Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
Enterprise Social Media: Definition, History, and
Prospects for the Study of Social Technologies
in Organizations
Paul M. Leonardi
Department of Communication Studies, Department of Management Science and Engineering, Northwestern
University, Evanston, IL 60208
Marleen Huysman
Department of Information Systems, Logistics and Innovation, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De Boelelaan
1105, room 3A-24, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Charles Steinfield
Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media, Michigan State University, Room 409,
Communication Arts Building, East Lansing, MI 48824-1212
Social media are increasingly implemented in work organizations as tools for communication
among employees. It is important that we develop an understanding of how they enable and
constrain the communicative activities through which work is accomplished because it is these
very dynamics that constitute and perpetuate organizations. We begin by offering a definition of
enterprise social media and providing a rough historical account of the various avenues through
which these technologies have entered and continue to enter the workplace. We also review areas
of research covered by papers in this special issue and papers on enterprise social media published
elsewhere to take stock of the current state of out knowledge and to propose directions for future
research.
Key words: Enterprise Social Media, Affordances, Organizing, Technology Use, Social Networking,
Workplace, Communication
doi:10.1111/jcc4.12029
The purpose of this article is to explore, at this early date, what consequences—positive and
negative—social media used for communication and interaction within the workplace may have for
those sociotechnical systems we call organizations. Enterprise social media (a term we define and explain
below) are distinct from traditional communication technologies often used in today’s organizations
because those who use them can see conversations occurring between others in the organization who are
not their communication partners and can distinguish social and work related connections among them.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19 (2013) 1–19 © 2013 International Communication Association 1
In other words, rather than functioning as a channel through which communication travels, enterprise
social media operate as a platform upon which social interaction occurs. Because this platform is digital,
in contrast to the physical platforms of offices, conference rooms, and hallways that have traditionally
been the stages on which most workplace communication is played out, anyone in the organization can
participate at any time from any place. Due to the dramatic changes in social interaction that enterprise
social media portend, it is nosurprise that industry analysts and the business press predict unprecedented
transformations in the way organizations that adopt them will operate in the coming decades.
As these new technologies begin to proliferate across organizations, it is important that we develop
an understanding of how they enable and constrain the communicative activities through which work is
accomplished because it is these very dynamics that constitute and perpetuate organizations. We begin
by defining enterprise social media and providing a rough historical account of the various avenues
through which these technologies have entered and continue to enter the workplace. We also review
areas of research covered by papers in this special issue and papers on enterprise social media published
elsewheretotakestock ofthe currentstate of our knowledge andto propose directionsforfuture research.
Enterprise Social Media: A Definition
In the short time in which they have been present in organizational contexts, social media seem to
have been used in two primary ways. The first, and more commonly studied, way is for organizational
communication with external parties, such as customers, vendors, and the public at large. Most
organizations that use social media to communicate with external parties have a multipronged strategy
that crosses various platforms (Piskorski, 2011). For example, they maintain pages on popular public
social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, and they broadcast messages on microblogging sites
such as Twitter. Their employees also sometimes write blog posts on news websites and, occasionally,
they host social tagging sties. Communication on these sites is faced externally.
The second and, heretofore, less commonly studied way in which organizations have employed
social media is for internal communication and social interaction within the enterprise. It is these
internal social media platforms that occupy our attention in this special issue. Unlike external uses of
social media that cross many public platforms, most organizations implement an integrated social media
platform for internal communications that contains several functions (McAfee, 2009). For example,
most internal social media platforms mimic in look, feel, and functionality popular social networking
sites such as Facebook. But embedded within the platform one can often find blogs and wikis, as well
as features through which social tagging and document sharing can happen. Thus, when talking about
social technologies used for communication within the enterprise, it makes less sense to distinguish
between tools such as social networking, microblogging, and social tagging, and more sense to treat
these individual tools as part of an integrated enterprise social media platform. For this reason, we define
enterprise social media (hereafter, ESM) as:
Web-based platforms that allow workers to (1) communicate messages with specific coworkers or
broadcast messages to everyone in the organization; (2) explicitly indicate or implicitly reveal
particular coworkers as communication partners; (3) post, edit, and sort text and files linked to
themselves or others; and (4) view the messages, connections, text, and files communicated,
posted, edited and sorted by anyone else in the organization at any time of their choosing.
There are many communication technologies commonly implemented in organizations that allow
workers to do one of the first three activities summarized in the definition above. For example, e-mail
2 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19 (2013) 1–19 © 2013 International Communication Association
allows people to exchange message with specific others while Q&A forums and message boards allow
people to broadcast messages to broad, unknown audiences. Some corporate directories auto-populate
lists of one’s current team members or past departmental affiliations while others allow workers to
choose and list their team members and other key work colleagues on their own. Many contemporary
knowledge management systems allow people to post files (documents, images, videos, etc.) for which
others can search and read at their leisure. But what make ESM unique and potentially transformational
within organizational contexts is that in addition to allowing users to do these three activities all in
one place, those activities are (as indicated in the fourth part of the definition given above) recorded,
stored, and available for one’s coworkers to view at anytime in the future (Treem & Leonardi, 2012).
Consequently, there are at least two affordances provided by enterprise social media that make them
distinct from other communication technologies commonly used in organizations: They provide people
visibility into the communicative actions of others and the visible traces of those communicative actions
persist over time. Because ESM afford the visibility and persistence of communicative actions, they
expand the range of people, networks, and texts from whom people can learn across the organization.
Consequently, one of, if not the most important, outcomes of these affordances for organizations is
increased opportunities for social learning.
ESM afford the possibility of making visible the communicative activities in which one engages at
work, such as the content of one’s messages to others, his or her communication network, and the
outputs of his or her work, which were once invisible to others in the organization (or at least very hard
for them to see). Visibility is tied to the amount of effort people must expend to locate information
(Treem & Leonardi, 2012). On a basic level, it is difficult to be privy to every communication that goes on
within the organization. Workers often do now know that two of their colleagues have communicated,
or what that communication was about, because it occurs through private channels such as e-mail or the
telephone (Cross, Borgatti, & Parker, 2003). On a more profound level, workers often do not attend even
to the communications of others that they do overhear because they lack interest or understanding. For
example, it is not uncommon for individuals to sit side-by-side in cubicles, no more than five feet away
from each other, and have little or no idea what each other actually do at work. This reality arises, in large
part, because of the specialization of work common in contemporary organizations. People are often
split into divisions, departments, and teams and assigned work tasks unbeknown to their colleagues.
Also, people who are proximately located to others may not have the domain knowledge necessary to
understand the work of someone form a different specialty. For these reasons, the work of individuals
and their communications about that work are largely invisible to others within the enterpris. ESM,
by offering a fast and lightweight means for individuals to publish information, provide an easy way
for employees to make their communicative activities visible to others in an organization and, perhaps
more importantly, by reducing the effort needed to find out who communicated about what, ESM make
it much easier for others not party to the original communication to see what was said and who said it.
Persistence refers to the fact that communication remains accessible in the same form as the
original display, even after the actor has finished his or her presentation (Bregman & Haythornthwaite,
2003). When an individual communicates through an ESM, that information remains available
to users, and does not expire or disappear when an individual logs out. In technologies such as
instant messaging or videoconferencing the conversation is normally bound in time and a record
of the interaction does not exist beyond what is remembered or captured by participants. Because
records of communication on ESM are available for a longer period of time communicative acts can
have consequences long past the initial point of presentation. The ability to view past interactions
and information affords individuals a chance to learn from the experiences of others and look
at what has been previously successful. Workers do not need to witness an interaction between
others in real time to take advantage of the social information it contains. Consequently, people
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19 (2013) 1–19 © 2013 International Communication Association 3
can interact with a communication, rather than the communicator, long after the conversation is
over. Persistence of communicative actions provides a direct pathway to an organization’s memory
(Walsh & Ungson, 1991).
The fact that the messages people send to one another, the networks they articulate, the text they
produce, and the files they post are visible to everyone in the organization and persist in their original
form over time means that others throughout the enterprise who were not involved in the original
communication have the opportunity to learn from and contribute to it. Perhaps the most important
effect of visibility and persistence is that they enable employees to learn from the communications of
others. There are at least two kinds of knowledge people can learn by participating in ESM: Instrumental
knowledge and Metaknowledge.
Instrumental knowledge is knowledge about how to do something. Direct exposure to instrumental
knowledge has been shown to be an important mode of social learning in organizations (Huber, 1991).
But research shows that direct exposure is often impeded because people simply do not know what
knowledge exists out there to be learned, or where that knowledge lies (Lave & Wenger, 1991). They do
not have an awareness of what knowledge exists in the organization because it has been communicated in
a visible format and/or it does not persist over time. Metaknowledge is knowledge about what and whom
other people in the organization know. Metaknowledge is important for the functioning of organizations
because it is an important antecedent to the transfer of instrumental knowledge (Ren & Argote, 2011).
A Historical Perspective on Social Media Use in Organizations
The emergence of ESM has typically followed one of three primary paths into organizational contexts:
(1) use of publicly available sites like Facebook, Google+, and Twitter; (2) private implementations
of open source or proprietary software, either installed on a company’s own servers or acquired as a
hosted (cloud-based) software service; or (3) in-house proprietary solutions, often built as prototypes
by software vendors for later incorporation into commercial offerings. We elaborate on each of these
paths below.
Public Sites
Although many organizations now routinely use publicly available social networking and microblogging
sites for customer-facing innovation, marketing and after sales service purposes (Kaplan & Haenlein,
2010), in the years before popular sites allowed business pages, employees often independently joined
and interacted with coworkers on public social media. In many cases, these experiences predated
the establishment of internal-only social media applications. For example, Efimova & Grudin (2007)
chronicle the arrival of blogging at Microsoft, noting that student interns as early as 2000–2001 were
active bloggers. Similarly, DiMicco & Millen (2007) reported on the growing use of online social
networking by new employees at IBM, who used Facebook at work to learn about new colleagues in
what they termed people sensemaking. Early studies further examined the tensions created by the use
of public sites, such as the potential they raise for proprietary information leakage, hierarchy problems
when managers and employees become friends, or personal and work boundary issues (Skeels & Grudin,
2009). As with the blogging example at Microsoft, students transitioning from college to work were a
common vector for the introduction of online social network sites like Facebook and LinkedIn into
organizations in the early to mid 2000s (DiMicco & Millen, 2007).
Private Systems
Primarily due to security concerns, a more common approach to implementing social media in the
enterprise is through in-house implementation of applications that are not open to external audiences.
4 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19 (2013) 1–19 © 2013 International Communication Association
These can be either open source or proprietary systems implemented on a company’s own servers
or implemented on a private basis as a hosted ‘‘software as a service” (SaaS). Among the earliest
examples of this approach were the many wikis established on company intranets (Danis & Singer,
2008). Majchrzak et al. (2006) surveyed managers at 168 different companies that had implemented
internal wikis, finding that corporate wikis improved work processes, and collaboration and knowledge
reuse, but had little impact on creation of new business opportunities. Internal blogging communities
are another example of this approach. For example, by 2002, Microsoft had an active internal blogging
community hosted on company intranets (Efimova & Grudin, 2007). IBM also maintained an internal
blogging community, BlogCentral, which has been credited with facilitating employees’ access to tacit
knowledge of experts inside the company, and otherwise enhancing collaboration across its many
distinct communities (Huh et al., 2007). Similarly, Jackson et al. (2007) observed how internal blogging
in a large, global IT company led to a number of social and informational benefits for the workforce,
including those with only moderate usage levels. Social benefits included feeling more a part of a
community and gaining a better perspective on the organization, with some employees indicating that
they had made new connections with other blog participants outside the system. Informational benefits
included obtaining feedback on ideas and assistance on solving problems.
Installing private social media applications were simplified by the availability of popular, and free,
open source wiki and social software such as TWiki, Foswiki, Tiki Wiki, and StatusNet. In recent
years, however, many vendors have entered the enterprise social software market with proprietary
solutions that can be either installed on company servers or hosted in the cloud. Such enterprise social
software tools now typically integrate the full variety of social media functionality, including blogs,
wikis, status updates and microblogs, social analytics, and other collaboration tools (e.g. uploading
and sharing files and other digital resources), as well as social network features such as profiles
and the ability to connect with or follow someone. Examples of such integrated enterprise social
software services include Salesforce’s Chatter, Microsoft’s Sharepoint, Yammer, IBM’s Connections,
Jive from Jive Software, Oracle’s Social Network, Cisco’s Webex Social, BlueKiwi from Atos, Cynapse’s
Cyn.in, Tibbr, Telligent, MangoApps, Socialtext, Socialcast, and Ingage Networks. Client companies
for these systems include many of the largest and most successful organizations in the world,
including Proctor and Gamble, Dow, SAP, SteelCase, Deloitte, American Express, and hundreds
of others.
In-House Developed Proprietary Solutions
The literature on ESM documents a number of examples of proprietary, custom-built systems, usually
developed by computer (both hardware and software) and information technology companies that
have vested interests in understanding how organizations might employ such new computer-based
applications. These types of companies not only stand to benefit from the potential for increased
productivity of their own knowledge workers, but also have an obvious interest in the potential that
ESM can have for their product mix. Their prototypes have been used to support research that informs
internal production systems and future commercial products, or otherwise supports client needs. Two
custom ESM examples that have been the subject of several papers are the Beehive system developed
at IBM (DiMicco et al., 2008; Steinfield et al., 2009) and the Watercooler system developed at HP
(Brzozowski, 2009).
The Beehive system, launched in mid 2007, garnered over 30,000 users before the end of the year
(DiMicco et al., 2008). It encompassed many of the features found on public sites like Facebook, but
was restricted to IBM employees. Employees reported connecting with both close colleagues and ‘‘weak
ties,” but reported greater content sharing with their more distant connections, leading DiMicco and
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19 (2013) 1–19 © 2013 International Communication Association 5
colleagues to conclude that the site had helped to form new ties and strengthen weak tie relationships
within the company. A later study of Beehive use by Steinfield et al. (2009) similarly found that usage of
the site was associated with a number of social capital benefits such as increased access to new people
and expertise, as well as perceptions of belonging to a larger community. At HP, the WaterCooler
system essentially was developed to bring together the feeds from the many separate social media
systems that were proliferating in the company (Brzozowski, 2009). The system indexed these feeds by
novelty, popularity, author, and topic, and enabled users to filter posts. Based on a survey, as well as
a network study of commenting behavior that compared internal blog reading by WaterCooler users
versus nonusers, the author concludes that the system enhanced employees’ access to new people and
expertise outside their local units. WaterCooler readers were more likely to access blogs from outside
their local unit than other readers.
These research prototypes often have a limited lifespan, and the lessons learned from such prototypes
are used to inform other internal systems and commercial products. For example, Beehive, which at its
height had over 65,000 members, was discontinued in 2011 but had many of its features incorporated
into a new internal site called SocialBlue. Today IBM offers a product called Connections that
incorporates features from these earlier prototypes. Microsoft also benefited from its early experiences
with various forms of social media, ultimately incorporating many social media features into its
commercial Sharepoint offering.
Prospects for the Study of Enterprise Social Media
Our understanding of the role that ESM play in organizational life is in its infancy. To date, most
studies of ESM have been conducted by scholars within the computer-supported cooperative work
(CSCW) and human computer-interaction (HCI) communities. That these two communities would
be the forbearers of research on ESM is understandable, given that many of the authors of papers from
these areas were themselves creators of specific ESM applications (e.g. the homegrown applications we
discussed in the previous section), or worked in organizations in which these technologies were created.
Most studies in CSCW and HCI have focused on specific technologies and provided detailed description
of how people use ESM, but with little focus on the implications for ESM use for organizational action.
Up to this point, researchers in the field of Communication have focused a good deal on social media
use among youth and college students, but they have not considered how such tools are used within
organizational contexts. Researchers in Information Systems are just beginning to explore ESM, most
often by describing how they might affect organizational performance. Scholars in management and
organization studies have not yet begin to explore ESM use.
Given these trends, the time seems ripe for researchers to examine how ESM are implicated in
various processes that occur within organizations. Specifically, this special issue seeks to provide an
initial examination of how the affordances enacted by ESM use may reinforce, alter, or dramatically
change how the people carry out important organizational processes.
To lay the groundwork for such an endeavor, we have reviewed the literature on ESM use published
in the disciplines mentioned above to identify various ways that researchers have characterized ESM so
far, and to uncover some of the organizational processes with which ESM use seem to be related. Below,
we present three broad metaphors for describing the role that social media play within organizations:
ESM as a Leaky Pipe, ESM as an Echo Chamber, and ESM as a Social Lubricant. As described above,
the visibility and persistence of communicative behavior afforded by ESM use provides new and
enhanced opportunities for social learning within organizations. Our review of the literature suggests
that these opportunities for social learning have implications for at least four common processes
6 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19 (2013) 1–19 © 2013 International Communication Association
within organizations: Social Capital Formation, Boundary Work, Attention Allocation, and Social
Analytics. Below, we review each of these metaphors and discuss, in turn, how viewing each of these
four processes from the vantage point provided by the particular metaphor bring potential advantages
and disadvantages related to each of the processes into focus, which may provide direction for future
research. Table 1 summarizes our discussion.
In working through the logic of Table 1, we also discuss the stances that the authors of the various
papers in this special issue take on these processes. This special issue is comprised of five excellent
papers. Fulk and Yuan discuss how the affordances of ESM can help reduce three challenges in sharing
organizational knowledge: How people locate expertise, their motivation to share knowledge and their
ability to capitalize on their social connections. To do so, they draw on transactive memory, public
goods, and social capital theories to show how ESM function as hybrids of communal and connective
goods within the organization. Majchrzak, Faraj, Kane, and Azad also focus on organizational knowledge
sharing. They theorize four ESM affordances—metavoicing, triggered attending, network-informed
associating, and generative role-taking—that represent different ways to engage in the publicly visible
knowledge conversations enabled by social media use. These four affordances overlap in some ways
and depart in others from the four ESM—affordances of visibility, persistence, editability, and
association—outlined earlier by Treem & Leonardi (2012). Pike, Bateman, and Butler confront the
tensions of information quality and availability faced by hiring managers within organizations. They find
that the affordances of ESM create an abundance of information for organizational decision-making,
but provide no means by which to interpret its quality. Consequently, managers have to engage in
several strategies to reduce tensions of accessibility, contextual cues, and intrinsic interest inherent
in the information ESM provide them. Vaast and Kaganer focus on governance issues in ESM use.
Specifically, they examine how organizations craft policies to respond to the affordances provided by
ESM and they consider how these policies, alongside the ESM affordances, might shape people’s use of
these tools in the workplace. Finally, Gibbs, Rozaidi, and Eisenberg provided a much needed critical
evaluation of ESM use, arguing that much of the emerging literature on social media in the workplace
use is characterized by an ‘‘ideology of openness,’’ which assumes ESM use will increase knowledge
sharing in organizations, and that open communication is effective and desirable. Their study of ESM
use in a geographically distributed organization shows how users limit as well as share knowledge
through social media, and the productive role of tensions in enabling them to attend to multiple goals.
Enterprise Social Media as a Leaky Pipe
One common metaphor that has implicitly guided many studies of social media use within organizations
up to this point is that ESM are leaky pipes for organizational communication. In using the metaphor
of a leaky pipe we mean to suggest that the directionality of a particular communication (to whom it
is directed) and the content of that communication (what the parties involved actually said to each
other) is visible to people who were not involved in it. Although the message may be communicated
for an intended audience, many others for whom the communication was not intended can learn
that two people are communication partners and what it is that they communicated about because
the technologies make not only the message public, but indicators of who the sender and recipients
are as well. Surely, there are some circumstances in which employees want or need the content of
their communication and awareness of who their communication partners are to remain private. But
from the standpoint of management, directional communication through leaky pipes may be quite
advantageous for the organization, writ large, especially when it comes to processes like learning and
knowledge sharing (see Fulk & Yuan, this issue, and Majchrzak et al., this issue).
The learning that occurs by third parties when other peoples’ communications occur through
leaky pipes has implications for the development and maintenance of one’s social capital within
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19 (2013) 1–19 © 2013 International Communication Association 7
Table 1 Prospects for the Study of Enterprise Social Media Use in Organizations
Metaphors of Enterprise Social Media
Processes Leaky Pipe Echo Chamber Social Lubricant
Social Capital Advantages
• Easy to ‘‘keep up’’ with what others
are doingwithoutsignificantsocial
investment.
• Broad knowledge helps build
bridges across nonredundant
groups.
Disadvantages
• Awareness that others see
what/whom you know could stop
you from contributing so as not to
undermine brokerage position.
• Potential loss of power from making private rolodexes public
Advantages
• Immediate feedback from similar
others strengthens existing communities.
• Helps to establish common ground
that makes interaction and sense of
belonging easier.
Disadvantages
• Self-reinforcing groups may balkanize and splinter into non-redundant
communities.
• Groupthink could arise from exposure only to similar others
Advantages
• Insights into what others are doing
and who they know help create
conversational fodder that makes
it easy to initiate new connections and maintain established
connections.
Disadvantages
• Peripheral awareness of others
may createillusionthat a realsocial
connection exists when it does not.
• Too much social information can
disrupt work and distract from
work-related communication.
Boundary Work Advantages
• Ability to cross more knowledge
boundaries due to visibility into
what people are doing in other
groups, departments, or locations.
• Ability to see more connections between people and forge
alliances.
Advantages
• Understanding of people in different
parts of the organization, but doing
similar tasks, can increase sense of
relationships and belonging.
• Promote similarity and accessibility
in global teams, across cultures.
Advantages
• Ease of communication creates a
low stakes environment to reach
out to people not within same
social group.
• Blurring boundaries between private and work communication
showcase personal similarities that
can be touch points for work communication.
8 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19 (2013) 1–19 © 2013 International Communication Association
Table 1 Continued
Metaphors of Enterprise Social Media
Processes Leaky Pipe Echo Chamber Social Lubricant
Disadvantages
• More generic communication due
to awareness that people outside a
trusted or known community are
watching.
• Loss of proprietary information in
a particular group.
Disadvantages
• Strengthen boundaries between
groups making communication,
interaction and identification more
difficult.
• Create a ‘‘speaker’s corner’’ in which
people only from one side of boundary interact and listen to each other
Disadvantages
• Context collapse makes it difficult
to know which ‘‘self’’ to present in
what situation.
• Highlights differences in communication style across cultures,
which can make people more reticent to reach out across boundaries
Attention
Allocation
Advantages
• Individuals begin to attend
to information, knowledge, and
communication from others who
they would not normally talk with.
Disadvantages
• Many information inputs means
cognitive overload and individuals
allocate attention only to specific
areas of the organization, or discontinue use of ESM altogether
due to overload.
Advantages
• Because of public nature of communication to a known community,
people provide more accurate and
honest information.
• Information from trusted others
increases attention to ideas communicated by others.
Disadvantages
• Individuals may believe that information they are attending to is representative of entire organization.
• Construction of sub-optimal attention allocation strategies.
Advantages
• Due to threaded and temporally
ordered nature of conversation,
people can focus their attention in
waysthat allowsthemto enter conversations more easily at meaningful times.
Disadvantages
• People interject in conversations
not intended for them.
• Too many social-related signals
can scatter one’s attention and
increases absentmindedness.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19 (2013) 1–19 © 2013 International Communication Association 9
Table 1 Continued
Metaphors of Enterprise Social Media
Processes Leaky Pipe Echo Chamber Social Lubricant
Social Analytics Advantages
• Because communication is visible
and available, managers can use
these digital traces to understand
the organization’s informal information economy
• Create strategic opportunities for
connecting people who are not yet
connected
Disadvantages
• Increased ability for surveillance
and possibility of control.
• Knowledge that management is
watching may compel people to
refrain from communicating on
the platform.
Advantages
• Better understand who are the various
communities withinthe organization,
even if those communities are not tied
to formal organizations (e.g. departments or divisions).
Disadvantages
• Mistaken understanding of what
communities are or who key players
in them might be because analytics
do not sample communication that
occurs offline.
Advantages
• Recommendations of connections provides excuse for people to get to know
one another
• Recommendations for documents
that one might read can provide
conversation-starter material with documents’ creators.
Disadvantages
• Encourages strategic self-presentation or
offline interactions to avoid being traced,
tracked, and quantified, which reduces
likelihood people will use the tool to
make new connections.
10 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19 (2013) 1–19 © 2013 International Communication Association
the organization. Social capital typically refers to the actionable resources accumulated through the
relationships among people (Coleman, 1988). Research suggests that by being exposed to leaky
communications can allow people to keep up with what others are doing in an easy way. From their
interviews with individuals about the potential for ESM at work Zhao and Rosen (2009, p. 5) found
that the broadcast nature of microblogs and other ESM tools served as a ‘‘People-based RSS feed’’ that
might help ‘‘keep a pulse on what is going on in others’ minds.’’ Similarly, at HP a tool that aggregated
ESM content from throughout the company was viewed by employees as ‘‘a way to orient themselves
in the organization’’ with respect to what and who others knew (Brzozowski, 2009, p. 7). As these
studies demonstrate, through exposure to communication leaking out from directional interaction
among others, a person might be exposed to social information that will allow her to make new social
connections with people she did not previously know (because she now has some knowledge about
them that can be used to start conversations) and to maintain those relationships better over time (for
more examples see Fulk and Yuan, this issue). Consequently individuals may be able to increase their
social capital by expanding their networks or by deciding which people represent redundant contacts
that provide little knowledge advantage and reconfigure their networks to bridge across structural holes
(Burt, 1992).
However, as Gibbs et al. (this issue) argue, the transparency into others’ actions enabled by
communication through leaky pipes may also encourage people to engage in defensive self-presentation
behaviors. For example, one way to think about social capital is that the strategic structure of relations
provides benefits for action. As Burt (1992), observes, being the person who connects people who are not
connected directly to each other confers power and status to the broker. But if a broker communicates
information (about what he knows or who he knows) through a leaky pipe, others might learn who his
contacts are, and what they discuss, and bypass the broker altogether. Such bypass could result in the
loss of social capital that gave the broker his or her unique advantage in social relations.
When focusing on the issue of boundaries within organizations (e.g. spatial, temporal, linguistic,
occupational, departmental, epistemic, etc.), the metaphor of ESM as a leaky pipe has much to offer.
Boundaries within organizations are constructed in practice, and people from one side often have
difficulty understanding the frames of reference of people on the other in large part because they simply
do not know who other people are or what they know (Carlile, 2004). If the content and directionality
of communication leaks out of ESM for others to see, individuals may be able to cross more knowledge
boundaries due to visibility into what people in other groups, departments or locations are doing
(Majchrzak et al., 2006).
However, we can also see ways in which boundary spanning is impeded if we view ESM as leaky
pipes for communication. Research suggests that people communicating to unknown audience on
social media may communicate more abstract information that can be understood by a wide group
of people (Marwick, 2011). This tendency, coupled with the fact that groups may have proprietary
information that they are not allowed to share even with other groups in the same organization may
encourage a level of communicative abstraction that makes it difficult or impossible for people from
across boundaries to really learn anything of substance from the communication that leaks out of the
pipes provided by ESM.
When viewed as a leaky pipe, ESM can be considered a vehicle through which to enlarge the arena in
which individuals within the organization pay attention. For example, many people simply do not seek
knowledge or information from coworkers because they simply do not know that certain knowledge
even exists ‘‘out there’’ to be found (Fulk & Yuan, this issue). If exposure to the routine communication
of others expands people’s awareness of knowledge, it may also increase the attention they pay to it.
Organizational policies that take advantage of these affordances can increase knowledge sharing and
reduce rework throughout the organization (Vaast & Kaganer, this issue).
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19 (2013) 1–19 © 2013 International Communication Association 11
Although expanding the realm of attention across the organization can be beneficial, information
overload is always possible. If information is too vast to consider in its entirety, individuals may make
only bounded searchers for information or process only limited quantities of information, which could
force them to become even more insulated and in-group focused than they were before they began ESM
use. This effect is partially documented in Pike et al.’s (this issue) study of hiring managers who have
to face an onslaught of information about candidates through ESM use and have to develop specific
attention allocation strategies that limit their use of the information, and hence, its usefulness.
As a leaky pipe for communication, ESM create special opportunities for analyzing social relations
and producing insights based on social analytics. The digital traces of communication can be processed
with algorithms that can help employees make connections, and help managers understand the
organization’s informal information economy. A study by Green, Contractor, & Yao (2006) showed
how a social networking application with algorithms to make emergent associations between people and
user-generated content spurred cross-boundary interactions and knowledge sharing in environmental
engineering and hydrological science research. This increased collaboration occurred because once
users learned that others were interested in similar topics to them individuals were more willing to work
to overcome disciplinary differences and understand one another, even if they did not share a common
store of domain knowledge.
The use of digital communication traces that have leaked out of secure channels and are available
for mining with machine learning algorithms can also have disadvantages for organizational action.
Such algorithms provide management with increased ability for surveillance and the possibility to
control workers. Knowing that people are watching and using their every communication to create
analytics that represent them, individually and in the aggregate, in some way, workers may choose to
communication through other media than the ESM so as to preserve some amount of anonymity and
autonomy. Choosing to do so obviously negates the potential benefits of third-party learning that can
take place when communication occurs through leaky pipes.
Enterprise Social Media as an Echo Chamber
A common concern voiced in both the scholarly and popular press is that the Internet, through its
ability to link people to content that reflects their preferences, operates like a giant echo chamber where
like-minded people connect with each other and conflicting ideas are avoided (Pariser, 2011; Singer,
2011). Recommendation systems and search algorithms, for example, present us with results that are
linked to our past behavior and interests, in effect filtering out information that may challenge our
current views. The potential balkanizing effects of the Internet have been examined in diverse arenas,
including political behavior (Sunstein, 2009), entertainment choices (Pariser, 2011), and even science
(VanAlstyne & Brynjolfsson, 2005).Insocial media, researchers have empirically demonstrated evidence
of an echo chamber effect in blogs, showing that through blogging, ICT4D development practitioners
engage with a self-selected like-minded audience consisting of peers with shared professional practices
(Ferguson et al. 2013).
The echo chamber metaphor, although commonly found in research on social media outside the
organization, has not been heavily applied to social media in the enterprise. Yet, it nicely illustrates
the tensions between the benefits of personalization – which facilitates finding people and content with
similar interests—and the dangers of balkanization—which may reduce exposure to new ideas and
exacerbate differences that can result in conflict or reduced cooperation. Viewing ESM through the
prism of the echo chamber metaphor highlights the opposing types of effects that are possible in the
four areas from Table 1.
The echo chamber metaphor applied to the potential social capital implications of ESM directs
attention to the ways in which various types of communities within organizations can emerge and be
12 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19 (2013) 1–19 © 2013 International Communication Association
supported. Positive associations between online social network site use and various measures of social
capital are a common finding in social media research (Ellison et al., 2007), including in the study of
enterprise social network site use (Steinfield et al., 2009). By making employees’ interests and expertise
more visible to others, and enabling linkages among like-minded people, ESMs can foster the creation of
communities of practice that considered so critical to organizational innovation, learning, and knowledge sharing (Brown & Duguid, 2001; Majchrzak et al., this issue; Fulk and Yuan, this issue). Profiles,
blog entries, comments, and other persistent content help distributed, but like-minded workers better
establish common ground that can be the basis for community formation. The notion of like-minded
connections could be considered a form of homophily, which has also been associated with stronger
network ties among virtual teams and increased bridging and bonding social capital (Yuan & Gay, 2006).
On the other hand, an echo chamber perspective also implies balkanization as noted above,
which could lead to lower integration of knowledge across disparate communities (Van Alstyne &
Brynjolfsson, 2005). The visibility afforded by ESM could thus paradoxically result in a fragmented set
of communities with too little interaction among them. The formation of network ties across groups
might be limited due to this subgrouping tendency. Outcomes such as groupthink, where conflicting
perspectives are ignored might become more prevalent. This potential for a reduction in knowledge
flows across communities might therefore signal a decline in organizational social capital from ESMs,
an outcome which has been given surprisingly little attention so far.
The echo chamber metaphor can also be used to explore the effects of ESMs in the area of boundary
work in organizations. Effective boundary work can bring critical outside information to organizational
units such as product development teams, while also helping shield teams from distraction (Ancona
& Caldwell, 1992). It is recognized as a distinct competence that emerges through practice around
boundary objects (Levina & Vaast, 2005). Boundary spanning researchers have called for more study of
the impact of enterprise social media on boundary spanning activities (Marrone, 2010). To the extent
that ESMs support geographically distributed communities of practice, and help teams connect with
external stakeholders with common interests and resources relevant to their projects, an echo chamber
perspective can imply a positive influence on boundary spanning (Majchrzak et al., this issue; Fulk and
Yuan, this issue). One study of an organizational social network site found that ESM use was associated
with employees’ perceptions of being connected across cultures in a large global organization (Steinfield
et al., 2009). Another study found that employees were more likely to use an ESM to access information
outside their local unit (Brzozowski, 2009).
On the other hand, an echo chamber view suggests that the opposite effect can result if groups
use EMSs in ways that encourage greater divergence than convergence across boundaries, much as has
occurred in the political blogosphere. Computer-mediated interactions can reinforce social boundaries
when there are cues that highlight group membership (Postmes, Spears, & Lea, 1998). Such use by
organizational units can create role conflict for boundary spanners caught between their ties to external
sources and internal group members. ESMs may in this way inhibit effective boundary work, limiting
knowledge flows across boundaries. Indeed, practice theory has shown that boundaries emerge around
common practices; knowledge may be leaky within community of practice, but surprisingly sticky
between such groups (Brown & Duguid, 2001).
Applying the echo chamber metaphor to the ways in which ESMs structure attention yields a
focus on the kinds of signals that workers might give off, and how these signals may foster trust
and connections among the like-minded. Early research on Facebook, for example, found that users
who provided profile elements that were more difficult to fake and that helped to establish common
background had more connections (Lampe, Ellison, & Steinfield, 2007). ESMs could thus make it easier
for employees to locate and connect with a community of interest or practice (Majchrzak et al., this
issue; Fulk and Yuan, this issue).
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19 (2013) 1–19 © 2013 International Communication Association 13
However, such an outcome, as noted earlier is not always desirable, if such cues simply reinforce
the boundaries of groups while limiting integration across groups. The network-informed association
affordance noted by Majchrzak et al. (this issue) can result in less-than-optimal groupings, including a
‘‘rich-get-richer” outcome. Moreover, to the extent that ESMs use algorithms based on preferences to
determine who and what an employee sees on the system—for example, in a news feed – then exposure
to other groups and ideas might be impeded.
An echo chamber view of favorable ESM analytics outcomes would emphasize the ability for organizational leaders to have a better understanding of the communities in the organization and how they are
functioning. ESM analytics can reveal who is active in various communities, perhaps identifying experts
and other influential people using social network analysis tools (Zhang, Ackerman, & Adamic, 2007).
However, these analytics may yield distorted views of what is actually occurring in organizational
communities. This may occur if the most active users on the ESM are not necessarily the most active
community members offline or the most expert. We know, for example, that a small fraction of users
account for the most content in online communities (Adamic & Huberman, 2000), and this power law
distribution holds for public social media such as blogs and microblogs (Java, Song, Finin, & Tseng,
2007). If employees concerned about too much openness, or who are acting to protect knowledge that
they feel yields them power or privilege, might withhold contributions, further distorting the value of
analytics for understanding knowledge communities (Gibbs et al., this issue).
Enterprise Social Media as a Social Lubricant
Organizations are increasingly aware of the need to be more ‘‘social,’’ exemplified by the increase
interests in social networks, communities and lately ESM. To support and sustain the social fabric of
organizations,social network interactions need to runsmoothly, without much managerial intervention.
In other words, to keep the wheels turning, social embeddedness lubricates informal networks (Agterberg et al., 2010). The affordances of ESM create the capacity for social lubricant by easing connection
and communication to get work done more quickly. Leidner et al. (2010) for example reported how the
introduction of an ESM called ‘‘Nexus’’ at a large IT department, enabled the sharing of private information among coworkers, which allowed newcomers, over time, to cultivate a sense of belonging and
a feeling of being a family within the workplace. The need to support interpersonal connection is often
metaphorically translated as a need for glue to hold people together (e.g. Huysman & Wulf, 2004). The
recent recognition of the fluid and temporal nature of online networks, however, might question whether
such ongoing interactions benefit from fixing connections. In order to keep the conversations and
connections running smoothly, organizations might be better of with social lubricants than social glue.
In general, by acting as a social lubricant, ESM contributes to the development of social capital
within the organization. Because social capital is easier to create when people know what others are
doing, individuals who are kept abreast of the knowledge and social interactions among their coworkers
will have an easier time establishing new connections with people simply because they have more fodder
for beginning conversation with unknown coworkers. For example, being informed about people’s
activities and whereabouts, both work-related and social-related, eases the opportunity to informally
contact each other, either online or at the coffee machine. Such small talks creates a sense of belonging
and lubricates connections (March & Sevon, 1984). Moreover, ESM use can create more conformable
environments with higher levels of psychological safety, helping people who are normally less inclined to
interact (e.g. who are shy or have a low self-esteem), to get connected with others (boyd & Ellison, 2007).
On the other hand, ESM use can also stimulate the development of disingenuous relationships, for
example by giving the impression that one has many close social ties, when in fact those ties are rather
weak or even nonexistent (boyd, 2004). Also, too much social capital might result in a social overload,
14 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19 (2013) 1–19 © 2013 International Communication Association
where non-work communication and gossip become commonplace. As the Generation Y is known for
using social media in their spare time to mainly hanging out with their friends, enjoy social life and chat
about nothing in particular (Park et al., 2009), introducing this communication genre in corporate life
will easily create interruptions which can be detrimental for productivity (Agarwal & Karahanna, 2000)
ESM use may enable individuals to bridge across spatial, temporal, functional, epistemic, or
cognitive boundaries. Such bridging enables new connections and serendipitous encounters, opening
new avenues for collaboration. Boundary crossing in particular between private and public life has said
to support social embeddedness, bringing people closer to each other. For example Kobler et al. (2010) ¨
found in their research on microblogging that the use of status update messaging generates a feeling of
connectedness between users.
However, blurring boundaries might also have downsides. For example, ‘‘context collapse’’ – a
phenomenon in which which multiple audiences are reached simultaneously (boyd, 2010) – can easily
create problematic encounters between, for example, a boss and her employee. In general, blending
private with public ties and grouping together social ties of varying strength, calls for audience
management strategies, which again might result in disingenuous relations (Marwick, 2011). In the
words of Karakayali (2013): ‘‘One general problem users encounter in collapsed context, then is
the difficulty of deciding which ‘face’ of the self to display.’’ Next to identity boundaries, epistemic,
cognitive, cultural and language boundaries potentially create limits to the opportunities that ESM use
can offer as a social lubricant offer. For example, although many global organizations have introduced
ESM in order to increase social connectivity, it is questionable whether more employees from different
regions will communication than before. Not only do language boundaries hamper informal social
interactions, people’s style of technology use differs per culture (e.g. Leonardi, 2003), which stiffens
more than softens social interactions in cross-cultural projects and teams (e.g. Yang et al., 2011).
The opportunity that ESM offers to attend to relevant information and knowledge lubricates social
interactions as it eases connecting to relevant people and content. Because conversations via ESM are
transparent and the entire history of conversation is retrievable in temporally ordered sequences, it
makes it easier for people to join the conversation in the moment and become relevant.
There are, however, some drawbacks related to lubricating interactions due to the ease of attending
to the right person or conversation. For example, too easily interjecting in ongoing conversations can
annoy those already taking part in the conversation, especially in situations where one jumps in an
ongoing conversation and brings up topics that have been discussed already. Also, increasing the level
of attention has a point of exhaustion, as too many social-related signals can scatter ones attention and
increases absentmindedness (Turel & Serenko, 2012).
The social analytical tools that most ESM offer are embodied in the form of recommender systems
that inform people with whom they should connect and why. Representing informal social networks by
means of various levels of analyses increases the transparency of the social make-up of the organization,
which in turn eases social connectivity. At the same time, the use of these analytical tools can reveal too
much about peoples social lives and their pasts (Pike et al., this issue). Moreover, the awareness that
one’s interactions will be recorded and made public though analytical representations might trigger
people to act and communicate strategically (see Gibbs in this special issue). Users might choose to
interact online as the main front stage, while using private encounters for backstage connections via
chat or email for backstage online networking (Denyer et al., 2011).
Conclusion
Social technologies are becoming pervasive in today’s organizations, and are functioning as a platform
through which much internal communication occurs. Much of the discussion about social media
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19 (2013) 1–19 © 2013 International Communication Association 15
has emphasized the powerful effects they can exert on the ways in organizations connect with
customers and external stakeholders, exploring issues linked to marketing, branding, and customer
relationship management. In contrast, this introduction and the papers in this special issue illustrate
that such technologies can also have significant implications for communication inside the workplace,
influencing such organizational communication issues as interaction with new hires, knowledge sharing
and management, and employees’ abilities to form relationships and build social capital. Additionally,
our introduction and the papers in this issue support the contention that outcomes from social media
use are a result of the interaction between the social context in which they are embedded and their
material features—the affordance view reveals that both positive and negative outcomes can result
from the use of social media in the enterprise.
The papers in this issue continue the work of this introductory essay by mapping out the terrain for
studies of ESM use in the organizations. We encourage scholars to continue the work begun here by
continuing to think about different metaphors for understanding ESM use, and exploring how those
metaphors allow us insight into various processes that are important to organizations. Theoretically
motivated investigation of social media technologies in the workplace is now an imperative for the fields
of communication, management, and information systems. Collectively, the papers in this special offer
a wide range of theoretical perspectives to help guide this process.
Acknowledgments
We are very grateful to the many reviewers who contributed their time, energy, and wisdom in working
with the authors who submitted papers to this special issue. Their feedback contributed immensely to
the final versions of the papers, and hopefully was useful to those authors whose work we were not
able to include. We also thank Maria Bakardjieva and Aiden Buckland for their ongoing support in
the production of this special issue. The reader will observe that this paper’s title and structure borrow
heavily from boyd and Ellison’s (2007) introductory essay to their special issue, in this same journal, on
Social Networking Site use. We asked boyd and Ellison’s permission to replicate the structure of their
paper and it’s title because they have proven so effective in helping readers to understand and apply
concepts from the essay to their own work; they graciously agreed. We thank them for their generosity
and for pioneering this effective introductory essay structure.
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About the Authors
PaulM.Leonardi(Ph.D. StanfordUniversity) isthePentair-NugentAssociateProfessor atNorthwestern
University. His research focuses on how companies can create organizational structures and employ
advanced information technologies to more effectively create and share knowledge.
Postal address: 2240 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208
e-mail: [email protected]
Marleen Huysman is professor of Knowledge and Organization at the department of Business
Administration, VU University Amsterdam where she heads the Knowledge, Information and Networks
(KIN) Research groups. Her teaching and research is on new ways of working and organizing as well as
the management of technology and innovation.
Postal address: 1105 De Boelelaan, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
e-mail: [email protected]
Charles Steinfield is a professor and former chair in the Department of Telecommunications,
Information Studies and Media at Michigan State University. He studies the how information
technology has reshaped many aspects of social and organizational life, most recently examining the
social capital implications of new media and the prospects for using new media to aid in economic
development in rural and developing regions.
Postal address: 404 Wilson, Rd, Room 409, East Lansing, MI 48824
e-mail: [email protected]
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19 (2013) 1–19 © 2013 International Communication Association 19