TALKING TO ME? CREATING NETWORKS FROM ONLINE COMMUNITY LOGS

Online communities offer many potential sources of value to individuals and organisations. However, the effectiveness of online communities in delivering benefits such as knowledge sharing depends on the network of social relations within a community. Research in this area aims to understand and op-timize such networks. Researchers in this area employ diverse network creation methods, with little focus on the selection process, the fit of the selected method, or its relative accuracy. In this study we evaluate and compare the performance of four network creation methods. First we review the litera-ture to identify four network creation methods (algorithms) and their underlying assumptions. Using several data sets from an online community we test and compare the accuracy of each method against a baseline (‘actual’) network determined by content analysis. We use visual inspection, network cor-relation analysis and sensitivity analysis to highlight similarities and differences between the methods, and find some differences significant enough to impact study results. Based on our observations we argue for more careful selection of network creation methods. We propose two key guidelines for re-search into social networks that uses unstructured data from online communities. The study contrib-utes to the rigour of methodological decisions underpinning research in this area

Enterprise Social Networks – Contributions to Research with respect to Actor Roles in Knowledge Management, the Role of Formal Hierarchies, and Network Evolution

In recent years, a new class of information technologies, called social media, has soared in popularity, and increasingly becomes part of people’s daily lives. Although originally designed for private use, an increasing number of organisations have begun to adopt social media for organisational purposes (Kane 2015). ). However, social media in general and OSN in particular cannot only be used for marketing purposes. Indeed, they can be used by a company along the whole value chain (Chui et al. 2012). In addition, social media can help organisations to support communication and collaboration within the organisation and to “work more effectively across geographic and cultural boundaries” (Kane 2015, p. 1). Already in 2012, a study estimated the economic impact of social media, mostly gained from more efficient communication and collaboration between USD 900 billion and USD 1.3 trillion (Chui et al. 2012). However, publicly available social media services cannot support all needs of an organization. Thus, with enterprise social networks (ESN) a new class of social media services designed for internal use has emerged. In recent years, many organisations have started implementing ESN on the one hand to foster internal collaboration, communication, and knowledge-sharing (Aral et al. 2013; von Krogh 2012). Against this background, the two subject areas that this dissertation focuses on are of increasing interest to both research and practice: First, this dissertation addresses research on OSN (Subject A) as OSN are amongst the most popular and most widely used social media services. Thus, this leads to a steadily growing number of publications in most major outlets of the global information systems (IS) community (Richter et al. 2011). To assess the knowledge and the research fields that have been predominantly addressed by the IS community so far (Scandura and Williams 2000), this dissertation aims to provide a structured literature overview on the prior IS literature, including the recent developments in the field as well as fields that need to be addressed in further research. Here, five research fields that already have been addressed as well as ten research gaps are described and discussed. Second, this dissertation aims at adding to research on ESN (Subject B). As noted, the potential of ESN for knowledge management, has been noticed by organisations and led to an increasing demand to better understand their role in knowledge practices like information seeking, knowledge sharing or expert finding (Bharadwaj et al. 2013; Herzog et al. 2013; Richter et al. 2013In this line of argument, there is a need to investigate different actor roles in ESN usage (Trier and Richter 2015) to better understand the role and potential of ESN as well as their users’ behaviour (Koo et al. 2011). Next to identifying and characterising value adding users, two measures fort he classification of users based on their amount of sharing and seeking knowledge were proposed. Here, it could be shown that users who actively share their knowledge in the ESN have a central position in the network structure. Formal organisational hierarchy is an essential and pervasive organisational characteristic, which might influence the creation of social relations and communication in ESN. Practice-orientated contributions argue that ESN can lead to flatter organisational hierarchy in companies (McAfee 2009). However, it is still largely unanswered, whether and how formal organisational hierarchies influence users’ networking behaviour in ESN and if these effects inside the ESN differ from those in the work place outside the ESN. Within this dissertation the significant effects of formal hierarchies on interaction behaviour within the ESN could be shown. Nevertheless, they seem to be weaker inside the ESN and seem to decrease in time. Moreover, it has to be considered that the underlying networking structures are not static. Indeed, the structure of an ESN is highly dynamic as more and more users are participating and creating new relations to other users (Ghosh and Ganguly 2014). While the evolution of other social media networks already has been investigated (cf. e.g., Ghosh and Ganguly 2014; Kumar et al. 2010), scarce attention has been paid to the structure and evolution of ESN. Against this background this dissertation investigated how the structure of an ESN changes in time as well as what are drivers for the creation of new relationships between the users. Here, a significant correlation between network centrality and new social relationships was found