How Multimedia in Enterprise Social Networks Matters to People's Performance

The proliferation of social-network-based services is transforming how people interact with each other. While online social networking tools are being adopted by enterprises in recent years, there exist much larger amount of multi-faceted employee interaction data in other communication channels such as email, instant messaging and multimedia sharing. In this paper, we focus on how enterprises build and utilize computational models of social networks based on the multifaceted data, and how the use of multimedia in social networks can affect employees' performance. We describe the research done at a large international information technology company. First, we describe the method to construct effective enterprise social networks models. Next, we present multimedia service and research within the enterprise social networks. Finally, we investigate the impact of use of multimedia in the enterprise social networks on employees' performance. Our results show that high performers keep close social proximity to people who actively share multimedia.