ReferenceGeyer, W., Dugan, C., DiMicco, J., Millen, D.,
Brownholtz, B., & Muller, M. (2008). Use and reuse of shared
lists as a social content type. In Proc. CHI 2008, Florence, Italy,
1545-1554Jackson, A., Yates, J., & Orlikowski, W. (2007).
Corporate blogging: Building community through persistent digital
talk. In Proc. 40th HICSS, Jan., 2007.Java, A., Song, X., Finin, T.
& Tseng, B. (2007). Why we twitter: Understanding microblogging
usage and communities. In Proc. 13th ACM SIGKDD, August 1215, San
Jose, CA.Joinson, A.N. (2008). Looking at, looking up or keeping up
with people: motives and use of facebook. In Proc. CHI 2008,
Florence, Italy, 1027-1036McFedries, P. (2007). Technically
speaking: All atwitter. IEEE Spectrum, 44(10), 84.Nardi, B.A.,
Schiano, D.J. & Gumbrecht, M. (2004). Blogging as social
activity, or, would you let 900 million people read your diary? In
Proc. CSCW 2004. New York: ACM Press, pp. 222231.Whittaker, S.,
Frohlich, D. & Daly-Jones, W. (1994). Informal Workplace
Communication: What is it Like and How Might We Support It?
Proceedings of CHI94, 131-137, ACM Press: New York.Whittaker, S.
(2003). Theories and Methods in Mediate Communication. In
http://www.research.att.com/~stevew/cmc-chapter.doc.pdf
*I will talk about micro-blogging and its potential impacts on
informal communication and collaborative work*Just to give everyone
a little bit overview, I will start with micro-blog, and why I
think its important to study the impacts on informal communication
at work. After that I will talk a little bit about the interview
study I am conducting, preliminary findings so far, and at the end,
some of my thoughts for us to discuss about.*First, Can I ask
people here, how many of you use Twitter?
Great! I am still working on my interview study, so I may
interview some of you after this, I hope you not say no to me .
I believe most of us here are very familiar with Twitter and
Facebook Status Feeds. Though little academia research study about
micro-blog, people can found many news and articles talking about
twitter and micro-blog on the Internet.
So what is micro-blog, here is a working definition based on
information from Internet and prior relevant research. Micro-blog
is emerging form of communication, enable individuals to broadcast
information through simple updates to their audience/subscribers
(including their friends, colleagues, and other interested
observers)
There are many articles talking about what people twitter about
and why they twitter. A unique behavior that I noticed is that,
Micro-blog allows users to share information that they probably
wont through other communication media, such as small little things
happen in peoples daily life. This type of information are often
live information, such as what they are doing, reading, thinking,
and experiencing, information that they believe are interesting and
might also be valuable for others, however they might not bother to
share with others through other manners of communication, such as
through emails, IM, or weblogs. Emotionally, people seem to use
micro-blog to achieve a level of cyberspace presence, being out
there and feel another layer of connection with others and the
world around their life.*This unique phenomenon makes me think of
its potential connection with informal communication at work. And
my position here is that Micro-blog might have potential to become
an new informal communication medium at work, so as to have
mediating impacts on collaborative work.
Informal communication has been suggested crucial important to
collaborative work and organizations success. The water-cooler
scenarios showed us that informal information exchange in such
impromptu conversations plays an important role for collaborative
work among knowledge co-workers and enhancing creativity and
innovation for organizations that rely on knowledge economy.
Communication patterns have shifted from primarily face-to-face
communication to more online communication in IM, emails, and other
CMC tools; As more and more collaboration can be done remotely
through CMC support, there are relatively less opportunities for
face-to-face informal conversations. As more and more of us suffer
from time-famine, people become more concerned of interruptions
along with convenience brought by IMs and Emails. We need better
CMC supports of informal communication more than ever, but this is
still an open research problem. Adding social/visual cues in CMC
seems not to help much. Other recent efforts including social
networking and public displays within organizations.
At the same time, the popular behaviors of sharing whereabouts
and status updates in micro-blogs shows micro-blogs potentials to
support mediated informal communication and keeping in touch among
co-workers. Two classes of anticipated impacts are informational
effects including increased opportunistic valuable information
sharing, expertise realizing, building and maintaining common
ground; social and emotional effects is mainly enhancing the
feeling of connectedness among co-workers. *I am conducting an
interview study to investigate the questions of a) how people
micro-blog at work, b) what consequential effects micro-blogging
have or might have on collaborative work, and c) how it might be
improved?
A semi-structured interview study is designed to interview about
20 people from who twitter with co-workers. The participants are
selected from a large software R&D business unit including
managers and workers in software engineering, product management,
marketing , and sales group.
Participants are asked about their experiences of using Twitter
with co-worker, problems and issues encountered, opinions and
anticipated feature needed either/or relevant to work. Questions
were asked from both information sender and receiver perspectives.
Participants are also asked more generally about their perceptions
of micro-blogs, compared with other communication media
available.*We found that micro-blogging helps opportunistic
valuable information sharing and prompting further informal
conversations among co-workers. A segment marketing manager said
that he once posted a tweet about his bad luck of setting a demo in
a marketing event, that he would rather not to bother to send
through email or IMs to co-workers, later on he get responds from
co-workers in remote sites with similar experiences, and one of the
guys even initiated an further conference call to learn from each
others experiences.
Other findings include that Micro-blogs help to share
work-related information and expertise. Marketing people often post
work related news, product managers post a lot about new features
and products of their competitors.
Common ground building : some people said that they reply to a
co-workers updates/opinions sometimes are just for alerting him/her
that they have read it, or agree with them in some extent.
Micro-blog also helps develop peoples perceptions of others
work: a product manager said that he had a project needs to
collaborate with a marketing team that he didnt have experience
about before. By reading their work-related updates in Twitter, he
gains insights into how their teams work.*Here are some preliminary
findings of technological affordances. Some of them are consistent
with prior research in blogs.
The nature of broadcasting and voluntary reading in micro-blog
makes it easier for users to broadcast information about themselves
that they probably wouldnt do otherwise. This technology affordance
also fulfill peoples needs of checking others status. Their reading
and responding is not demanded, people choose to subscribe based on
their interests, and reply if they find topics interesting or have
something to share.
Another important characteristic of Twitter is that it is
simple, easy, and pervasive. These features help reduce peoples
threshed to share information, allow them to update as things
happening and ideas and thoughts crossing their minds. It also make
the communication easy to manage. Some people said they usually
check on others updates whenever they get a moment, such as
in-between meetings, but not necessarily interrupt their current
work tasks.*Some issues and problems are also found valuable to
technology improvement.
Privacy issue: some people concerned about broadcasting social
or work status to everyone on their follower list, sometimes they
would prefer to update different updates to different groups.
Security issue: due to twitter is a public service, some people
said they would like to post more client and task sensitive
information to an internal micro-blog, and would want to see
similar posts from others.Integration issue: people expressed that
even if there is an internal secure micro-blog tool, they would
also like a more integrated way to stay in touch with people inside
and outside organization e.g., co-workers inside the organization,
clients and sales partners, other friends in the same industry
outside the organizationFinally, people sometimes not sure what
might be interesting to update for their subscribers, especially at
start
*Here are some of my thoughts about future research work
We still lack of academia investigation of Micro-blogging as a
social activity: we still know little about a) motivation of
micro-blogging (e.g., social emotional needs,
individual/culture/background difference factors), b) we still know
little about its consequential effects (both cognitive and
emotional effects in both individual and group levels). We want to
understand more about what are the technological affordances of
this communication channel and how they relate to peoples usage and
needs?
Further investigation of corporate micro-blogging is still
subject to actual implementation inside the organizations. Its use
and impacts will be dramatically affected by the specific
organizational settings (e.g., organizational structure and
culture, nature of work activities, and job and individual
differences)
In a word, micro-blog could potentially become a useful medium
for employee communication across various organizational levels.
The nature of status broadcasting might enact a variety of
communication needs at work. I believe that its potential adoption
in corporate will have critical impacts on various organizational
issues (e.g., job satisfaction, creativity and innovation, and
strategic management).
**
