http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/feedback Attention matters in motivating contributions to enterprise social media. But some types of attention matter more. Increasingly, large organizations are experimenting with internal social media (e.g., blogs, forums) as a platform for widespread distributed collaboration. Contributions to their counterparts outside the organization's firewall are driven by attention from strangers, in addition to sharing among friends. However, employees in a workplace under time pressures may be reluctant to participate and the audience for their contributions is comparatively smaller. Participation rates also vary widely from group to group. So what influences people to contribute in this environment? In this paper, we present the results of a year-long empirical study of internal social media participation at a large technology company, and analyze the impact attention, feedback, and managers and coworkers participation have on employees behavior. We find feedback in the form of posted comments is highly correlated with a users subsequent participation. Recent manager and coworker activity relate to users initiating or resuming participation in social media. These findings extend, to an aggregate level, the results from prior interviews about blogging at the company and offer design and policy implications for organizations seeking to encourage social media adoption. To appear at GROUP 2009. Michael J. Brzozowski, Thomas Sandholm, and Tad Hogg 2009-03-18 00:00:00 blogs social media hp attention participation GROUP http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/watercooler/group2009 Cross-referencing enterprise social media with an enterprise directory can increase inter-group communication. As organizations scale up, their collective knowledge increases, and the potential for serendipitous collaboration between members grows dramatically. However, finding people with the right expertise or interests becomes much more difficult. Semi-structured social media, such as blogs, forums, and bookmarking, present a viable platform for collaboration--if enough people participate, and if shared content is easily findable. Within the trusted confines of an organization, users can trade anonymity for a rich identity that carries information about their role, location, and position in its hierarchy. This paper describes WaterCooler, a tool that aggregates shared internal social media and cross-references it with an organization's directory. We deployed WaterCooler in a large global enterprise and present the results of a preliminary user study. Despite the lack of complete social networking affordances, we find that WaterCooler changed users' perceptions of their workplace, made them feel more connected to each other and the company, and redistributed users' attention outside their own business groups. To appear at GROUP 2009. Michael J. Brzozowski 2009-03-17 00:00:00 blogs social media hp watercooler attention GROUP http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/blogging/chi2009 How do you get people to blog at work? blogs attention social media participation CHI The attention economy motivates participation in peer-produced sites on the Web like YouTube and Wikipedia. However, this economy appears to break down at work. We studied a large internal corporate blogging community using log files and interviews and found that employees expected to receive attention when they contributed to blogs, but these expectations often went unmet. Like in the external blogosphere, a few people received most of the attention, and many people received little or none. Employees expressed frustration if they invested time and received little or no perceived return on investment. While many corporations are looking to adopt Web-based communication tools like blogs, wikis, and forums, these efforts will fail unless employees are motivated to participate and contribute content. We identify where the attention economy breaks down in a corporate blog community and suggest mechanisms for improvement. To appear at CHI 2009. Sarita Yardi, Scott A. Golder, and Michael J. Brzozowski 2009-01-20 16:33:00 http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/watercooler Visibility, attention, and recognition drive participation in internal corporate social media. watercooler blogs attention social media hp CSCW Blogs, wikis, and forums can break down geographic distances, workgroup boundaries, and organizational hierarchy in an organization. While these tools significantly lower the barriers to producing content, employees may perceive there to be little incentive to invest their own time in providing this content for public consumption. We found that increasing visibility often motivated employees to participate and contribute content. Employees were motivated by the opportunity for attention, and the ways in which social media tools enabled or hindered this opportunity influenced the way it was used. In this paper, we describe the design and use of the internal social media platforms at Hewlett-Packard and examine the ways that employees used these tools. Specifically, we explore ways in which designing for increased visibility and providing opportunities for recognition improve the ways that social media platforms can be used in organizations. To appear at CSCW 2008 Workshop on Enterprise 3.0. Michael J. Brzozowski and Sarita Yardi 2008-10-13 15:27:00 http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/blogging/ Participation in internal corporate blogs is both work-related and social, indicating a desire to connect with coworkers on multiple levels. blogs community temporal patterns hp CSCW Blogging at work has gained considerable interest in the knowledge management community. It is not clear, however, how much of work blogging is work-related versus social, or when work blogging takes place. In this poster, we present results from our examination of the temporal aspects of blogging within a large internal corporate blogging community. We compared our findings to similar analyses of employee email use and to college student Facebook use. We found that blog posting is temporally similar to email, while blog reading is more similar to Facebook messaging. Our results suggest that participation is both work-related and social, indicating a desire to connect to coworkers at multiple levels. To appear at CSCW 2008. Sarita Yardi, Scott Golder, and Michael J. Brzozowski 2008-10-13 15:15:00