Orient Me!: Important Event Identification in an Enterprise Activity Stream

Social media platforms such as blogs, wikis and file sharing have become very popular in enterprises. Despite their effectiveness in increasing collaboration in the organization, employees are overloaded with information originating from these many sources and find it hard to orient themselves in the stream of events occurring in their organizational news feed. In this paper we identify what makes an event in an organizational social media platform important to employees. Once important factors of an event to an employee are identified, the stream of events can be personalized and prioritized based on those and thus reduce the overload and assist in work efficiency. Through interviews and two extensive user surveys, the first hypothetical and the second empirical, we identified which factors of an event make it important and compare results from the hypothetical and empirical surveys.