Microblogging inside and outside the workplace

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Citation: K. Ehrlich, N. S Shami (2010) Microblogging inside and outside the workplace. ICWSM 2010 (RSS)
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Microblogging inside and outside the workplace
Download: http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM10/paper/view/1508/1830
Tagged: Computer Science (RSS) sociology (RSS), microblogging (RSS), BlueTwit (RSS), IBM (RSS), enterprise2.0 (RSS), Twitter (RSS)

Summary

A content analysis and semi-structured interviews are used to understand employees' motivation for microblogging on Twitter and the enterprise2.0 microblogging system BlueTwit.

Methodology

Content analysis of microblog posts of 34 IBM employees, along with semi-structured interviews from 25 of the 34 employees. Posts were coded with one category--status, provide information, directed posts, retweet, ask question, and directed with question, unknown--based on two coders working independently and subsequently discussing their categorizations. Intent and nearby chronological posts were used.

Corpus

5,387 posts from 34 IBM employees. Posts were from both Twitter (3,152 - 58.5%) and BlueTwit (2,235 - 41.5%).

426 posts were removed (leaving 4961):

  • 128 written in a foreign language
  • 61 ambiguous
  • 237 directed to someone but otherwise ambiguous

Context

1257 people had posted to BlueTwit; of these, 86 had indicated their Twitter account on a company information system. The 34 users who had 20+ posts in each tool were selected. Since the total of 19,067 posts from these users was too large for the content analysis, posts were selected for 1 week per month, collected over 4 months.

Interviews

25 of the 34 employees were interviewed in hour-long semi-structured interviews.

Theoretical and Practical Relevance

Quotes from users and the description of why users microblog may help companies understand why and whether enterprise2.0 can be valuable.

Main reasons for using internal microblogging:

  • constructive criticism of company
  • company specific information
  • conversation and help from colleagues
  • real-time information sharing and awareness (also used for Twitter)
  • reputation management

Demographics of the participants are available in the Results section.

This was published in an open access journal.

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