Microblogging Inside and Outside the Workplace
By Kate Ehrlich, N. Sadat Shami. 2010
150 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Microblogging has recently generated a lot of research interest. Yet very little is known about how corporate employees use microblogging tools. This study examined microblogging in the workplace by conducting a content analysis comparing posts from individuals who were using an internal proprietary tool and Twitter simultaneously. In both settings, posts that provided information or were directed to others were more common than posts on status. Within these categories, it was more frequent to provide information externally than internally but more common to ask questions either through broadcast or directed posts internally than externally. Qualitative interviews explored users’ motivations regarding microblogging behavior. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of microblogging for business use.
Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Communication
- Alexandra Olteanu
- Carlos Castillo
- Fernando Diaz
- Emre Kıcıman
- Anne Archambault
- Jonathan T. Grudin
- Onur Varol
- Y. Muraki
In Sociology and Political Science
- Alexandra Olteanu
- Carlos Castillo
- Fernando Diaz
- Emre Kıcıman
- Anne Archambault
- Jonathan T. Grudin
- Onur Varol
- Adam Acar
Citations in the corpus
- Social Data: Biases, Methodological Pitfalls, and Ethical Boundaries (2019, background): “On the social web users search, interact, and share information on a mix of topics including work (Ehrlich and Shami, 2010), food (Abbar et al., 2015), or health (De Choudhury et al., 2014); leaving, as a result, rich traces that form what Harford (2014) calls found data : “the digital exhaust of…”
- Distilling the Outcomes of Personal Experiences: A Propensity-scored Analysis of Social Media (2017, background): “They talk about work or relations [33, 41], health and dietary practices [1, 93], and even log information about their illnesses and coping strategies [23, 34].”
- Social Media Use in Organizations: Exploring the Affordances of Visibility, Editability, Persistence, and Association (2013, unknown): “An example of this occurred at IBM where researchers found that users of a microblogging platform felt they were able to fi nd quality information more quickly than through other forms of communication (Ehrlich & Shami, 2010).”
- LibRA (2019, unknown): “Researchers have studied the differences and similarities in the self-presentation behavior and use of LinkedIn in comparison to personal social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter [5, 135, 151, 163].”
- Twitter for crisis communication: lessons learned from Japan's tsunami disaster (2011, background): “Ehrlich and Shami (2010) interviewed with IBM employees who use Twitter internally and listed major motivations as a reaching information quickly b gaining higher visibility c feeling connected d being aware of what is happening around.”
- A longitudinal study of Facebook, LinkedIn, & Twitter use (2012, methodology): “In the spring of 2009, Ehrlich and Shami [5] compared uses of Twitter and BlueTwit, a Twitter-like internal IBM tool that allows posts of 250 characters.”