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“You Cannot Grow Viscum on Soil”: The “Good” Corporate Social Media Also Fail

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COOP 2016: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, 23-27 May 2016, Trento, Italy

Abstract

The paper illustrates the adoption of an Enterprise Social Media in a multinational corporation: the primary goal was to support the sharing of experiences among its members and to facilitate their collaboration. The paper highlights the outcomes and the problems that have been encountered in the effort to link this initiative to the achievement of the goals mentioned above, and tries to summarize the main reasons of these problems. The study adopted a research design in which an online questionnaire was administered to the corporation employee. By analysing the responses, we distilled the major points raised by the employees, among which lack of interest and use. The discussion focuses on the lessons that we drew from this experience on how an Enterprise Social Media should be introduced within organizations, e.g., by considering integration with other systems and the inadequacies emerged during the pilot experience.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The name of the company as well as the name of the ESM will be left voluntarily anonymous due to the non disclosure agreement.

  2. 2.

    Proportions are indicated for negative answers vs. the positive ones, followed by the p-value of the binomial test performed on the null hypothesis that the proportions are equal – the lower the p-value, the more significant the differences.

  3. 3.

    In other words, in those cases it cannot be excluded that other surveys, involving other respondents, would yield different results.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Viale Sarca 336, 20126, Milano, Italy

    Federico Cabitza, Angela Locoro & Carla Simone

Authors
  1. Federico Cabitza
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  2. Angela Locoro
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  3. Carla Simone
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Federico Cabitza .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. InterAction Laboratory Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Antonella De Angeli

  2. LERO Department of Computer Science & Information Systems, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Liam Bannon

  3. Department of Communication Science, University of Siena, Siena, Italy

    Patrizia Marti

  4. Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Silvia Bordin

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Cabitza, F., Locoro, A., Simone, C. (2016). “You Cannot Grow Viscum on Soil”: The “Good” Corporate Social Media Also Fail. In: De Angeli, A., Bannon, L., Marti, P., Bordin, S. (eds) COOP 2016: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, 23-27 May 2016, Trento, Italy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33464-6_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33464-6_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-33463-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-33464-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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