Examining Contributions to a Corporate Microblog as a Basis for an Employee Incentive System

Text Sample: Chapter 2, Social Software and Enterprise 2.0: Microblogging is a rather new phenomenon. In March 2006, for example, the now omnipresent social networking service Facebook introduced a feature allowing its users to share brief status updates among their friends. July the same year, the dedicated microblogging service Twitter was launched. Twitter is now immensely popular, its name being defacto synonymous to microblogging in popular perception. Adoption of the Twitter service is seemingly evergrowing . Due to the intensity of innovation in this area, the object of investigation changes rapidly and scientific analysis becomes relatively difficult. Meanwhile, however, there seems to be a broad consensus to classify microblogging as a social technology (a social medium or, more generally, social software), and, as such, as a Web 2.0 phenomenon. Since this research examines the use of microblogging in a corporate context, it is also necessary to present a definition of Enterprise 2.0, an umbrella term that has been coined to characterize business applications of Web 2.0 technology and principles. For the purpose of this treatment, it thus seems practical to define these categories - Web 2.0, social software, Enterprise 2.0 - prior to examining microblogging as a specific technique. 2.1, The Web 2.0: The term Web 2.0 is quite frequently used, but controversial. In a stricter sense, Web 2.0 is not a scientific definition, but rather the outcome of a brainstorming with practitioners : At an industry conference in 2005, attendants were asked to name novel, remarkably successful internet services since the burst of the dotcom bubble in 2001. A broad, seemingly diverse range of contributions arose, but upon closer examination, there were also striking similarities. On the one hand, all those Internet offerings were broadly soliciting and encouraging contributions from their users, allowing participation while not requiring the possession of any technical skills. On the other hand, and by contrast to traditional web software, they seemed to facilitate the combination of data from various sources and applications from various areas in an open fashion and in a rather playful way . Another common characteristic of Web 2.0 applications is their openness with respect to the data and services that they provide: In many cases, application programming interfaces (APIs) were provided for unrestricted access, spawning unforeseen, creative uses; allowing the consumption of those services on a wide range of devices and operating system platforms. Resulting from the heuristic definition, arguably, the term Web 2.0 does not seem to be used and understood consistently. The choice of terminology could in fact be criticized: Contrary to what the analogy to a software product's version number (2.0) suggests, no upgrade or enhancement of WWW technology is involved. Technological advances in fact play only a marginal role to constitute this new generation of Internet services: The underlying innovations are supplements or enhancements of conventional Web technology. 2.2, Social Software: An apparently more precise term than Web 2.0 is social software . 'Social software applications are supporting, as part of a socio-technical system, human communication, interaction and collaboration. The actors are thereby leveraging the potential and contributions of a network of active participants.' In this definition, the idea of a system in both the social and the technical senses is crucial: The active inclusion and utilization of participant contributions is the single most important characteristic for social software. For an early example of how an application of this principle has significantly influenced the course of Internet history, let us look at Google's PageRank algorithm: With Page Rank, priority for any given search result does not at all depend on attributes of the page in question, but rather on the quality and number of links from other, external documents to the page in question. PageRank effectively applied the technique of academic citation to Internet search. Rather than considering the properties of the web content itself, the new algorithm assessed how other contributions considered its relevance (assuming that hyperlinks are only placed to content that is considered relevant). PageRank, in essence, was based on relationships between web pages rather than their content. Building on this idea, Google could deliver better and more useful search results than any other Internet search engine at the time: With the introduction of PageRank, search rankings were much harder to manipulate. Nowadays, the social software principle is reaching a lot further. There are countless practical examples of platforms built around substantial contributions from participants, in the Internet as well as for internal corporate use (Intranet). The most popular and successful Internet example for a service built upon community contributions, arguably, is Wikipedia, but there are also examples of corporate Intranet platforms based on Wiki software to provide collections of employee knowledge.