A study of the online profile of enterprise users in professional social networks

Abstract

Understanding the impact of corporate information publicly distributed on the Web is becoming more and more crucial. In this paper we report the result of a study that involved 130 IBM employees: we explored the correctness and extent of organisational information that can be observed from the online profiles of a company's employees. Our work con- Tributes new insights to the study of social networks by showing that, even by considering a small fraction of the available online data, it is possible to discover accurate infor- mation about an organisation, its structure, and the factors that characterise the social reach of their employees.