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The purpose of this paper is to explore the perceptions of master of library and information science (MLIS) students of social software.

A web‐based questionnaire is used as a survey instrument. The MLIS students at Kuwait University (KU) and the University of Wisconsin‐Milwaukee (UWM) are identified as the population of this study. In total, 132 MLIS students participate in the survey.

The majority of students from the two schools are aware of social software applications and their use. Blogs, video sharing, collaborative authoring, communication and social networking received the highest mean scores. Their perceptions about online activities, their use of social software and the obstacles to its use were not significantly affected by institutional affiliation. It was further found that the institutional affiliation exhibited significant differences for their perceptions of social software applications in education.

The sample issues present one of the main limitations of this study and the bias of the survey method.

The findings of the study can meaningfully contribute to a better understanding of the affect of social software on MLIS students. It also can be applied to the implementation of these applications in library and information science (LIS) education.

Most research on social software concentrates on students from other fields; very little research has considered student in LIS. This research is also the first survey to investigate how MLIS students in Kuwait using social software.

This paper aims at contributing to the knowledge regarding the use of social software in corporate environments. It analyses, in an exploratory way, the perceptions of social software managers (specifically blogs and wikis) regarding the implementation processes and actual usage of this type of applications within their companies.

The paper follows a qualitative approach, with exploratory nature. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect social software manager's perceptions, and the resulting data were subjected to qualitative content analysis, from which several issues emerged and were analyzed.

According to managers' perceptions, social software applications are helping companies regarding, in particular, knowledge management, project management, and internal communication issues. On the other hand, it seems clear that companies (and managers) need to adopt participation incentives, establish usage rules, implement monitoring and evaluation instruments, and broaden the scope of usage beyond core business areas.

The analysis reflects the managers' perceptions expressed in semi-structured interviews made on a limited number of companies where most application users have technological academic formation or experience. Further research efforts should overcome these limitations by including a wide variety of companies (from other activity sectors), with a wider diversity of application user profiles. Also, input from application users should be taken into account in the analysis, as well as some quantitative indicators (regarding actual usage, for instance).

The paper contributes to the knowledge regarding the use of social software, namely blogs and wikis, in corporate environments, an area where further research is needed. The analysis and reported findings can be of value to managers responsible for social software implementation processes within corporations, helping them to reflect upon the issues that emerged.

Social software emerges as an important and effective tool for customer knowledge management (CKM). However, the supporting role of social software in CKM is not well understood. This paper aims to bridge the gap by studying the implementation of social software to effectively manage customer knowledge assets.

The paper analytically models and investigates the optimal level of social software for a firm who maximizes its transactional benefits through managing a consumer knowledge system. The system consists of a customer knowledge base and social software that dynamically affects the customer knowledge base through customers' interactions.

The paper shows that the optimal level of social software can be obtained under certain conditions and how the level changes with the initial index of customer knowledge base, transactional benefits, and the positive and negative effects of the social software. In addition, it provides guidelines to implement social software based on the analytical results.

This research provides valuable insights and guidance for the practicing manager and lays the foundation for future research on social software and CKM.

The purpose of this study is to explore the acceptance and use of social software tools; in particular, the paper focuses on how the features of social software determine its use.

This study identifies and uses three independent variables: intrinsic motivation, communication, and information/knowledge sharing. The dependent variables are based on the technology acceptance model (TAM) and include the perceived usefulness of social software and the perceived easiness of using social software. Using an online survey, data were collected from employees in government agencies (n=116) in Korea.

The results of a regression analysis show that both communication and knowledge sharing have a positive effect on the perceived usefulness of social software. However, the results did not statistically support intrinsic motivation as a crucial factor influencing the usefulness of social software. The findings also indicated that intrinsic motivation and communication are crucial factors in the ease of use of social software, while knowledge sharing is not significant statistically.

There are some limitations in this study that need to be addressed. First, in this study, the subjects in the questionnaire survey were employees in Korean government related agencies. In addition, the survey was conducted by volunteers responding to the questionnaire. Thus, in other circumstances, the findings of this study may not be valid or generalizable due to a different social context and representative sampling.

The study implies that decision makers in software companies should support knowledge sharing activities and a variety of communication channels to transform a government agency into a social software community. In addition, the study shows that social software developers should consider enjoyment as a crucial factor for ease of use. Finally, the study found that the associations between the features of social software and South Korean government employees' characteristics for adopting social software can serve as a starting point for research projects involving government employees in other countries.

The purpose of this paper is to provide both practice‐oriented researchers and practitioners with detailed insights into the social software goals and implementation strategies for corporate environments. Also, to illustrate the novelty and specificity of corporate social software (CSS) compared to other groupware or knowledge management systems.

The paper is grounded in the ongoing discussion on differences and commonalities of knowledge management and Enterprise 2.0 applications and motivated by the lack of scientific studies on this topic. The authors have therefore made a comprehensive study of social software adoption in corporate environments, performing a cross‐case analysis of 23 enterprises. The study was meant to enable researchers and practitioners to acquire a better understanding and appropriate related explanations of the relatively new phenomenon of CSS appropriation and use.

From the cross‐case analysis, six main goals of CSS adoption were derived and compared with the goals of knowledge management projects and initiatives. While some of the goals set for the introduction of CSS seem to coincide with those resulting from knowledge management studies (e.g. establishing networks of experts), others appear to be novel and specific for CSS (e.g. improving employee‐to‐employee communication).

By investigating 23 different cases (most of these case studies being documented by the authors), this paper presents one of the most comprehensive cross‐case analyses systematically exploring pursued goals and implementation approaches adopted for CSS. The contribution of the study is relevant for both research and practice and it is aimed to contribute to the ongoing scientific debate on social software in knowledge management and information systems research.

By studying the drivers of social collaboration the purpose of this paper is to describe how, and for what job-related purposes, social software is employed in the digital workplace. Focussing on consultants, who are considered to be part of a knowledge-intensive and innovative industry, factors that may influence the adoption of professional social software are explored. In addition, insights about socio-demographic differences as well as distinct consulting segments and use categories are provided.

The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technologies (UTAUT) is the theoretical backbone of this research. The UTAUT model is expanded to fit the research goals, and the results from a quantitative study (n=341) are used to test the model.

The results suggest that the adoption of social software is associated with the expectation that one’s work performance will improve. There are significant differences regarding age and gender in the use of social software for job-related purposes.

Using the results of the study, social software suites can be tailored to users’ needs and preferences, which, in turn, may lead to higher levels of acceptance and intensity of use.

Social software is already widely adopted for private purposes, and it is being used more and more within the digital workplace, too. However, little research has been conducted into how, and for what job-related purposes, social software is employed, or into the potential drivers for its adoption. The stakeholders in the research include scholars and practitioners alike.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how researchers from four large Canadian distance education or dual mode institutions conducted a survey aiming to describe the use of and interest in social software and Web 2.0 applications by distance education students and to measure their interest in collaborating with peers.

In order to do this, an online questionnaire was distributed to students from four large Canadian distance education institutions. A systematic sampling procedure led to 3,462 completed questionnaires. The results show that students have diverse views and experiences, but they also show strong and significant age and gender differences in a variety of measures, as well as an important institution effect for interest in collaboration.

Males and younger students score higher on almost all indicators, including cooperative preferences. In this paper the authors review quantitative results from the survey from earlier work (Poellhuber et al.) and present an analysis of the qualitative data gathered from open‐ended questions in the survey. Answers to open‐ended questions regarding the expectation and interest in using social software in their courses, show that students have positive expectations about interactions and course quality, but also concerns about technical, time, and efficiency issues.

The probabilist sampling, as well as the high number of respondents, are forces. The limits of the research are linked to its survey methodology, possible self‐selection bias, history effect and social desirability effect.

The study opens avenues to those who consider the integration of social software or Web 2.0 tools in distance courses.

It also offers guidance to those who consider using social software for learning purposes in general.

While social media and social networking tools offer new educational affordances and avenues for students to interact, that may alleviate the drop‐out rate problem faced by distance education institutions. Little is known about distance students' expertise with social media or their interest in using them to learn individually or to collaborate with peers.

The purpose of this paper to investigate the current information systems security (ISS) practices of the social software application (SSA) users via the internet.

The paper opted for a systematic literature review survey on ISS and its practices in SSAs between 2010 and 2015. The study includes a set of 39 papers from among 1,990 retrieved papers published in 35 high-impact journals. The selected papers were filtered using the Publish or Perish software by Harzing and Journal Citation Report (JCR) with an inclusion criterion of least one citation per article.

The practice of ISS is driven by the need to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the data from being tampered. It is coherent with the current practice as reported by many researchers in this study. Four important factors lead to the ISS practice in SSA: protection tools offered, ownership, user behaviour, and security policy.

The paper highlights the implication of successful ISS practices is having clear security purpose and security supported environment (user behaviour and security protection tools) and governance (security policy and ownership) protection tools offered, ownership, user behaviour, and security policy towards ISS practice by the users.

This paper fulfils an identified need to study how to enable ISS practice.

Over the past decade, the rapid evolution of social media has impacted the field of human resource management in numerous ways. In response, scholars and practitioners have sought to begin an investigation of the myriad of ways that social media impacts organizations. To date, research evidence on a range of HR-related topics are just beginning to emerge, but are scattered across a range of diverse literatures. The principal aim of this chapter is to review the current literature on the study of social media in HRM and to integrate these disparate emerging literatures. During our review, we discuss the existent research, describe the theoretical foundations of such work, and summarize key research findings and themes into a coherent social media framework relevant to HRM. Finally, we offer recommendations for future work that can enhance knowledge of social media’s impact in organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to establish reciprocity among socio-location attributes while underlining the additional users’ privacy implications on social media (SM).

Digital identity theories, social software engineering theory and the Privacy Safeguard (PriS) methodology were considered while reviewing 32 papers for identifying users’ SM attributes. After proposing interrelations among socio-location attributes, the PriS method was used to match social aspects of privacy in designing case studies to illustrate the associations through potential users’ privacy implications.

Eighteen users’ SM attributes were collected and correlated to the Face, Frame, Activity, Time and Stage (FFrATS) 4 W (socio-location attributes), which provoke further privacy implications due to the notions of self-determination and self-disclosure on SM. The authors draw on the PriS methodology to address privacy’s multidimensionality while creating case studies to examine privacy issues arising due to socio-location attribute disclosure and users’ trajectories and normativity lines.

Supplementary case studies and research are needed to enable the design of a socio-spatially and privacy-aware designing methodology.

Designing proper methodologies and techniques to address users’ privacy implications deriving from socio-location attributes can provide designers with a technical solution to SM platforms.

Socio-location attribute disclosure constructs representative SM profiles; however, the revelation of attributes and their interrelations create additional privacy implications for SM users.

Deepening the understanding of disclosing socio-location attributes on SM while bridging the socio-technical gap will provide the necessary background for proposing technical solutions to protecting users’ privacy.