Enterprise Social Media: a Knowledge-Based Taxonomy

Enterprise Social Media (ESM) are social media platforms designed to be used by company’s internal employees. Their application is rapidly becoming attractive, for this technology is increasingly considered important for future competition. Many scholars underline that ESM can bring substantial benefits to knowledge management (KM): some authors have even claimed that these tools are leading to a sort of “KM renaissance”. Hence, it is not surprising that the impact of ESM on KM is now a really popular research topic. However, since the current experience of companies is rather variegated, there is the need to investigate and classify possible approaches to ESM adopted in business. The available empirical evidence, indeed, shows that different companies are using ESM systems for different purposes. This study aims to contribute to this topic and particularly, by adopting a KM perspective, it develops and applies a taxonomy of ESM systems implemented in companies, based on two dimensions: a) kind of knowledge to which the system is addressed; and b) cognitive goal of the system. By combining the two dimensions, four possible approaches to ESM are singled out. In order to illustrate the features of these approaches, as well as to assess consistency and representativeness of the proposed taxonomy, the experience of six Italian companies that have adopted an ESM platform is examined. The study shows that the taxonomy is useful to highlight the differences in ESM adoption and implementation by companies, in terms of KM goals and processes. Furthermore, it stresses the differences in the implementation strategies of each company, and the obtained outcomes, which can also provide insights for managers who are willing to promote the adoption of ESM technologies in their organization.