Enterprise Social Media: Challenges and Opportunities for Organizational Communication and Collaboration

Given the large investments in Enterprise Social Media technologies in organizational settings, this paper sets out to explore the challenges and opportunities that ESM technologies provide for organizational communication. Merging existing conceptual work on ESM with findings from thirteen appreciative interviews with professionals from a large multinational organization, our papers offers six areas of opportunities and challenges -- Social Capital Formation, Boundary Work, Attention Allocation, Social Analytics, Adoption and Use Incentives, and Governance and Control -- that could guide researchers and practitioners in understanding and informing the use of social media technologies in their most productive and impactful ways.

1. Introduction

Today, the proliferation of social media technologies in organizational contexts-frequently referred to as Enterprise Social Media (hereafter, ESM)—has profound implications for communication-based processes in organizations. ESM encompass a range of information and communication tools (ICTs) for supporting interaction, collaboration, and co-creation, such as blogs, content communities, and social network sites [1], [2].