Does the Source Matter? How Referral Channels and Personal Communication Tools Affect Consumers’ Referral Propensity

Many companies are using social sharing buttons to make it easier for consumers to refer a website or app to other potential consumers. Although these buttons are ubiquitous online, it remains unclear whether consumer referral propensity (i.e. the likelihood of consumers referring other consumers) varies across the channels through which consumers arrive at the website. In particular, we test whether referral propensity is higher for consumers themselves acquired through social referrals and compare them with consumers accessing the website through other commonly used channels, such as search engines and online advertisements. In addition, we examine whether the communication tool (i.e. social networking websites or instant messaging clients) through which the referral is transmitted affects consumers’ referral decisions. Our results indicate that consumers acquired through social referrals are more likely to make a referral and that the communication tools do not differ in their influence on consumers’ referral propensity.

Instant Messaging and Employee\u27s Performance: A Text Mining Approach

The adoption of Instant Messaging (IM) applications in the workplace remains contentious due to difficulties in adequately quantifying organizational benefits and how it affects individual performance. Previous research on the impact of IM usage on employee performance has been limited to analyzing primary data (i.e., survey methods), making it difficult to extrapolate the findings to a constantly changing workplace. In contrast, we investigate the relationships between these individuals\u27 IM usage at the workplace and their primary assessment metric in their organization, performance evaluation, using longitudinal data of employees\u27 IM activities and their performance evaluation collected from a US Fortune 500 financial company. Using cutting-edge text-mining techniques, we identify the primary purposes of IM utilization in organizations and assess the impact of those attributes on employee performance. Our findings show that IM in the workplace can improve team communication, knowledge-sharing experience, and social networking among employees, but it can also be disruptive. However, the combined effect of team communication and knowledge sharing on employee performance can overshadow the negative impact of IM interruption on employee performance

Relation Discovery from Web Data for Competency Management

This paper describes a technique for automatically discovering associations between people and expertise from an analysis of very large data sources (including web pages, blogs and emails), using a family of algorithms that perform accurate named-entity recognition, assign different weights to terms according to an analysis of document structure, and access distances between terms in a document. My contribution is to add a social networking approach called BuddyFinder which relies on associations within a large enterprise-wide "buddy list" to help delimit the search space and also to provide a form of 'social triangulation' whereby the system can discover documents from your colleagues that contain pertinent information about you. This work has been influential in the information retrieval community generally, as it is the basis of a landmark system that achieved overall first place in every category in the Enterprise Search Track of TREC2006

Acceptance of Technology with Network Externalities: An Empirical Study of Internet Instant Messaging Services

Many researchers have examined the technology acceptance model (TAM) that Davis (1986) created to predict the voluntary use of information systems. However, TAM\u27s primary focus is on how ease of use and usefulness influence acceptance, without looking at the effects of network externalities. In this study, we examined adoption behavior involving Internet-based instant messaging services (IMS). A questionnaire was used to collect data on perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived number of users for external network utility, and technology utility. The results indicate an acceptable goodness-of-fit statistic for our proposed TAM model, which combines the original TAM concept and network externality theory. The results also support the importance of network externalities in considering IT acceptance

The adoption of social enterprise software

Social enterprise software is a highly promising software application for firms, though it is still in an infancy state. It offers rapid real-time information transfer based on business collaboration tools or instant messaging. The software collects and processes customer data from surveys, consumer feedback, reviews, blogs or social networks. This enables firms to build up detailed customer profiles potentially anticipating upcoming trends. We analyze the determinants of social enterprise software adoption based on the literature on the adoption of new technologies. In our analysis, we control for factors like firm size, intensity of information and communication technology, human capital and international competitive situation. Exploiting recent German firm-level data and a model controlling for sample selection, the results reveal that firms with highly qualified workers, a large share of young employees and international business activity are more likely to adopt social enterprise software. Larger and more ICT-intensive firms and recent innovators also have a higher propensity to use social enterprise software. In addition, firms belonging to the service sector are more eager to implement social enterprise software applications than manufacturing firms

Organizational Information Dissemination Within Collaborative Networks Using Digital Communication Tools

While knowledge is one of an organization’s greatest assets, it remains a challenge to facilitate knowledge transfer between people within an organization. Social influence has been studied in its role of facilitating information diffusion, which is necessary for knowledge transfer to occur. Among this research, tie strength, a quantifiable characteristic of a social network that determines the link between two nodes, has been measured to determine the impact of social influence on knowledge transfer and information dissemination within a social network. Current research that explores the impact of social influence on information diffusion has been conducted within public social networks due to the availability of data that can be gathered from public social online network systems, such as Facebook. With the emergence of collaboration technologies that exist in online social network tools being utilized within organizations, there is an opportunity to digitally collect information regarding information dissemination within a collaborative network. This study captured data from an online social network, specifically a unified communication tool, being used within a collaborative social network at a mid-sized South Central corporation. A content analysis of Lync messages for 1,749 connections was performed to quantitatively measure the influence of tie strength on information dissemination within a collaborative social network. The results demonstrated that tie strength had a significant impact on information dissemination using a collaborative system. Multivariate analysis of variance showed that tie strength had the largest impact on information dissemination using the instant messaging modality of a collaboration system