Enterprise Social Media & Network Analysis for HRM

Social media are Internet-based Web 2.0 applications that allow users to create their own digital profile, generate and share content with others, and form virtual communities. Four common characteristics follow from this definition: they are interactive and web-based; they support user-generated content; they allow the creation of a personal digital identity; and they lead to the emergence of virtual communities.

Three characteristics distinguish social media from other digital communication tools:

1. Ease of use — Social media are designed for intuitive participation. Interfaces are deliberately simple, with few functions and straightforward controls, so that users can engage without prior training.

2. No imposed structure, yet structure-enabling — Social media do not prescribe content organization, permission hierarchies, or mandatory interaction partners. They impose no predefined workflows. Yet they provide mechanisms — tags, groups, follower lists, polls — through which users can voluntarily create their own structures.

3. Usage openness — This is the most important defining characteristic. Because social media impose no fixed purpose, users define the platform's purpose through their own goals. The same platform might support project collaboration in one department and newcomer socialization in another. This flexibility is what makes social media so adaptable to organizational needs — and also what makes governing their use in organizations challenging.

By 2015, more than 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies had implemented some form of organizational social media.