Towards Managing an Enterprise Social Media Portfolio

Enterprise social media (ESM), such as wikis, blogs, or social networks, have rapidly spread across organisations. They offer unique means to support knowledge management, knowledge creation, or internal communication, especially in distributed work environments. In recent years, the evaluation of ESM has taken big steps forward. Dedicated frameworks for planning and implementing evaluations have been developed. They describe when an evaluation is carried out, its purpose, the level of analysis (individual, group, organisation), the perspective (user, platform operator, management), the qualitative and quantidative data required, or the methods to collect the data. Dedicated key performance indicators (KPIs) can thus be calculated and mapped to a maturity model. Finally, methods from social media analytics allow an ever more precise view of the inner workings of ESM. However, looking at previous research, it can be observed that managing a portfolio of ESM (i.e., all wikis, blogs, or social networks in a business unit or an enterprise) is not explicitly considered. There are several challenges. For instance, it is not uncommon that similar platforms coexist in an enterprise. In addition, people in charge of managing such a portfolio (we call them program managers), are not considered as a user group. From a practical point of view, it is hardly mentioned how the suggested models or frameworks can be implemented using commercially available tools. The contribution of the paper is twofold: it proposes a model that facilitates the management of an ESM portfolio and it shows how this model can be implemented with commercially available tools. The model consists of four parts: the input data (here we distinguish between usage data and business figures), the steps to process these data, a description of the influencing factors (i.e., the level of analysis, the use cases, the context in which ESM are employed, and the phase ESM are in), and the questions / areas of interest guiding an evaluation. We also discuss how the model can be applied to another domain. The next step is to request input from decision makers and users of ESM alike regarding our model.