You cannot grow viscum on soil : the "good " corporate social media also fail

The paper reports on two different adoption experiences of an in-house Enterprise Social Media (ESM), at the local and global level in a big company. It compares the deployment strategies and their impact on the users appropriation of the ESM in the two settings. Our observations let emerge how the local level design strategy aimed to link the initiative to concrete aspects of working practices and to their expected evolution. This met the companies goals, improved users work effectiveness, and led to a quite successful appropriation. The same success was not achieved at the global level, where a quite different strategy drove the initiative on a slippery slope towards a drift from success. The paper distills lessons that can shed light on how an ESM should be introduced within large organizations by taking care of different local conditions, consolidated practices and legacy technologies

"You cannot grow viscum on soil": the "good" corporate social media also fail

The paper illustrates the adoption of an Enterprise Social Media in a multinational corporation: the primary goal was to support the sharing of experiences among its members and to facilitate their collaboration. The paper highlights the outcomes and the problems that have been encountered in the effort to link this initiative to the achievement of the goals mentioned above, and tries to summarize the main reasons of these problems. The study adopted a research design in which an online questionnaire was administered to the corporation employee. By analysing the responses, we distilled the major points raised by the employees, among which lack of interest and use. The discussion focuses on the lessons that we drew from this experience on how an Enterprise Social Media should be introduced within organizations, e.g., by considering integration with other systems and the inadequacies emerged during the pilot experience.23-27 May 201