Examining Contributions to a Corporate Microblog as a Basis for an Employee Incentive System

Social media and social networks seem to be conquering human relationships. Corporations increasingly expect business benefits from such platforms for employee-to-employee networking and internal collaboration. Firstly, however, social software platforms have to be introduced into an organization successfully, which often requires strategic and cultural changes before the new technology effectively supports everyday work tasks and corporate procedures. Companies will thus be looking for ways to promote usage of the new platforms and influence employee behavior accordingly. After a review of selected relevant scientific theory and practical examples of social software analysis, this publication analyzes over 50,000 employee contributions to an internal microblogging platform used over a period of two years in a global corporation. The subsequent analysis tries to find a metric for organizationally desired behavior. The nature of microblogging - short text messages that propagate across a network by means of very basic mechanisms, like subscription, repeats or responses - seems very well suited for such a purpose. Two metrics, describing an employees' influence across the network and the utility of their contributions as recognized by peers, were combined in a single numerical score. Such scoring could be used as a factor within an employee incentive system intended to reward extraordinarily active or useful contributors.

Jochen Adler, born 1975, began his career as a self-starter in software engineering in the early 1990s and has since worked as a business analyst, project manager and IT/management consultant across Europe and in the U.S. In 2007, he joined the IT organiz