A Multimethod Study of Enterprise Social Media Implementation and Use: Mitigating the Gap between Theory and Practice

Enterprise social media ESM are web-based platforms dedicated to corporate-based communication and collaboration. Although the practitioner literature and industry reports have suggested the potential value of ESM for organizations, there has been limited research that focuses on employees' reactions to ESM implementation and their post-implementation use behaviors. The authors conducted a mixed methods study of a large-scale ESM implementation in a Fortune 500 manufacturing company and found that widely used IT adoption models and determinants failed to explain employees' ESM use. To help explain this paradoxical finding, the authors leveraged their qualitative data and found several major challenges, both internal and external, that the company faced during ESM implementation. Their findings have a number of generalizable lessons for practice as well as implications for research.