Enterprise Social Media: Ethnographic Research on Communication in Entrepreneurial Teams

This article reports an ethnographic research on effect of enterprise social media on communication of members in entrepreneurial teams. The researcher acted as an entrepreneur and as a team member in two entrepreneurial projects to observe the communication of team members within the enterprise social media. In addition to observation, he conducted some interviews with team members to collect supplementary data. A theoretical framework developed from an array of three metaphors: leaky pipe, echo chamber and social lubricant, and four organizational learning processes: social capital, boundary work, attention allocation and social analytics. By the interpretation of the collected data, a new metaphor of “living room” was proposed. This metaphor suggests that enterprise social media provide a space for interaction of internal-external people similar to what home members and guests do in a living room (public conversations), as well as possibility of conversation corners (private conversations).