Joan Morris DiMicco

Motivations for social networking at work

The introduction of a social networking site inside of a large enterprise enables a new method of communication between colleagues, encouraging both personal and professional sharing inside the protected walls of a company intranet. Our analysis of user behavior and interviews presents the case that professionals use internal social networking to build stronger bonds with their weak ties and to reach out to employees they do not know. Their motivations in doing this include connecting on a personal level with coworkers, advancing their career with the company, and campaigning for their projects.

Identity management: multiple presentations of self in facebook

As the use of social networking websites becomes increasingly common, the types of social relationships managed on these sites are becoming more numerous and diverse. This research seeks to gain an understanding of the issues related to managing different social networks through one system, in particular looking at how users of these systems present themselves when they are using one site to keep in contact with both their past social groups from school and their current social connections in the workplace. To do this, we examined online profile pages and interviewed employees at a large software development company who frequently use the website Facebook, a site primarily used by college students and young graduates transitioning into the work force. The outcome of this initial case study is a framework for understanding how users manage self-presentation while maintaining social relationships in heterogeneous networks.

Bowling online: social networking and social capital within the organization

Within an organizational setting, social capital facilitates knowledge management processes in that it enables individuals to locate useful information, draw on resources and make contributions to the network. This paper explores the relationship between various dimensions of organizational social capital and the use of an internal social network site (SNS). We hypothesize that the use of a SNS contributes to social capital within the organization in that SNS users are able to maintain larger networks of heterogeneous contacts. Additionally, the affordances of the site support social interaction between users, thus helping individuals maintain existing relationships and deepen developing ones. We find that bonding relationships, sense of corporate citizenship, interest in connecting globally, and access to new people and expertise are all associated with greater intensity of use of the social network site.

Results from deploying a participation incentive mechanism within the enterprise

Success and sustainability of social networking sites is highly dependent on user participation. To encourage contribution to an opt-in social networking site designed for employees, we have designed and implemented a feature that rewards contribution with points. In our evaluation of the impact of the system, we found that employees are initially motivated to add more content to the site. This paper presents the analysis and design of the point system, the results of our experiment, and our insights regarding future directions derived from our post-experiment user interviews.

Removing gamification from an enterprise SNS

Gamification, the use of game mechanics in non-gaming applications, has been applied to various systems to encourage desired user behaviors. In this paper, we examine patterns of user activity in an enterprise social network service after the removal of a points-based incentive system. Our results reveal that the removal of the incentive scheme did reduce overall participation via contribution within the SNS. We also describe the strategies by point leaders and observe that users geographically distant from headquarters tended to comment on profiles outside of their home country. Finally, we describe the implications of the removal of extrinsic rewards, such as points and badges, on social software systems, particularly those deployed within an enterprise.

Detecting professional versus personal closeness using an enterprise social network site

In this work we analyze the behavior on a company-internal social network site to determine which interaction patterns signal closeness between colleagues. Regression analysis suggests that employee behavior on social network sites (SNSs) reveals information about both professional and personal closeness. While some factors are predictive of general closeness (e.g. content recommendations), other factors signal that employees feel personal closeness towards their colleagues, but not professional closeness (e.g. mutual profile commenting). This analysis contributes to our understanding of how SNS behavior reflects relationship multiplexity: the multiple facets of our relationships with SNS connections.

People Sensemaking and Relationship Building on an Enterprise Social Network Site

This paper describes a social network site designed to support employees within an enterprise in connecting and learning about each other through personal and professional sharing. We introduce the design concepts and provide a detailed account of the first three months of usage, involving nearly 300 users. Our findings suggest that employees find the site particularly useful as a way to perform people sensemaking of individuals and to connect and maintain relationships with others on the site.

Spreading the honey: a system for maintaining an online community

As online communities, such as social network sites, mature, they face challenges in sustaining user engagement. To address this, we designed and deployed a rating system to encourage a broad set of users to promote a diverse set of content on a social network site. By evaluating the impact of the promotions on the sites content and users over time, we found that the system successfully promotes more diverse content and encourages new social interactions between users.

Honeycomb: Visual Analysis of Large Scale Social Networks

The rise in the use of social network sites allows us to collect large amounts of user reported data on social structures and analysis of this data could provide useful insights for many of the social sciences. This analysis is typically the domain of Social Network Analysis, and visualization of these structures often proves invaluable in understanding them. However, currently available visual analysis tools are not very well suited to handle the massive scale of this network data, and often resolve to displaying small ego networks or heavily abstracted networks. In this paper, we present Honeycomb, a visualization tool that is able to deal with much larger scale data (with millions of connections), which we illustrate by using a large scale corporate social networking site as an example. Additionally, we introduce a new probability based network metric to guide users to potentially interesting or anomalous patterns and discuss lessons learned during design and implementation.

Use and reuse of shared lists as a social content type

Social networking sites support a variety of shared content types such as photos, videos, or music. More structured or form-based social content types are not mainstream but we have started seeing sites evolve that support them. This paper describes the design and use of structured lists in an enterprise social networking system. As a major feature of our shared lists, we introduced the ability to reuse someone elses list. We report the results on the use and reuse of shared lists based on three months of usage data from 285 users and interviews with 9 users. Our findings suggest that despite the structured nature of lists, our users socialize more around lists than photos, and use lists as a medium for self-representation.