simple web hyperlinks. The content on the web during the time of Web 1.0 was also predominantly maintained and updated by webmasters. It was the advent of Flash technology and how it was applied on the web that gave birth to a new concept referred to as Web 2.0, which signified the beginnings of the social web. This buzzword traces its origins back to 1999 but it has been associated with Tim O Reilly, founderofo ReillyMediaandanadvocateof open source software, due to the phrase being used during the O Reilly Media Conference in When compared to the concept of Web 1.0, what makes the notion of Web 2.0 different is that it refers to diverging pathways in how end users and web developers use the web. The philosophy of Web 2.0 is associated with the social participation of the web, and the term is used to describe how individuals interact in a collective and social capacity through the use of web technologies. Web 2.0 extends the boundaries of Web 1.0 because it allows users to generate and share content and knowledge online, thereby enabling the use of the web to be user driven, involving a significant amount of user participation. Social Software and Social Media The birth of Web 2.0 also coincided with the use of the terms social software and social media.the term social software was coined by the writer Clay Shirky in a speech at ETech in 2003 entitled A group is its own worst enemy, where he referred to social software as software that supports group interaction. Similarly to the concept of social software, social media are a set of software tools that are designed to support online social networking and knowledge sharing. Despite the fact that social media tools have been predominantly designed to be used collaboratively, they can also beappliedonanindividualbasiswherepeople can use them privately rather than making the content publicly accessible to more than one person. The important distinction to make between social media tools and the concept of Web 2.0 is that Web 2.0 refers to the social characteristics such as knowledge sharing and collaboration shown by those using social media tools, and that Web 2.0 technologies support the facilitation of these particular attributes. Social media tools are used extensively in most walksoflifeandinmanydifferentdisciplines for various purposes. In addition to their use in a social capacity in the household and by people on mobile devices such as smartphones and laptops, social media tools such as blogs, microblogs, wikis, and social networking sites are used widely in the educational sector to facilitate and support learners in most forms of learning such as mobile or blended learning. Furthermore, in an educational context, social media tools such as wikis have been applied by educators in the classroom to support group work and knowledge sharing, while blogs have been used to support reflection on courses such as language learning and teacher training. The use of social media tools in the educational sector has resulted in the amalgamation of terms such as education 2.0, learning 2.0, student 2.0, and teacher 2.0. The International Encyclopedia of Digital Communication and Society, First Edition. Edited by Robin Mansell and Peng Hwa Ang John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. DOI: / wbiedcs025

2 2 SOCIAL M EDIA IN O RGANIZATIONS Despite the increased use of social media tools to assist learners within the educational sector, the use of social media is now having a profound effect on how organizations formulate their business strategies and business aims. The gradual application of social media use in organizations has been associated with what is known as Enterprise 2.0 (McAfee, 2006). The term is often used to refer to the application of social media tools inside an organization or between organizations and their stakeholders and customers. In addition, the concept of Enterprise 2.0 is also associated with how the introduction of social media tools inside organizations can support social and organizational changes within the organization itself. The versatility of the ways in which social media tools can be applied in organizations has resulted in many enterprises from various industry sectors developing Web 2.0 strategies to complement the way in which they conduct their business activities. The increased competitiveness of today s industry marketplace, coupled with the notion of the knowledge economy, has resulted in organizations exploring the potential of social media tools to engage and communicate with their employees, company stakeholders, and customers. The rapid rise of social networking sites such as Facebook, in addition to the application of microblogging platforms such as Twitter, has provided organizations with the opportunity to engage with their customers and receive feedback from them about particular services and products. For example, Twitter has been widely used in the health care sector by patients to find out about newly available treatments and to obtain advice about specialists in addition to forming health communities. Enterprise Social Media Enterprise 2.0 organizations are companies that have modified their working practices and routines to accommodate the use of Web 2.0 technologies in the workplace. This is having an impact on how workplace learning is being enhanced and is supporting a shift away from individual learning to social learning in terms of how employees share knowledge and communicate at work. In addition to these reasons for adopting the use of social media tools, organizations are now resigned to the fact that there is a shift in workplace demographics in relation to the younger generation in the workforce, toward those often known as Millennials, the Net Generation, or Generation Y, who are regularly using social media tools in their everyday social lives and there is, therefore, an increasing level of expectancy about their use within the workplace. The fast-paced nature of the knowledge economy has meant that there is a greater need for individuals in organizations to obtain, digest, and disseminate information, thereby increasing the ability of an organization s social capital to materialize into commercial value. Organizations that choose to adopt an Enterprise 2.0 strategy need to ensure that the social media tools that they use are those that coincide with their business goals. There is a plethora of social media tools that is at the disposal of today s organizations. Three of the most established types of social media tools that have the potential to assist organizations in terms supporting communication and knowledge sharing are blogs, wikis, and online discussion forums. The phrase weblog (later shortened to blog) was devised by blogger Jorn Barger in 1997 as a result of combining the two words web and log. There are several definitions of what blogs are but a blog is essentially defined by its format, as it is a website that is regularly updated in reverse chronological order with the most recent dated entries added first. Since the inception of the term, the activity of blogging has steadily increased and its popularity has resulted in what is known as the blogosphere, a term used to describe the interconnectedness of how people communicate by blogging on a global scale. Despite the assertion by some that social media technologies have yet to become widely used in organizations, certain companies such as IBM and Microsoft have been quick to realize the benefits of using blogs for internal knowledge sharing and communication among employees. Research into the organizational uses of blogs is growing, with several types of organizational blog being identified, namely, employee blogs, group blogs, executive blogs, promotional blogs, and newsletter blogs (Lee, Park, & Hwang, 2008). Employee blogs are often associated with staff

3 S OCIAL M EDIA IN O RGANIZATIONS 3 members blogging externally on behalf of their company to maintain a favorable corporate image. Thesekindsofblogsareusuallyhostedbythe company with the staff member acting as the corporate voice of the organization. Group blogs, also referred to as collective, collaborative, or project blogs, are mostly used for internal project related work with the blogs being authored by the members of the project team. Executive or CEO blogs are run by company executives to project company ideas and engage with members of the public through feedback. CEO blogs can also be used internally in organizations to communicate company initiatives with staff. Promotional blogs are used specifically for advertising products while newsletter blogs deal with issues relating to company information. The person responsible for using the first wiki was the computer programmer Ward Cunningham in The term wiki originates from the Hawaiian word wiki-wiki, meaning fast, and wasusedtodenotehowquicklycontentcanbe generated with a wiki. Wikis are often defined as editable websites that are created piecemeal by individuals working collaboratively. There is no overall predetermined structure to a wiki page, with content on a wiki often adopting the form of an emergent structure. Wikis have been used in higher educational contexts to support student learning through project work. Research has also indicated that in an organizational environment, the use of wikis is beneficial in project teams where team members are working collectively in sharing knowledge about a specificprojectonthewiki.anexampleofthis would be a group of software developers sharing code that was useful for other developers to use when constructively working toward completing a software development project. Wikis can also be used by organizations to catalogue and record facts related to processes and working procedures. Forums, sometimes referred to as discussion boards or bulletin boards, are one of the oldest types of technologies used for information sharing and collaboration. Online forums allow ausertopostamessageforotherstoreadand to which others can respond. The topics posted on online forums are known as threads and the replies are known as posts. Online forums, in contrasttowikis,donotnormallyallowpostsor threads to be modified once added. The exception might be in the case of a moderator whose job might be to oversee the use of the forum. The structure of an online forum differs from that of awikiandthreadsinonlineforumsarearranged in descending chronological order of the most recently posted message. From an organizational perspective, forums are alsohighlyadaptableasamethodforsupporting teamwork as forum participants can share and create knowledge through discussion threads and postings. Again, like wikis, forums have been associated with collaborative learning. Forums also have useful applications for information sharing in organizational settings and allow employees to ask questions about work related topics so that they can quickly find answers to difficult problems or challenges that they have come across. In addition to the application of the more traditional Web 2.0 tools in organizations, namely, blogs, wikis, and online discussion forums, additional types of social media tools that are gradually being adopted by certain organizations for the purposes of communication and knowledge sharing are the microblogging platform Twitter, and social networking sites, the most popular at present being Facebook and LinkedIn. Founded in October 2006, Twitter has been associated with the term microblogging and is an asynchronous communication medium that allows individuals to send messages known as tweets where responses can be sent by users who are following that specific person s Twitter site via retweets. Though initially conceived as a medium for sharing personal updates through the maximum limit of 140-character messages, the scope of Twitter in terms of its application in organizations has grown to the point that it can be used as a beneficial resource to broadcast information bulletins. Twitter is now a popular communication medium in journalism, and is often perceived as a means for broadcasting news. Despite the fact that there is a lack of empirical research investigating how Twitter is used internally in organizations, it has been suggested that Twitter has the potential to facilitate communication and employee interaction in the workplace (Zhao & Rosson, 2009). Similar to most types of social media tools it can be used to establish online communities in the

4 4 SOCIAL M EDIA IN O RGANIZATIONS workplace, providing employees with a platform to update one another on work projects or general progress. In contrast to Twitter, microblogging platforms such as Yammer, introduced in September 2008, have allowed organizations to adopt microblogging for internal use among employees for business purposes. The principal difference between Twitter and Yammer is that Twitter is a public and open network where anyone can register and participate. Furthermore, microblogging platforms such as Yammer are installed behind an organization s firewall and users are more aware of the boundaries of use that might include issues such as terms and purpose of use. One of the most popular social networking sites at present, Facebook, created by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg and launched in February 2004, is a social networking platform that can be used privately among members of that Facebook page in addition to being made public to a wide external audience. The majority of research undertaken about the use of social networking sites has been carried out in the educational sector, with very little known of the success of the application of social networking sites for internal use in organizations. Where Facebook has proved to be very useful is for organizations that create company pages to disseminate information about them or for organizations that regularly host events. Furthermore, the versatility of Facebook has meant that it can also be used as a beneficial vehicle for employee recruitment by human resources departments. However, at a more personal level, Facebook can be used by individuals to connect with business contacts in addition to assisting individuals in establishing a personalized business profile. LinkedIn, launched in May 2003, is a userprofile based database that allows people in professional occupations to network and establish contacts with individuals in like-minded or alternate professions. LinkedIn allows industry professionals to profile and promote their skills and fellow users to endorse each other s skills. LinkedIn also provides individuals with the opportunity to identify and research about companies that they might be interested in working for in addition to forming special work related interest groups. Enterprise social media and organizational learning One of the main potentials that social media tools can provide to organizations is that they have the ability to support the theory of organizational learning. It is generally accepted that the term organizational learning was proposed by Cyert and March (1963), but the concept was used by Cangelosi and Dill (1965) for the first time. Since the concept of organizational learning originated it has become a subject area that is examined from various multidisciplinary perspectives that include subjects as diverse as psychology, sociology, management science, economics, anthropology, political science, and history (Easterby-Smith & Lyles, 2003/2011). In addition,theconceptoforganizationallearning is associated with other subject areas that include the learning organization, organizational knowledge creation, and knowledge management. There are various definitions of what the area of organizational learning entails that are influenced by a researcher s subject area and ontological position. Despite this, it is generally accepted in the organizational learning literature that there are three main perspectives on the subject area, namely, the functionalistic, interpretive, and the learning organization. The functionalistic outlook of organizational learning adopts the viewpoint that learning begins with the individuals who inhabit organizations and argues that individuals learn as representatives for the organization. Within this perspective are the theories proposed by Argyris and Schon (1978) known as single-loop and double-loop learning. Single-loop learning refers to organizational members reacting to changes in their organizational environment by noticing errors and fixing them to ensure that the organization s primary routines remain intact. Double-loop learning involvesmodifyingorimprovinganorganization s existing policies when required to enhance organizational performance, allowing organizational members to learn. The type of knowledge created and distributed in organizations is considered by functionalists to be hard, real, and capable of being transmitted and articulated in a formal language. This epistemological belief conforms to the view that knowledge is explicit

5 S OCIAL M EDIA IN O RGANIZATIONS 5 and can be easily stored and accessed for learning purposes. In contrast to the functionalistic outlook of organizational learning, the interpretive viewpoint perceives learning in organizations as a social process. This social perspective argues that learning is predominantly relationship based and learning begins in the form of relationships through social construction. The context where learning occurs is an important element in the interpretivist view of organizational learning where knowledge and learning become contextualized. The social learning theory proposed by Etienne Wenger, known as communities of practice, is closely associated with the social aspect of organizational learning where it is argued that knowledge in organizations is shared in communities or groups of individuals who work together on a particular goal, sharing their knowledge and expertise through interacting with one another to achieve their aims (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002). The social perspective of organizational learning views knowledge as nonquantifiable and perceives knowledge to be subjective and personal in nature based on an individual s unique experience, consisting of their own mental models, beliefs, and know-how. In this standpoint, knowledge is considered to be tacit, that is, personalized and based upon experience, context, and the actions of an individual. Those who adhere to the concept of tacit knowledge and its relevance to organizational learning generally argue that knowledge can be problematic to store and that it is often difficult to communicate to other people. In addition to the functionalistic and interpretivist views of organizational learning, the literature on organizational learning also debates whether organizations can learn. Contained within this outlook of organizational learning is the view that organizations are living entities thatpossessacognitiveabilitytolearn.for example, the school of thought that postulates that organizations can learn further argues that all organizations do learn, whether those within them consciously choose to or not, in order to survive and that organizations learn as a result of the individuals who reside in them. One of the mainaimsoroutputsoftheprocessoforganizational learning is to allow an organization to make the transition toward becoming a learning organization. The concept of the learning organization was popularized through the work of Peter Senge (1990/2006). Various definitions and perspectives of the term learning organization areusedintheacademicliterature.forexample the definition provided by Garvin, Edmondson and Gino (2008) defines a learning organization as an organization that is proactive in creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge but more so in modifying its behavior in response to the new knowledge that it has learned and digested. Potential of enterprise social media The theoretical relationship between social media tools and the social aspect of organizational learning has been identified in the academic literature (Baxter, Connolly, & Stansfield, 2010). The principles which the concept of Web 2.0 and social media tools have been associated with mean that they have the potential to support the interpretivist stance of organizational learning. Thisisbecausesocialmediatoolshavetheability to facilitate conversation and the potential to support the storing and sharing of knowledge, thereby assisting in the establishment and sustainability of communities of practice. In addition, the use of social media tools, depending on how they are implemented, has the additional ability to transform an organization into becoming a social organization. One of the fundamental arguments that support such a claim is that, depending on the context of their use, socialmediatoolsadoptedbyorganizationshave the power to enable mass collaboration among employees when applied internally (Jackson, 2010). For example, it has been suggested that microblogging using Twitter can support the concept of communities of practice where individualsinanorganizationcanshareinformation and provide one another with updates in relation to their working practices. Two prominent features of Twitter make it a beneficial internal communication tool to allow individuals working on projects within an organization to share project updates with one another in the form of a community of practitioners. Users of Twitter can directtweetstoanotheruserbyusingthe@sign Furthermore, Twitter can also group topics or themes where tweets can be arranged using a hash sign # to link dialogue of

6 6 SOCIAL M EDIA IN O RGANIZATIONS users together, which can help to initiate social interaction among individuals in an organization about specific work related topics they are engaged on. One of the primary benefits that social media tools can provide for organizations is that they have the ability to support mass collaboration not just within enterprises but between staff who maybegeographicallydispersed.forinstance, when working on a specific project that might involve staff from varying organizations, the use of a communal wiki would be an effective approach to allow project members to share project knowledge in addition to documents that are of relevance to the project. Furthermore, a problem area often articulated in the literature is the dilemma organizations sometimes encounter about how to store tacit knowledge if it is concluded that such knowledge can be accumulated in a central organizational repository. It has been argued by Baxter and Connolly (2013) that blogs, depending on the context of their use, are social media tools that can be applied to capture reflectionandthetacitknowledgeofemployees so that it can be explicitly communicated. When viewed from this perspective, blogs, similar to other types of social media tools, can support and facilitate the process of organizational knowledge creation. In addition, it has also been suggested that blogs can be applied internally in organizationstoallowemployeestolocateexpertise among individuals who may not be familiar with each others working practices. By responding to blog posts, employees can share tacit experiences concerning different and similar problem scenarios they encounter at work, for example in a specific project environment. Where social media tools have the potential to transform an organization into becoming a learning organization is when employees apply their reflections or tacit knowledge that they document on that particular social media tool in practice in the workplace. However, the organization itself can only become a learning organization if it modifies its behavior to coincide with the new knowledge that it has acquired from the learning and knowledge sharing of its employees. Although theoretically social media tools have the potential to support the process of organizational learning, it is important to note that there are also significant barriers toward the adoption of social media tools in organizations. These may include: organizational aims and objectives, cultural issues, management support, staff buy in, and also matters relating to security, often referred to as security 2.0 in the context of social media use in organizations. The scope and possibilities for use of social media tools in enterprises are considerable and with the continued developments surrounding the web, these will only increase in terms of how they can be applied in addition to their evolving contexts of use. However, to understand the full potential and effectiveness of social media tools in their ability to support an organization in becoming a social organization further empirical research is required. SEE ALSO: Content Creation and Curation; Online Business Collaboration; Online Labor and Business Outsourcing; Semantic Web; Social Media; Social Media Business Models; Web 2.0 and Beyond References Argyris, C., & Schon, D. A. (1978). Organizational learning: A theory of action perspective.reading,ma: Addison-Wesley. Baxter, G. J., & Connolly, T. M. (2013). The state of art of organizational blogging. The Learning Organization, 20(2), doi: / Baxter, G. J., Connolly, T. M., & Stansfield, M. H. (2010). Organisational blogs: Benefits and challenges of implementation. The Learning Organization, 17(6), doi: / Cangelosi, V. E., & Dill, W. R. (1965). Organizational learning: Observations towards a theory. Administrative Science Quarterly, 10(2), Cyert, R. M., & March, J. G. (1963). Abehavioraltheory of the firm. Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Easterby-Smith, M., & Lyles, M. A. (Eds.) (2003/2011). Handbook of organizational learning and knowledge management (2nd ed.). Chichester, UK: Wiley. Garvin, D. A., Edmondson, A. C., & Gino, F. (2008). Is yours a learning organization? Harvard Business Review, 86(3), Jackson, P. (2010). Web 2.0 knowledge technologies and the enterprise: Smarter, lighter and cheaper. Oxford, UK: Chandos.

7 S OCIAL M EDIA IN O RGANIZATIONS 7 Lee, H. H., Park, S. R., & Hwang, T. (2008). Corporatelevel blogs of the Fortune 500 companies: An empirical investigation of content and design. International Journal of Information Technology and Management, 7(2), doi: /ijitm McAfee, A. P. (2006). Enterprise 2.0: The dawn of emergent collaboration. MIT Sloan Management Review, 47(3), Senge, P. M. (1990/2006). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization (2nd ed.). London, UK: Random House Business Books. Wenger, E., McDermott, R., & Snyder, W. M. (2002). A guide to managing knowledge: Cultivating communities of practice.boston,ma:harvardbusinessschool Press. Zhao, D., & Rosson, M. B. (2009). How and why people Twitter: The role that micro-blogging plays in informal communication at work. In GROUP 09 Proceedings of the ACM 2009 international conference on supporting group work (pp ), Sanibel Island, Florida, US May Bradley, A. J., & McDonald, M. P. (2011). The social organization: How to use social media to tap the collective genius of your customers and employees. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press. Gavin Baxter is a lecturer in the School of Computing at the University of the West of Scotland. His research focuses on the implementation of enterprise social media technologies in organizations for the purposes of organizational learning. His other research areas include the applicability of blogs and microblogs as communication and knowledge sharing tools in organizational project basedenvironments.hismostrecentpublication (written with T. M. Connolly) is published in The Learning Organization: Implementing Web 2.0 tools in organisations: Feasibility of a systematic approach (2014). Further Reading Bingham, T, & Conner, M. (2010). The new social learning: A guide to transforming organizations through social media. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.