Microblogging in the Enterprise: A Few Comments are in Order

Popular social networking sites have revolutionized the way people interact on the Web. Researchers have studied social networks from numerous perspectives, mostly focusing on publicly available social networks and microblogging sites. Enterprises however have recently being adopting and utilizing microblogging services as part of their day to day operations. The goal of this paper is to study the topological properties of a corporate microblogging service, its dynamics and characteristics. Through an extensive analysis of enterprise microblogging data, we provide insights on the structural properties of the extracted network of directed messages sent between users of a corporate microblogging service, as well as the lexical and topical alignment of users. We compare our results to traditional, general purpose, online social networks and discuss the implications of our findings. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first quantitative study of an enterprise microblogging service, its usage characteristics, and its derived social network based on replies between users.