“To Listen, Share, and to Be Relevant” - Learning Netiquette by Reflective Practice

Part 2: CommunicationsInternational audienceOver the years, organization researchers have researched use of Social Network Sites (SNSs) in organizations. Organizational research on use of SNSs in public organizations is a growing research field. To expand the latter research stream, this paper explores a trend in the Norwegian public sector, the creation of so-called “betas”, competence groups in social media. This trend illustrates how public employees have started to work professionally with social media. The paper examines a case showing how the members of a beta group affiliated to a municipality, developed a social media strategy to master the unwritten rules of communicating on social media. The paper exemplifies this by analyzing how the beta group members interacted on various SNSs to learn netiquette and used this user experience to provide municipal employees a moral compass to interact online, which had to be created by performing processes of reflection-on-action. Their social media strategy was expressed under the self-designed catchphrase – “to listen, share, and to be relevant”