Social Media and the Digital Enterprise

. Over the last decade, the role of social media in enabling the digital enterprise has been rapidly growing. In order for digital enterprises to embrace the opportunities afforded by social media technologies, including the use of social media for both inward-and external-facing communications and collaborations, several issues need to be addressed. The panelists will discuss contemporary issues and potential strategies to help establish a roadmap for social media research in the context of digital enterprises and digital transformation.


Social Media and the Digital Enterprise: A Research Agenda
The modern organization is a digital enterprise and part of a digital ecosystem, "a grouping of enterprises, competitors, customers, regulators and other stakeholders that exchange information and interact electronically" [1].Although a topic of increasing focus for information systems and technology scholars, the practical relevance is also underscored by the tremendous growth in investments in digital transformation projects forecasted to increase 42% to $1.7 trillion by 2019 [2].
One of the main information and communication technologies (ICTs) at the heart of the digital enterprise is social media, a group of Internet-based applications that supports various actors in a multiplicity of communication activities for producing usergenerated content, developing and maintaining connections and social relationships, or enabling other computer-mediated interactions and collaborations [3,4].
Social media have reshaped almost every dimension of organizational communication and collaboration, both internally and externally.With social media spending estimated at $100 billion worldwide and 80% of companies currently using some form of enterprise social media (ESM), there is little scholarly guidance to identify ways in which today's organizations can make profitable, yet, safe and ethical usage of social media.
Several areas appear to be in dire need for scholarly guidance, including:  Social Media and Intra-Organizational Knowledge Collaborations: Organizations have high hopes of social media to enhance knowledge transfer within and into the organization.Yet there is little evidence that social media, instead of extant knowledge management tools, successfully enhance knowledge transfer in organizations, while there is ample evidence that social media is an effective communication medium for social and professional communities.In fact, there is some evidence that social media may give an illusion of knowledge transfer with little actual learning.The panel will explore how knowledge transfer in organizations can be enabled through social media. Social Media Marketing: Investments in social media advertising continue to increase and social media ad revenue was estimated at $51.3 billion for 2018 [5].Possibly the most researched topic pertaining to social media, the landscape of social media technologies and marketing tactics are constantly changing, requiring scholarly guidance.In this panel, we will focus on some of the latest industry trends, including omnichannel and influencer marketing, as well as topics pertaining to measuring the ROI of social media marketing. Social Media Analytics: Organizations are making growing investments in big data analytics [6].A major source of data for such analytics come from social media.Although the focus has hitherto been on using consumer data for marketing purposes, there is increasing awareness of how data from internal social media or ESM can be used by companies to build better work environments, improved collaboration, and foster greater innovation.This panel will showcase scholarly research on how to measure and visualize the digital traces from social media behaviors and content to provide managerial guidance for supporting evidence-based and increasingly automated decision-making in all strategic matters. Blockchain and Social Media: Social media platforms were initially hailed as the apotheosis of digital democracy, but were soon found to be plagued by a number of issues, not least the algorithmic decision making of which items to appear first in users' timelines.Blockchain can tackle this problem by allowing for decentralized applications, which actively encourage user participation by allowing voting on content trustworthiness and influencing the reputation of content generators and sharers.We will discuss how Blockchain-based platforms may combine information cascade verification with information trustworthiness scoring, benefitting from Blockchain technology to ensure transparency of the scoring process and that information has not been modified in a cascade.
Academic research is growing in these areas yet the relative volume of research publications has not reached a level that parallels the importance of these themes in industry.This panel will bring together a group of world-renowned experts that are at the forefront of research and practice on these and other topics related to social media and the digital enterprise.

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Example Panel Questions  Unexplored research questions and agenda: What may we recommend as a scholarly agenda for the research community in this context?Which questions regarding digital transformation can be investigated from a social media perspective?Questions framing the panelists discussion include the following: o What will be the main roles of social media in the digital enterprise of the future?o What is limiting social media in being an effective means of knowledge transfer?o How will Blockchain disrupt the social media landscape by allowing for trustful, user-oriented and secure decentralized social network platforms?o How can we use decentralized social media platforms to address the problem of trust (e.g.fake news spreading)? Training digital transformation and social media practitioners: How can we effectively train the current and next generation of practitioners using social media to enable digital transformation in enterprise settings? Collaborations with social media researchers: Where can we network with fellow social media scholars interested in interdisciplinary research?How can a mutually beneficial value proposition be generated? Measurement on social media: What is the role of data analytics, not only in facilitating better use of social media but also in enabling the most productive use of these tools in the context of digital transformation?What are the key analytics informing a digital enterprise strategy?

Panelist Biographies
Wietske Van Osch (vanosch@msu.edu) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media and at Michigan State University as well as Associate Professor in the Department of Information Technology at HEC Montreal.She received her Ph.D. in Economics (Information Systems) from the University of Amsterdam's Business School.Her research work has appeared in numerous high-impact, peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of Information Technology, Information and Management, and leading conferences, including the International Conference on Information Systems.Her current research interests focus on the role of enterprise social media (ESM) in team collaboration, knowledge management, boundary-spanning, and innovation.Wietske has received a total of $1,000,000 in funding from the National Science Foundation for her work on ESM.According to SCOPUS, Wietske is the most frequently published author in the domain of ESM.Her core research projects involve extensive industry collaborations for research on ESM, data science/ artificial intelligence, and social media marketing with multinational companies including Steelcase and Leo Burnett.Professor George M. Giaglis is General Director of the Institute for the Future at the University of Nicosia, as well as a leading expert on blockchain technology and applications and advisor to many blockchain projects and technology start-ups.Prior to joining UNIC, he was Professor at the Athens University of Economics and Business (2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017), where he also served as Vice Rector (2011-2015).George has been working on digital currencies and blockchain since 2012, with his main focus being on new forms of industrial organization (programmable smart contracts, decentralized applications and distributed autonomous organizations) and new forms of corporate financing (token economy, crypto-economics and ICOs).He has been one of the first academics to research and teach on blockchain, having: designed the curriculum of the world's first full academic degree on blockchain (MSc in Digital Currency at the University of Nicosia); led the development of blockchain credentialing technology that has resulted in the first ever publishing of academic certificates on the blockchain; taught on the disruptive innovation potential of blockchain, both at academic programs and in executive seminars worldwide; organized a number of prominent blockchain conferences and events, including Decentralized.Throughout his career, he has published more than 10 books and 150 articles in leading scientific journals and conferences, while he is frequently interviewed by media and invited as keynote speaker or trainer in events across the globe.He is the Chief Editor for Blockchain Technology at the Frontiers in Blockchain Journal and member of the Editorial Board at Ledger.
Constantinos K. Coursaris (coursari@msu.edu) is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Information at Michigan State University, as well as Associate Professor in the Department of Information Technology at HEC Montreal.Constantinos studies user motivations, expectations, and experiences with new media and the consequent design implications with a focus on social systems.His research is at the intersection of usability and mobile technologies for the purpose of health and/or commercial applications.Constantinos' research has been published in top peer-reviewed journals, such as Information & Management, New Media & Society, Computers in Human Behavior, Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, and Online Information Review, among others.Working in interdisciplinary teams, he has received $4 million in external funding to support his research.He consults on social media for governance and/or marketing, and has trained organizations in North America, Europe, Middle East and North Africa, and ranks among the Top 50 Marketing Professors on Twitter.Dov Te'eni is Research Associate Dean at the School of Business, Tel Aviv University and holds the IS Mexico Chair.Dov currently studies visualization and feedback, combining human and machine intelligence, and knowledge sharing.Dov has co-authored (with Zhang and Carey) a book published by Wiley-Human-computer interaction for developing effective organizational systems and co-edited (with Schwartz) the Encyclopedia of Knowledge Management, as well as other books on information systems and innovation.He has published articles in Management Science, MIS Quarterly, Organization Science, IEEE Transactions, JAIS, JASIST amongst other journals, and has served on the boards of MIS Quarterly, AIS Transactions of HCI, JAIS, Information and Organizations, and Internet Research.He is co-editor of European Journal of IS.Dov was awarded the AIS Fellowship (2008) and LEO award (2015).