Moderation of Enterprise Social Networks – A Literature Review from a Corporate Perspective

Abstract

The implementation of internal social collaboration technologies confronts corporations with new challenges. Former unidirectional information flows become multidirectional and user-content driven networks. Prior research describes the successful implementation as a challenging management task with employees’ usage at the center of attention. Consequently, corporations need to select a moderation style to encourage the usage. The degree of corporate engagement might have repercussions on the contribution behavior. We conduct a structured literature review to identify pre-existing IS contributions to the moderation phenomenon in social media tools, which help to explain on how to moderate these communication platforms in the enterprise context. We reviewed over 150 articles on the subject and assessed 31 articles in depth on the degree of corporate engagement and user content encouragement. We analyze the identified literature for gaps in understanding the phenomenon and provide a first assessment of three different moderation approaches and give implication for future research.