What are you doing? – Enterprise Microblogging as Context Building

Riemer K, Altenhofen A, Richter A

Abstract

With the advent of Twitter, microblogging has turned into a widely discussed phenomenon. Due to its perceived impact, many organisations have begun experimenting with the use of microblogging „be-hind the firewall‟, in order to support internal communication and group work. However, Enterprise Microblogging (EMB) is still in its infancy and not yet well understood. With this study we want to add to the rather limited body of knowledge a case study of Enterprise Microblogging in an academic set-ting. A multidisciplinary team of University researchers has adopted the platform Communote to col-laborate and communicate. We conduct a genre analysis of the team‟s microblogging stream and find that EMB mainly serves as an effective medium for context building and meeting coordination in a project of otherwise loosely related individual activities. We compare our results with findings from two existing EMB cases, one of which has investigated the use of the same IT artefact in a different context. We find striking differences in usage patterns and show that EMB is highly dependent on the particular organisational context shared by the EMB users. Consequently, we conclude that appro-priation of Enterprise Microblogging happens largely in accordance with organisational context characteristics.