When Social Media Meet the Enterprise

Social media have become a global phenomenon affecting people in their private lives and in their personal interactions, particularly among younger people. It is thus not surprising that social media are also being explored in professional contexts such as in enterprises, where a number of social media platforms and social extensions to existing workgroup and collaboration systems have been emerging. In this paper, we consider one such platform that was developed for the internal use in a large global enterprise (HP). We present data and analysis of how this social media platform has been used in HP over the past five years. We then present conclusions from this analysis and relate them to work patterns in enterprises with the goal of advancing social media to the next level making them better fit the work context and more relevant for people in their work functions. We consider enterprise sales processes as a case study and present a number of extensions for our social media platform.