How Social Media Influences Behaviours Within Organizations

In an effort to improve collaboration between employees and drive innovation, many organisations are investing in enterprise social media platforms like Salesforce’s Chatter, IBM Connections, or Yammer. Forrester Research predicts that $4.6 billion will be spent by corporates on social media platforms in 2014 (Forrester Research, 2013). But due to the novelty of these technologies, and our experiences using them, research is only beginning to unveil how the hours dedicated to online interactions are impacting human behaviour in both positive and negative ways.

Do the hours we spend sharing our lives through computer screens and smart phones actually isolate us from real and meaningful relationships with others? Or do these social networking sites really make us more social? How are social media platforms and the data that they generate changing our organisations and worker behaviors?

My recent research has attempted to address these important questions. In this talk, I will discuss my studies, and in particular, how social network analysis techniques can shed light on how social media impacts innovation. I will also discuss my current research on the problem of information overload and attention scarcity.