Digital Colleague Connectedness: A Framework for Studying Teachers’ Professional Network Interactions

The coronavirus outbreak will likely highlight both strengths and weaknesses of the pre-corona educational system. Researchers have a responsibility to examine the experiences educators have had during the pandemic; however, there are no education-specific frameworks for researchers to use to examine teachers interacting with digital colleagues for professional purposes. This paper describes the literature used to design the digital colleague connectedness framework. The purpose of the framework is to operationalize terminology used to examine educators interacting in professional exchanges within a virtual network. This framework includes six behaviors in which digital colleagues engage and four roles they may assume that specify their level of connectedness. Suggestions for how the framework might be used in future research are included

Posters versus Lurkers: Improving Participation in Enterprise Social Networks through Promotional Messages

Enterprise social networks (ESNs) often fail if there are few or no contributors of content. Promotional messages are among the common interventions used to improve participation. While most users only read others’ content (i.e. lurk), contributors who create content (i.e. post) account for only 1% of the users. Research on interventions to improve participation across dissimilar groups is scarce especially in work settings. We develop a model that examines four key motivations of posting and lurking. We employ the elaboration likelihood model to understand how promotional messages influence lurkers’ and posters’ beliefs and participation. We test our model with data collected from 366 members in two corporate Google? communities in a large Australian retail organization. We find that posters and lurkers are motivated and hindered by different factors. Promotional messages do not – always – yield the hoped-for results among lurkers; however, they do make posters more enthusiastic to participate

Driving the Use of Enterprise Social Media at Work: A Framework for Employees’ Adoption

More and more organizations are using enterprise social media (ESM) to improve the efficiency of communication and collaboration. Although many studies have tried to investigate employees’ adoption of this technology, most only provide limited insights and fail to capture the differences between ESM and other information systems used in organizations. In this article, we introduce a framework for enterprise social media adoption at the individual level. Our framework is based on the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) and enterprise social media affordances. It is necessary to divide employees’ usage behavior into three types: not use, contribute, and lurk. We propose that the affordances initiate new types of factors that drive the three types of employees’ usage behavior differently

Exploring Users’ Interactive Behaviors in Online Group: A Case Study of QQ Group “TuanRenTang”

The users’ interactive behaviors of the online group chat and an accurate identification of users’ interaction, which can provide method support for mining user interests and the crowd labeling, was analyzed in this paper. By using social network analysis method, the study took QQ Group “TuanRenTang” as an example to analyze users’ interactive behaviors, discover users’ interaction relationships, construct interaction networks, and explore the interaction types and community detection. The findings suggested that both explicit and implicit interaction exist in the same topic discussion. Users could be classified into four categories: active interaction, general interaction, passive interaction and lurking interaction based on different user activity. Besides, twenty “experts” and eight communities on the basis of interaction networks had been found out from the sample data of “TuanRenTang” chat records

How Do They Differ? Analyzing the Motivations of Posters and Lurkers for Participation in Enterprise Social Networks

Organizations have increasingly begun to implement enterprise social networks (ESNs) due to their potential to afford enterprise-wide collaboration, knowledge sharing, and interaction. Despite their proliferation, many companies still struggle to motivate a sufficient number of employees to actively participate in these collaborative networks. Consequently, many ESNs fail due to a lack of contributions. While most employees only read and consume content (lurking), few actively create content (posting). Little research has examined the differences between posters and lurkers and their underlying motivations, particularly in the ESN context. Building on social exchange theory (SET), we identify and test a set of motivational factors that researchers have scarcely studied in corporate social networks: reputation, common identity, common bond, social interaction, and community commitment. By investigating a rich data set of 4,892 respondents in a large knowledge-intensive multinational company, we provide evidence that posters and lurkers significantly differ in why they participate in ESNs. Further, we introduce a nuanced classification of participant roles to distinguish five user groups (super frequent posters, frequent posters, infrequent posters, frequent lurkers, and infrequent lurkers) with super frequent posters showing significantly higher mean values for all motivational factors to use an ESN compared to the other user groups. Our findings yield important theoretical and practical implications regarding different usage behaviors and on how to enhance participation in ESNs

Why are people interacting with brands on Facebook: unraveling consumers' motivations for lurking and posting on Facebook brand pages

Facebook brand communities allow consumers to interact with brands in various ways differing in level of activeness and public visibility, ranging from rather passive and less publicly visible (or lurking) to active and highly visible (or posting) behaviors. For brands, posting behavior is particularly desirable as consumers’ publicly visible interactions may strengthen the brand’s online visibility and thus brand awareness. The current paper investigates individuals’ motivations that may drive lurking and posting behavior on Facebook brand pages by a survey study (N = 187). Results show that while both behaviors are driven by social interaction motives, the former is also driven by a need for entertainment, and the latter is additionally driven by a need for empowerment. Since results also show that individuals engage far more in lurking than in posting behaviors, this study implies that companies should invest in strategies that appeal to consumers’ empowerment motives

From Virtual to Physical: An Exploratory Study on how Online Social Networks and Communities Influence Decision-Making in Everyday Crafting

The popularity of the maker movement has prompted extensive research on how the maker spirit enhances learning and redefines entrepreneurism. However, what is left unknown is the dynamic process of making as a hobby and how it may cut across virtual and physical media. To seal this gap, we conducted a qualitative study to investigate how online social networks and communities (OSNCs) may play a role in influencing making-related decisions. We carried out diary studies and semi-structured individual interviews with 25 arts and crafts hobbyists. The findings show that YouTube and Pinterest are the top two mentioned sources to facilitate ideation about what to make. Participants mostly turned to YouTube and Reddit to address problems when getting stuck. We demonstrate the direct and close relationship between tangible making and OSNCs as a multidimensional source, showing how virtual user-generated content can impact everyday hands-on practices

Conceptualization and operationalization: utility of communication privacy management theory

Communication Privacy Management (CPM) theory explains one of the most important, yet challenging social processes in everyday life, that is, managing disclosing and protecting private information. The CPM privacy management system offers researchers, students, and the public a comprehensive approach to the complex and fluid character of privacy management in action. Following an overview of Communication Privacy Management framework, this review focuses on recent research utilizing CPM concepts that cross a growing number of contexts and illustrates the way people navigate privacy in action. Researchers operationalize the use of privacy rules and other core concepts that help describe and explain the ups and downs of privacy management people encounter