ENTERPRISE SOCIAL MEDIA: MANAGING THE BENEFITS FOR ORGANIZATIONAL COLLABORATION

Today’s organizations are increasingly distributed requiring their employees to communicate in new ways across time zones and different locations throughout the world. As a result, effective communication, collaboration, and innovation have become challenging. Recent advances in social media technologies have created opportunities for organizations to supplement traditional communication methods with new Enterprise Social Media tools that enable immediate and delayed organization-wide communication and information exchanges. Recent studies show that 4 in 5 companies now use some form of ESM and that worldwide spending for ESM has increased to over $100 billion dollars, yet, managers lack an understanding of how to assess the impact of these technologies, mitigate its risks, and reap benefits for improved collaboration. Therefore, in this course, we explore the effects of Enterprise Social Media (ESM) in organizations as it pertains to processes of intra- and inter-organizational communication, collaboration, innovation, and knowledge management and discuss ways to determine and manage the effect on organizational collaboration.