At twintangibles we believe that Social Media has quite profound implications for the way we do business, and we have already mentioned that we think that its impact and application stretches way beyond the common mantra of marketing. One application that we have mentioned in passing is the concept of Social Knowledge. What do we mean by that?
Knowledge Management (KM) is a much maligned and much misunderstood concept that has, to a large extent, foundered on the common misconception that it is an extension of information management. There are many reasons for this but one of the contributing factors was undoubtedly that the fashion for KM coincided with advent of the Web. The web held a great deal of promise for early KM advocates because at the heart of the KM proposition was a recognition of the vast resource embodied in communities and the desire to liberate and generate value from that. One of the most compelling attributes of the web is its democratising power by lowering barriers to entry and bypassing traditional gatekeepers and it seemed to be the natural bedfellow of KM. However it’s other great strength is its capacity to generate and aggregate data which does have a connection to information and it was this strand that was effectively conflated into KM and very much to its detriment. The connection between the web, information and KM became something of an unholy trinity and the more nebulous, elusive but most valuable principle KM as a liberator and change agent and the web as a potential engine for that was essentially forgotten.
What the web lacked however, and perhaps meant it would never have ultimately delivered as the engine for KM was the conversational and timeliness that Social Media brings. This is the product of a combination technical development and the ubiquity of the architecture and access points and methods, and a changed sensibility of engagement and participation. So Social Media is an engine for conversations, emergent themes and process, rapidly changing evolutionary models and movements.
As such it is also the true platform for liberating that early and mislaid KM potential. But to differentiate it from that somewhat damaged KM model we refer to it as Social Knowledge.
What we mean by this is the use of Social Media technologies and sensibilities to unlock the potential of communities for value. In a business context this can be operationalised as many things, innovation, crowd sourcing, deep insight and any number of other activities and interventions.
This can mean that we have to question some of our long held concepts of business as usual to considering business as unusual. It can challenge our traditional notions of what constitutes the organisation, intellectual property rights, management structures and trust tagging. That challenging is at the same time full of promise and the opportunity to unlock new ideas and hidden potential and value.
We don’t claim to have all of the answers, to be frank no one has. But we have experience and insight in this area and we recognise and embrace the opportunities that it offers. We can help you to both understand and engage with these opportunities, so if you want to know how Social Knowledge could transform your organisation get in touch.
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