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Chapter 8 Social Media Information Systems
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social media, including blogs, microblogs, status updates, image and video sharing, personal sites,
and wikis. The primary goal of enterprise social networks is to improve communication, collabo-
ration, knowledge sharing, problem solving, and decision making.

Enterprise 2.0

In 2006, Andrew McAfee wrote an article about how dynamic user-generated content systems,
then termed Web 2.0, could be used in an enterprise setting. He described Enterprise 2.0 as the
40
use of emergent social software platforms within companies. In other words, the term Enterprise
2.0 refers to the use of enterprise social networks.
41
McAfee defined six characteristics that he refers to with the acronym SLATES (see Figure 8-12).
First, workers want to be able to search for content inside the organization just like they do on the Web.
Most workers find that searching is more effective than navigating content structures such as lists and
tables of content. Second, workers want to access organizational content via links, just as they do on
the Web. They also want to author organizational content using blogs, wikis, discussion groups, pub-
lished presentations, and so on.
According to McAfee, a fourth characteristic of ESNs is that their content is tagged, just
like content on the Web, and these tags are organized into structures, as is done on the Web
at sites like Delicious (www.delicious.com). These structures organize tags as a taxonomy does,
but, unlike taxonomies, they are not preplanned; they emerge organically. In other words, ESNs
employ a folksonomy, or a content structure that emerges from the processing of many user
tags. Fifth, workers want applications that enable them to rate tagged content and to use the
tags to predict content that will be of interest to them (as with Pandora), a process McAfee refers
to as extensions. Finally, workers want relevant content pushed to them; or, in McAfee’s termi-
nology, they want to be signaled when something of interest to them happens in organizational
content.
The potential problem with ESNs is the quality of their dynamic process. Because the benefits
of an ESN result from emergence, there is no way to control for either effectiveness or efficiency.
It’s a messy process about which little can be predicted.

Changing Communication

Prior to 1980, communication in the United States was restricted to a few communication
channels, or means of delivering messages. There were three major national TV networks and no
more than a half-dozen major national newspapers. Consumers got their news twice a day: from

'PVGTRTKUG
%QORQPGPV 4GOCTMU
5earch People have more success searching than they do in
finding from structured content.
.inks Links to enterprise resources (like on the Web).
#uthoring Create enterprise content via blogs, wikis, discussion
groups, presentations, etc.
6ags Flexible tagging (like Delicious) results
Figure 8-12 in folksonomies of enterprise content.
McAfee’s SLATES Model 'xtensions Using usage patterns to offer enterprise content via tag
Source: Based on Andrew McAfee, processing (like the style of Pandora).
“Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent
Collaboration,” MIT Sloan Management
Review, Spring 2006, accessed http:// 5ignals Pushing enterprise content to users based on
sloanreview.mit.edu/article/enterprise- subscriptions and alerts.
the-dawn-of-emergent-collaboration.