Knowledge Management: Social Media Platforms…not just for sharing status updates?

When we think of social media, we think of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.  We think of shared photos of food, likes, pokes, views, political rants, trolling, benign status updates, and the like.  However, social media can be more than that….social media can be an essential tool in the collection, storage, and sharing of knowledge.  Social media platforms provide increasing opportunities for organizations to align employees’ creative efforts toward enterprise goals by utilizing social media.

Hemsly & Mason (2013) show us that social media tools allow people to develop and maintain social relationships in ways that appear to differ in quality and quantity than face-to-face relationships. These tools enable building and maintaining large social networks (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook); self-publishing as a way of sharing knowledge with anyone who has a similar interest (blogs, YouTube, Flickr); and collaborating with friends and strangers around the world (wikis).

In Grace’s (2009) case study of Mapa, a UK-based market research consultancy, they chose to utilize a wiki for the knowledge management solution because of its ability to not only capture explicit and migratory knowledge but also tacit and embedded knowledge which is critical to the knowledge intensive nature of business.  Grace offers here the classic epistemological perspective that is often called the knowledge pyramid, in which knowledge is built up from elements that come from sensing the environment.  As Polanyi first discussed, the tacit dimension of knowledge (1966), he noted that knowledge comprises two dimensions.  The higher levels in these pyramid models (e.g., wisdom, knowledge), when applied at the lower levels (information, data), may be characterized as predominantly tacit.

The new “MapaWiki” became a robust and friendly KMS solution due to its flexibility to be able to store information in context which gives users background and perspective relative to the information retrieved and allows in‐depth comprehension of the relevance of the piece of information.  They began to see that users were easily able to add, edit and link articles with little to no training needed.  The power of social media!

A key implication that Hemsly & Mason (2013) offer is that organizations adhering to the older paradigm of bureaucratic control of knowledge will be at a competitive disadvantage.  They believe that many of the dominant KM paradigms and models need revisiting. They believe they are “ill-suited” for the knowledge environment facilitated by the increasing opportunities presented by social media.  This seems to be reinforced by the studies conducted by Grace, showing that a wiki is, a democratic, accessible community of users responsible for its own content, supported by an open model of knowledge creation and communication.  The ease-of-use provided by these social media platforms transitions beautifully into the world of knowledge management by creating a solution that is easy to implement and adopt with little to no training.  Yet, there is another point to consider…can we use these social media platforms to also build social capital within our organizations?

Bharati & Chaudhury (2015) investigate the concept of social capital at the organizational level.  Social capital creates channels of communications that promote exchange, creation and recombination of knowledge among individuals, business groups and business partners.  In this way, Bharati & Chaudhury show us that social capital enables knowledge management activity such as knowledge acquisition, knowledge transfer, and knowledge contribution within and across the firm.  This improved social capital will, in turn, make it more feasible to engage in knowledge management initiatives.  Social media positively affects this social capital, as electronic connections are capable of both creating new relationships online and maintaining existing ones.  Through panel data they collected, they were able to show that while organizational assimilation of social media positively affects organizational social capital, the social capital’s effects on organizational knowledge quality are indirectly through organizational emphasis on knowledge management, and so is the organizational assimilation of social media’s effects on organizational knowledge quality.

Through Bharati & Chaudhury’s exploration into whether social media can help grow social capital and facilitate organizational knowledge management we are able to see some fascinating trends emerge. The results of their study indicate that social media can be a viable technological choice to enhance organizational knowledge management efforts.  This parallels perfectly with previous discussions surrounding the effective design of knowledge management platforms for organizational knowledge.  Perhaps social media is paving the way for more than just status updates, old prom photos, and hashtags?

 

References:

Grace, T. P. L. (2009). Wikis as a knowledge management tool. Journal of Knowledge Management, 13(4), 64-74. doi:10.1108/13673270910971833

Hemsley, J., & Mason, R. M. (2013). Knowledge and knowledge management in the social media age. Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, 23(1), 138-167. doi:10.1080/10919392.2013.748614

Bharati, P., & Chaudhury, A. (2015). Better knowledge with social media? Exploring the roles of social capital and organizational knowledge management. Journal of Knowledge Management, 19, 456-475. doi:https://doi.org/10.1108/JKM-11-2014-0467