You cannot grow viscum on soil : the "good " corporate social media also fail

The paper reports on two different adoption experiences of an in-house Enterprise Social Media (ESM), at the local and global level in a big company. It compares the deployment strategies and their impact on the users appropriation of the ESM in the two settings. Our observations let emerge how the local level design strategy aimed to link the initiative to concrete aspects of working practices and to their expected evolution. This met the companies goals, improved users work effectiveness, and led to a quite successful appropriation. The same success was not achieved at the global level, where a quite different strategy drove the initiative on a slippery slope towards a drift from success. The paper distills lessons that can shed light on how an ESM should be introduced within large organizations by taking care of different local conditions, consolidated practices and legacy technologies.