Harnessing Social Media As A Knowledge Management Tool

Assalamualaikum. My term paper for Advanced Knowledge Management System:

TURNITIN RESULT: 3%

Harnessing Social Media As 

A Knowledge Management Tool

Noorafini Abdul Wahab & Haryani Haron (Assoc. Prof. Dr.)

Faculty of Computer  and Mathematical Science,

Universiti Technology MARA (UiTM) Shah Alam, Malaysia
nurhaqqq@yahoo.com
haryani@tmsk.uitm.edu.my

Abstract— This paper will discuss the use of social media as a knowledge management tool and examples of using them generally at the organization.

Keywords— Social media; Knowledge management tool; Knowledge sharing

I.      Introduction

                Using the social media as communication medium has become a new trend in communities since last several years. The social media group is predicted to become larger by introducing new applications and new gadgets which can be used for daily communication. Social media tools and platforms which are fully supported by Web 2.0 technologies are used to establish connection in reaching friends, family members, colleagues, or business partners. Businesses are utilizing the social media trend to carry out the marketing activities, create collaboration with external partners, and promote knowledge sharing among the employees via internal social media applications. Government has also been using social media technology to simplify the government working process, improve communication with the stakeholders and initiate collaboration with others such as other countries. It seems the social media technology has efficiently develops more connectivity, interaction and support knowledge exchange and sharing despite the geographical factor.

                Social media is the use of collaborative online applications and technologies for the creation, sharing and application of information by facilitating a social environment among users. There are variety of social media tools such as blogs, chat rooms, discussion forums, social networking websites, video sharing websites, photo sharing websites, and social collaborative websites. These tools provide both interactivity and collaborative opportunities. As a result, social media has been used by people and organizations globally and it has a vital role in knowledge management. The use of social media technology is to collect, store and disseminate knowledge to the right people, at the right time, at the right place, and in the right format. It also can be seen as an enabler for efficient knowledge management processes.

                Yates & Paquette (2011) claimed that social media has started to become the new technology for knowledge management.

                Knowledge management is crucial in providing the right knowledge to the right people. Peter Drucker (1999) defined knowledge management as to coordinate and to utilize the organizational knowledge in order to bring competitive advantages for the organization. It is to ensure an organization can learn, use and retrieve its knowledge assets from both employee and the organization.

II.   Social Media

                According to Kaplan & Haenlein (2010), social media is defined as a collection of internet-based application which is built using the Web 2.0 base ideology and technology. It permits the user to create, generate, share, and exchange the content.

                Social media is a two-way form of sharing information or ideas which is conducted using online communication. Some people referred it as Web 2.0 which can be divided into several categories with subcategories. Younger generations are known synonym with the use of social media technology. It occurs to be more accessible due variety selection of cell phones and Wi-Fi wireless internet packages by telecommunication companies.

                Everyone wants to be on social media nowadays. As social media users, people want to keep up to date with latest news or trends. The technology lead new ways of getting in touch and promote knowledge sharing. It can also act as a motivational tool which can improve communication channel between people. Apart from that, it also expands social marketing to the internet. The way to influence people and get public to react has been changed as social media technology is used massively for communication. 

                According to Bard (2010), social media is classified into 15 categories:

• Aggregators
• Audio
• Conversation Apps
• Crowd Sourcing
• Gaming
• Live-casting
• Micro-Blogging
• Mobile
• Photo Sharing
• Publishing
• RSS
• Search
• Social Networking
• Video
• Virtual Worlds

                However, there are different examples for each category such as Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace in Social Networking category; Twitter and Tumblr in Micro-blogging category; Blogger and Wordpress in Blogs category; Pinterest in Photo Sharing category.

III. Social Media Characteristics

                According to Panahi et al. (2012), there are four features of social media characteristics that enable knowledge sharing via different mechanisms:

• multimedia oriented,
• peer to peer communication,
• user-friendly, and
• user-generated content.

                These features have made a great combination with social media tools and turn into an excellent way for knowledge sharing among users. People get connected and able to communicate with each other despite geographical factor. It increases the trust factor and helps to build good relationship. By having these, people are more willing to share their knowledge. Knowledge creation and distribution are made easier. It also helps to improve the knowledge visibility which seems more effective compared to the traditional way of knowledge management systems.

IV. Integrated Km Process Cycle

                Davenport & Prusak (2000) stated  that knowledge management is to manage the organization's knowledge via a systematic process of acquiring, organizing, sustaining, applying, sharing and renewing. These applied to both tacit and explicit knowledge of employees in order to increase the organizational performance and develop the value.

There are three major stages in KM process cycle. They are:

• Knowledge capture and/or creation
• Knowledge sharing and dissemination
• Knowledge acquisition and application

The integrated KM cycle is outlined in Figure 1.

Figure 1 (According to Dalkir, 2011)

PROCESS	ACTIVITIES
Knowledge capture and/or creation	The discovery of knowledge which is related to professional practices  Personal approach and understanding in the implication of professional experiences
Knowledge sharing and dissemination	Disseminate, exchange or share ideas and knowledge among individuals
Knowledge acquisition and application	Post questions that facilitate communication and discussion among users Provide response or give feedback to the questions posted Problem solving discussion by sharing experience or knowledge to encounter problems in professional practice

Table 1 Knowledge Process (According to Dalkir, 2011)

                Bose [2] suggested that the knowledge generated from skills and experiences of the employees must be kept in raw form. These are useful to peers and employees of the organization.

                Any learned lesson or relevant experience must be added. Available contextual information such as  images, related stories, audios, videos, or electronic document are added to increase the context information of the described experience. Relevant discussion between staff or employees of the organization must be conducted on the system chat or a community forum. In this case, the organization has the possibility to store the entire chat content and able to publish this conversation so others employees can have access. The knowledge created is automatically stored and documented for further usage.

                Knowledge sharing is defined as the exchange of knowledge between and among individuals or organizations.

                According to Bukowitz and Williams (1999), successful knowledge sharing is determined by the following criteria:

• Access to the knowledge.
• Articulation or the user's ability to define what he needs.
• Awareness of the knowledge available.
• Completeness where access is made possible to centralized knowledge and self-published knowledge. Centralized knowledge takes longer time to be recognized and published but it is always relevant. However, self-published knowledge has the risk of not being reliable to be use.
• Guidance where knowledge managers are often considered key in the build-up of a knowledge sharing system.

                Nowadays, more organizations are encouraging their staff or employees to integrate social media usage at their workplace. Staff or employees who use social media at their workplace for work purpose tend to have better perception and positive attitude in knowledge sharing via social media. This is due to the positive mindset instilled in staff or employees who are more willing to share their experience and knowledge via social media. Positive attitude is also a bonus here where staff or employees feel more motivated to share knowledge when they saw their peers are willing to share with them as well. As a result, they believe that using social media for their work purposes will encourage more knowledge sharing.

                An organization need to identify the main purpose in introducing social media technology to support the existing KM. Then, strategy planning development to support the main purpose is crucial where the organization able to benefit from the social media technology implementation. It is best to learn from other organizations that have already succeeded and progressing in their new implementation. There are some organizations that prefer to experiment with various social media in developing their strategy planning. Reviewing case study and study the existing proposed structured framework can aid the social media technology opportunities in the organization.

                However, risks at each level must be addressed and acknowledged in a realistic way.  Further discussion and next steps need to be identified for affected areas.

                In this case, the organization must perform further searching and extra effort in examining and choosing the win-win situation that able to bring benefits for both the employee and the organization. The organization must be able to enhance and protect the organizational reputation. Meanwhile, the employee must be able to enhance and protect their own reputation as knowledgeable worker and have freedom in sharing their knowledge.

                The win-win situation is fully supported with the alignment of employee and organizational interests. Employees are able to build and create their own reputation in their career. They also have freedom to share their knowledge, apply their knowledge and generate new knowledge in any project at the organization. This will encourage their willingness to share and apply their knowledge to organizational problems solution and to assist other peers. As a result, this can build business reputation which support and fits with the organizational strategic capability. Having positive and competitive employees will build a flexible organization that can learn and succeed in this digital era.

V.    Social Media In Action

                Social media is very useful in converting and transferring the individual knowledge to a big pool of resources in an organization. For example, a company that has a massive batches of products for sales. It requires marketing and sales employee to be able to give good explanation on their product's pros and cons to retailers. As a solution, the head of marketing and sales department instructed a new way to disseminate the information to their retailers by providing videos of their staff promoting and explaining the products with the help of video editing software. This can boost up the retailers' confidence and understanding on the products.

                Social media helps to save time and money in an organization via integrated knowledge management systems and processes. For example, the use of online mobile or web application tools can streamline the team coordination in any project. These tools can be used for calendar sharing, project management and helps to keep the knowledge standardized at one place.

                Knowledge sharing between similar industry players drives further advancement in any business sector. For example, an airline company can develop and build online customer club for their members or passengers to share recommendations and advice pertaining their visits or trips to other countries.

                Staff or employee can learn more when the organizational knowledge is made accessible. This can improve their performance and ability to learn new tool or material relevant to their jobs. For example, an internal social network within an organization can help  to increase the talent base visibility and help employees reach out to one another.

                Daily conversations between individuals at the workplace can be encouraged to help solve problems. For example, a department in the organization requires help in solving a problem pertaining computer graphic problem. He posted the problem on the organization's Facebook group and received a response from another employee who gave suggestions and solution to the problem.

                Staff or employee can share their knowledge with customers and partners to support their business relationships which brings more value to the organization. For example, nowadays organization encourage their employees to share photos or pictures that showed their involvement in any activities at the organization. Some organizations even incorporated this photo sharing picture in their website.

VI. Issues And Concerns Of Social Media Usage in Knowledge Management

                Hamburg (2010) stated that there are some issues to be considered in connection with the use of social media for KM:

• Social media technology provides people with different ways and channels to share their experience and knowledge.  By having this sharing feature, people are able to give feedback after they experience and evaluate the knowledge.
• People are willing to share their experience and knowledge because they are willing to participate personally in social media. It is their own willingness and not because they need to.
• Users need to provide input for the KM system on regular basis. The knowledge must be kept up-to-date from time to time. Otherwise, the knowledge is obsolete. In this case, the KM system is considered invaluable if the knowledge is not updated.
• Having difficulties to arrange and organize information in the right way. It must be search able and in a well presented way so the most relevant is on top of the search results.
• Unstructured content can affect the organization in various ways. This resulted from the usage of public search engine by the organization.

                The use of social media technology within an organization needs to be managed properly including those that being prohibited by the management. Otherwise the outcomes that were intended to be prevented may still occur. For example, the staff or employee that brings their own laptop to the workplace and evade the policy and controls by conducting any online misbehavior will put risk on the organization. The situation will be even worse if they are using the organization’s network connection or using the company’s assets. At the end, the organization is the one who will be affected.

                Management of social media requires procedural and technical controls especially in terms of policy and technology. The risk assessment requires different approaches such as to any risk acceptance, risk avoidance, risk mitigation, and risk transfer. The first process to be conducted by the organization is the risk assessment of any social media used, This will help to identify the risks that showed possible threats and the impact on the business activities. Next is to identify the threats in terms of vulnerabilities and exploits. This is a challenge as the key ingredient of risk is uncertainty.

                In any unforeseen situation, the use of social media may become a major attack surface for the organization. Malware and Social Engineering attacks are rising where cybercriminals are using social media as the target source. This can affect the organization in revenue loss, the business reputation failure, loss of intellectual property, and higher cost in repairing the damage.

                Social media provides a doorway which can enable an attack on the organization. Although social media is a tool, there are circumstances if that tool is not used properly. Social media is best used in a positive way as a tool to generate business income or reduce the business costs.

VII.             Conclusions

                Knowledge management requires change in order to be at par with the current trend. Instilling social media technology is the best choice for an organization. It requires big support, incentives and recognition from the management. In order to engage employee participation, the management needs to reward their staff by support and incentives. Any business environment should encourage staff engagement, provide motivation and give inspiration to employees and customers. The next big step is to ensure successful adoption and implementation when the KM mechanisms are well understood in the organization itself.

                There are a few questions in implementing the social media technology for KM:

• What is KM as related to the organization? Is the existing KM sufficient enough for the organization?
• How can social media help in achieving both organization and KM objectives?

                As having KM in the organization is to enable making better decisions and generate more idea, approaching potential social media tools to support the existing KM means to empower all levels in the organization. In this digital era, social media is changing the way user or people behave and interact with one another. It encourages them to learn and engage in exchanging ideas or sharing information with among themselves. The advantage of using social media is one does not need to stay in the office to perform work related job. Office work can be completed on laptop via social networking, discussion with peers or customers can be conducted via online video conferencing, and work related matters can be done on mobile gadgets such as smart phone. Big organizations have started to invest in social technology implementation to optimize their existing KM in order to improve their knowledge process and usage among the employees. It is also often referred as Social KM. The use of social media technology will strengthen the existing KM because it disengages the traditional KM limitations and provides collaboration tools which are optimized from existing social media capabilities. 

                Basically, traditional KM is always thought as doing extra work within longer period. It requires time for the approval and implementation in the organization. Depending on which and what the organization considered as important and brings value to the business. However, KM with social media integration seems able to engage employees better compared to traditional KM. It provides a flexible platform for knowledge sharing in a casual way which employees tend to be more comfortable on using it. The content can be disseminated freely, people-centric attribute and determined by the importance value to the employees. These advantages have made KM with social media integration becoming more self-sufficient, prominent and effective among the employees.

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