Today at 3pm my co-author Becky Roth is going to be presenting our paper “Implementing Social Media in Public Sector Organizations” at the 2012 iConference.

Here’s the abstract and a copy of the paper.  I’m very happy with this work. I don’t usually do this kind of research method, but I think the integration with previous work on organizational technology adoption along with the case studies comes out as effective at the end of the day. I’d love feedback on this, and to get it into the hands of practitioners to see if it’s useful in thinking about designing social media for their organizations.

“Social media has been widely adopted by organizations in the recent past, and public sector organizations are also showing an increased interest in using this tool to meet their goals. In this paper, we describe three cases of social media adoption by public sector organizations, and the struggles faced in that implementation.  We argue through the experience of implementing these systems that the characteristics of non-profit organizations, including the government and community service organizations that interact in the public sector, exacerbate problems of groupware adoption. In particular, public sector organizations involve multiple stakeholders coordinating in a distributed fashion, which leads to barriers to social media adoption to accomplish their goals.”

Lampe and Roth 2012

Here’s a *relatively* final draft of the e-communities course I am teaching this semester.  Some readings may shift around, but this is the basic structure.

SI529 eCommunities

Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Jen White at Michigan Pubic Radio and talk about how technology and social influence affect the distribution and consumption of social media.  A couple of key points I’m glad came out:

- There’s a strong intermingling of media at this point.  Mass media stories are propagated to social media.  Social media messages inform mass media attention.  Both get talked about in “water cooler” conversations.

- Social influence matters.  We adapt the information we’re absorbing from the source we’re receiving it from.

http://michiganradio.org/post/politics-language-part-3

I have a very anti-hipster confession to make.

I don’t have great taste in music.

I mean, I have music I like, and music I think is good, but in general I pretty much watch my my friends are listening to, and go with that.  It’s been like this pretty much forever. I think partially, it’s because I don’t listen to music all *that* often.  In the car I listen to news. While working I listen to ambient or classical so I can focus.  I do listen to music at the gym, but I’m heartily sick of my lifting mix and haven’t had the wherewithal to seek out new stuff.

Music choice is an intensely self-presentational thing. I can’t think of many other things that signal “coolness” and cultural literacy more than the types of music one listens to.  People always joke about “guilty pleasure” listening, but we still hang a good portion of our ego on the fantastic choices in music we’ve made.

Recently, I was staying in the same hotel as Nosh Contractor, and he had shared his music file through iTunes.  What are you going to do?  Of course you’re going to listen to Nosh’s music.  And it was fun.  Some great rock tunes, very cool Indian music and some really interesting Chinese music I’d never heard.  I felt like I new more about Nosh after my peek into his music tastes.  When he and I talked about my voyage through his music library the next day, he seemed initially nervous (you could see him reviewing his music list to see if there was anything incriminating in there) but then enjoyed talking about it.

Because I depend on people I think have good taste to discover new music, I had a lot of interest in Spotify.  I’ve been enjoying listening to the music of friends, both those from my research community (Nancy Baym rocks of course) and from my personal friends.  It’s fun, and I’ve been introduced to some new music that can become part of my limited musical scope.

However, with the latest change in the Facebook interface, and my somewhat rash decision to link Spotify and Facebook, each song I was listening to started to be shown in my Friends’ feeds. Some friends posted to my wall with a bit of sarcasm to let me know they didn’t care to see my musical choices that evening.  I was nervous about what I was listening to, whether it betrayed the fact that I’m a supremely uncool listener of music.  In self defense, I started to seek songs from Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus and the cast of Glee to turn the whole thing into a joke. Plus I really do like “The Climb”.

Who sees what on Facebook is tough to figure out. It’s a function in the algorithm of how many friends they have, how “close” we are as measured by multiple possible interactions, and what choices I’ve made in applications.  However, plenty of research has shown that people engage in very carefully considered self-presentation strategies in their social network sites profiles.  Most people want to be authentic in their profiles, but “Sunday” authentic where they are presenting a somewhat cleaned up version of themselves.

The unholy combination of Spotify and Facebook take some of the control and transparency out of my self-presentation.  I’m willing to tell folks I have terrible musical taste, but I want to be the one to tell them.

It’s that time of year where I’m working feverishly on CHI papers. Thanks to my collaborators near and far for their hard work on these little gems.