Does one model fit all? Exploring factors influencing the use of blogs, social networks, and wikis in the enterprise

ABSTRACT

Enterprise social media (ESM) have become increasingly widespread, but many intranet communities barely survive, miss their initially planned targets, or are even terminated. Research on technology acceptance can be a useful approach to improve adoption rates, but more empirical research needs to be conducted to examine factors driving the adoption of enterprise social media. To address this gap, we develop a model of individual ESM adoption, including technological and individual factors based on findings from collaboration and knowledge-sharing research. Because different ESM tools, such as blogs, social networks, and wikis, can be employed for fundamentally different uses, we explain differences between individual adoptions of the three technologies by identifying their uses and gratifications from the perspective of employees. The model is tested in three parallel studies, one for blogs, social networks, and wikis each, among employees of an international technology company in the pre-implementation phase. We find substantial differences between the factors influencing the intention to adopt the three applications. This provides the basis to employ the applications in a more effective way by considering organizational and employee needs.

KEYWORDS:

• Blog
• enterprise social media
• social network
• technology adoption
• uses and gratifications
• wiki

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tobias H. Engler

Tobias H. Engler received his doctoral degree in business administration from the University of Marburg, where he is a member of the Information Systems research group. Before receiving his PhD, he was visiting scholar at Georgia State University and Tongji University in Shanghai. His research on the use of social media in enterprises for collaboration, communication and knowledge management is published in various international journals, such as Information Processing and Management and Journal of Retailing & Consumer Services, as well as proceedings of conferences such as ECIS.

Paul Alpar

Paul Alpar is a professor of Business Administration and Information Systems in the School of Business and Economics at the University of Marburg, since 1993. He is also a director at the Marburg Institute for Innovation Research and Entrepreneurship. After earning his doctoral degree at University of Frankfurt, he worked in staff and line positions in IT in European headquarters of US American multinationals. From 1986 to 1992, he joined the business faculty at University of Illinois in Chicago, USA. He also taught or did research as a Visiting Scholar at the universities of New Mexico (Albuquerque, USA), Tel-Aviv (Tel-Aviv, Israel), Frankfurt/M., California (Berkeley, USA), Pennsylvania State (College Station, USA), Georgia State (Atlanta, USA), and VGU (Saigon, Vietnam). He is the (co-)author of about 70 refereed journal articles and five books, covering such topics as commercial use of the Internet, Data Mining, and Web 2.0. His articles have been published in the Journal of Management Information Systems, Decision Support Systems, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, Entrepreneurship—Theory and Practice, International Journal of Research in Marketing, and in Proceedings of International Conference on IS and European Conference on IS, and many other outlets. He is currently on the editorial boards of the European Journal on Information Systems, Information Systems Management, and IJBIR.