Connecting Organizational Silos: Taking Knowledge Flow Management to the Next Level with Social Media

DIFFERENCES IN THE WORLD

Now let’s have a closer look at some of the differences between using social media in the external world and the internal world. It usually starts with scale. The social media platforms that we are most familiar with have been growing over years and reached user numbers beyond imagination. With almost 800 million1 users on the planet, Facebook would be the third largest nation,2 if social networks qualified. (Personally, I think that likening it to a nation is not fully appropriate, but for the purpose of size comparison, it is an interesting way of looking at it.)

Even if you take into account that not all of the 800 million accounts are active, and that in a given point in time you usually only reach a fraction of people, such large social networks are larger than any typical organization. There actually are some organizations with millions of employees and, in those cases, some of what I outline in this chapter might not fully hold; but for most organizations it is more about hundreds or thousands of employees than it is about millions.

Clearly, in terms of scale, a huge social network like Facebook—that is open to the entire world—has a lot more potential users than a 500-employee organization. To get collaboration going and to get a social media platform active, you usually need a certain number of users. The number of users who will be active is only a portion of the potential users. You could view the process of converting potential users to active ...