Is your organization using social media to enhance internal knowledge sharing and collaboration? Here at APQC, we’re engaged in new research to understand how firms get value from blogs, wikis, microblogging, social tagging, and other similar tools. If you have a social media success story (or some useful lessons learned), please email me so I can feature you in our upcoming report.
APQC has been studying the integration of social tools into knowledge management programs for more than five years, conducting research on the role of evolving technologies and advances in social networking and expertise location when Web 2.0 was just taking off. In 2010, we collaborated with our KM Advanced Working Group to study the role of social networking in the workplace. The guidelines for social KM applications that the group created may be a few years old, but I still think they’re spot on.
Guidelines for Social Knowledge Management
- Remember that your organization is not Facebook. Your colleagues don’t need another Facebook. Decide what they do need and build your initiative around that.
- Don’t expect the same level of participation as in external social networking sites.The frenzied level of posting on social networking sites would be extremely annoying and very strange in a business context. Don’t benchmark yourself against them.
- Trust but verify. You’ll spend more time than it’s worth policing participants’ activities in social media if you don’t trust users to behave appropriately. However, you should check—at least occasionally—to ensure that social networking hasn’t become social “not-working.” It is also important to hit security and privacy issues head on.
- Watch what happens. Rather than trying to predict behavior or ROI, watch what people do and how they use social networking tools in expected and unexpected ways. Invest in and support what bubbles to the top value-wise, and let the rest fall away.
- Mine the information. Relationships and posting behaviors can tell you a lot about what networks exist, which are vibrant, and what content people find valuable enough to share. Desirable content can be pushed to users who need it and flagged to appear higher in search results. Again, be sensitive to privacy concerns about mining digital behavior of employees.
- Accept that the media will change. Social media evolution in the consumer world will dictate how well the enterprise version continues to be accepted. Design your content and policies to be as agnostic as possible to device and software; these details will change.
As the dust begins to settle, organizations seem be converging on certain types of social media tools. For example, firms ranging from CapGemini to Alcoa have added microblogging to their knowledge management portfolios, and many are successfully using wikis to collect and share knowledge. Our current project looks at these applications and more in an effort to understand what works and why. Look for our new published findings in May, or email me and throw your hat into the ring to be profiled in the research.