16-01-2013, 12:54 PM
EFFECTS OF FEEDBACK AND PEER PRESSURE ON CONTRIBUTIONS TO ENTERPRISE SOCIAL MEDIA
INTRODUCTION
In recent years, social media, such as forums, blogs, microblogs
(e.g., Twitter), and bookmarking services, have lowered
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the barriers to self-publishing on the Web. The prospect of receiving
widespread attention motivates contributions to sites like
YouTube [18], while attention from particular friends drives posts
to Twitter [19]. The abundance of information and opinions freely
available online makes readers’ attention a scarce resource [30]. It
has been said that an attention economy drives the Web [12], with
myriad contributors competing for readers’ attention.
Recently, organizations and researchers have begun experimenting
with the use of internal social media in the workplace, hoping to
reap the benefits of lightweight informal collaboration among employees.
Unlike email, which must be targeted to specific recipients
or distribution lists, social media provide a free broadcast platform,
allowing authors to circumvent traditional organizational hierarchies
and connect with geographically or organizationally distant
readers.
Approach
We explored various forms of feedback and reinforcement and
the effect they have on observed behavior within a corporate environment
using over a year of data on contributions to internal social
media at a large global enterprise. We built a tool to monitor employees’
contributions across the venues described in Table 1. We
cross-referenced them with daily snapshots of the employee directory,
giving us information about where authors work, what they
do, and who they report to.
RELATED WORK
Online communities
The question of what motivates people to contribute to online
communities has inspired a variety of research. Social benefits
derived from a sense of community can be powerful motivators
for people to participate in a discussion group [8]. Experienced
members of a community learn to practice the local “netiquette”–
the standards of good behavior that build up members’ reputation,
trust, and social capital. Markers of reputation are the bedrock
of how peer-to-peer commercial transactions function on sites like
eBay [29].
The promise of a response is also a potential motivator for contributions.
Yet a quarter of all Usenet posts never receive a response
[2]. The politeness or rudeness of a message can help or
hinder its chances of getting a response, depending on the norms of
a forum [7]. Some communities, such as Slashdot, have evolved sophisticated
moderation and feedback mechanisms to reward commenters
for valued contributions and discourage undesirable behavior
[25].
People are more likely to contribute to online communities if
they feel their contributions are unique, either because they’re explicitly
told so [3] or because their opinions differ from the majority
[35].