Research on Tweeting Inside and Outside the Enterprise

We need more research like this. I recently read an interesting study by my friend Kate Ehrlich at IBM and her colleague Sadat Shami, It is titled, Microblogging Inside and Outside the Workplace and looks at how corporate employees use microblogging tools. This effort conducted a content analysis comparing over 5,000 posts between March and June 2009 from individuals who were using an internal IBM proprietary tool, Blue Twit, and Twitter simultaneously.  Within these 5,000 plus posts, 58% were done with twitter and 42% were done with the internal tool so there is a reasonable balance for the comparison.

The abstract reports that 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.”  In other words, questions were more likely asked of colleagues within the trusted environment of the enterprise. This makes sense and it is nice some empirical evidence to support this assumption.

The users reported that Twitter was a great source to learn about and share breaking news that other sources, However, they were more likely to ask a question with their work community and more likely to proactively look for questions to answer within this same community.  The study reported that “participants talked of using Twitter as an alternative to an RSS feed or feed reader, because the information was already filtered to match their interests and they knew enough about the people providing the information to be confident in the quality of the information they provided.” This resonates well as it is exactly one of my main uses is Twitter.  

On the other hand, people inside the enterprise used micro-blogging, in part, to enhance their reputation as someone who is knowledgeable and helps the community.  In contrast many of the external posts were done to enhance the reputation and awareness of the organization by providing company news. In keeping with the differences in usage, 15% of the internal posts had links and 26% of the external ones did.

I think this is very useful study and more systematic work needs to be done in this space to supplement our intuition and anecdotal observations. 

Comments

[Courtney Shelton Hunt, PhD]

Thanks for sharing this, Bill. Are you a member of the Social Media in Organizations (SMinOrgs)Community? This would be a great piece to share with our members via our LI group, our FB page, and/or our Twitter account.

Courtney Hunt
Founder, Social Media in Organizations (SMinOrgs)
http://sminorgs.net