Social Media at IBM

IBM has been aggressively using social media to tie its far-flung and huge workforce together and, without a doubt, also with a mind towards selling these technologies as part of its service offering. IBM’s Beehive Social Network is a glimpse of how social networks might be used and received in the future. It is an Internet-based social networking site that gives IBM staff a “rich connection to the people they work with,” both professionally and personally. Using it, employees can make new connections, track current friends and co-workers, and renew contact with people they have worked with in the past. In the first nine months of use, over 35,000 registered IBM employees created over 280,000 social network connections to each other, posted more than 150,000 comments, shared more than 43,000 photos, created about 15,000 ‘Hive5s,’ and hosted more than 2,000 events. Beehive seems to be succeeding “to help IBM employees meet the challenge of building the relationships vital to working in large, distributed enterprises.”

A Case Study of Yammer at Deloitte

Social media technologies are making fast inroads into organisations. In the context of knowledge intensive work the propositions of improving communication, information sharing and user involvement seem particularly promising. However, the role and impact of social technologies in enterprises in general, and knowledge work in particular, are still not well understood, despite emerging scholarly works in this field. Our case investigates emerging communicative work practices on the Enterprise Social Networking platform Yammer within Deloitte Australia. We uncover a set of emerging practices enabled by the platform within the case company and reflect on our results in the context of the knowledge-intensive nature of professional service work. We find that Yammer in the case company has