Enterprise Social Media: Current Capabilities and Future Possibilities

The use of social media has soared in popularity in recent years. Facebook has over 1.3 billion users, while Twitter and LinkedIn users number in the hundreds of millions. New social media platforms, like Pinterest and Snapchat, seem to appear rapidly and from out of nowhere. Organizations, however, have largely lagged the public in their adoption of social media platforms for business purposes. The focus of consumer-facing platforms is to keep users engaged with the platform so the social media company can gather more data and sell more advertising. The focus of enterprise social media, however, is not simply to encourage people to use the platform more, but to use it to accomplish business objectives more efficiently or effectively. Companies typically begin by using social media for marketing, which means their initial foray often begins with communicating with their customers via consumer-facing platforms. For example, cookie giant Oreo released an advert via Twitter just minutes after a blackout at the 2013 Super Bowl, promising that “you can still dunk in the dark.” It generated over 500 million views. Companies, however, are increasingly using social media for internal collaboration, talent management and even operations. Multinational companies, such as BASF and State Street Bank, are using social media to help their global organizations work more effectively across geographic and cultural boundaries. Enterprise social media platforms such as Yammer and Chatter have begun to emerge to support these relationships. Mandviwalla and Watson have recently described how companies can use existing social media infrastructures to build human, social, organizational, economic and symbolic capital.2 A 2010 MIS Quarterly Executive special issue on industry and enterprise applications of social media provided some valuable case studies for readers seeking deeper insights into how