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

KFM VERSUS SOCIAL MEDIA

In the preface I talked about the importance of knowledge flows and the management of them. So how does knowledge flow management relate to social media?

Social media is basically a collection of tools and the associated processes to use them. Those processes might be outlined and documented, but very often, they are just understood and resemble shared beliefs in the community using the social media tool or platform. One example is the flexible usage of hashtags, which we discussed earlier in this chapter.

Tags do not represent a predefined taxonomy so much as a folksonomy, where anyone can create and spread a new hashtag. You might be able to trace who has used the tag for the first time, but in the end it does not really matter. It matters more who and how many in the community are using it to describe a common context or term.

The ideas of KFM that I outlined in my first book8 still apply when using technologies like those usually referred to when we talk about social media. But social media itself is not KM or KFM, for that matter. It is a supporting element of reducing barriers that would otherwise hinder the flow of knowledge in an organization.

By providing another distributed network channel, social media tools, if used properly, support better knowledge flows. By making it easy to participate and share, social media empowers a wide range of people in an organization to contribute, including those that might be hesitant to participate in more complicated ...