Wisdom of the Masses

Your most valuable asset—employee knowledge—can be difficult to harness, but social media provides the tools you need to capture and distribute organizational knowledge effectively.

Regardless of your industry or the size of your company, your most valuable asset is the one that will never appear on your balance sheet: employee knowledge. This knowledge can be explicitly documented, in the case of policies and procedures, or it can be implicit—as in the case of relationships and experience. Both kinds of knowledge evolve over time as business conditions and the corporate culture change. And both can provide a competitive advantage when harnessed effectively.

For nearly two decades, enterprises have pursued formal knowledge management initiatives. A variety of technologies have been employed in the quest to streamline the flow of information, from centralized databases to search algorithms to Web-based portals. And while these efforts have helped to increase documentation and retain explicit knowledge, they often fell short on collecting implicit knowledge.

That’s where social media comes in. Because social media technologies mimic the way informal knowledge often flows in social relationships, they can be extremely effective for capturing information that may have been considered too anecdotal in the past (but is, nonetheless, important to the business). And because social media is designed to let information evolve over time as multiple contributors offer their own data, it can also provide more up-to-date knowledge than traditional knowledge management systems.

Build a Collaboration Culture

Organizations that use social media for knowledge management can benefit in indirect ways as well. In addition to encouraging more complete documentation of implicit knowledge, social media provides an intuitive, flexible platform for centralizing and indexing corporate best practices. This centralized resource can help to bring new employees on board quickly and effectively—as well as strengthen a culture of collaboration for all workers. It may even help to shorten product development cycles and reduce redundant work across departmental lines.

In many enterprises, critical knowledge has traditionally remained siloed within business units or functional groups. Social media can exploit the real-life relationships among employees in different areas of the business to help break the de facto boundaries for corporate information and, in turn, foster greater innovation.

In some cases, using social media for knowledge management can help enterprises solve tough problems quickly and with very little (if any) investment. This technique is called crowdsourcing. As the theory goes, massive collaboration within a large group tends to generate a better solution to a problem than experts working alone. The technique implicitly recognizes that good ideas can come from anyone—regardless of formal qualifications or expertise. A social media framework reinforces this viewpoint by flattening the organization and rewarding contributors whose ideas rise to the top.

Your Information-Gathering Arsenal

Enterprises can use several social media technologies to collect and distribute valuable employee knowledge. Wikis are perhaps the most important of these tools. By giving employees the ability to create and edit interlinked entries on the company’s internal network, wikis help simplify the gathering and indexing of corporate knowledge. And because wikis facilitate collaborative editing, they can be corrected, appended, and expanded by other employees over time—a practice that encourages accuracy and completeness.

Internal blogs can also capture key employee know-how. If your IT department enables author-generated meta-tags, these blog posts can be included in network-wide search results and incorporated into the larger body of enterprise knowledge.

Best Practices for Encouraging Participation

Implementing social media technologies to capture organizational knowledge is one thing—but actually getting employees to use them is another. If you’re just getting started with knowledge management or social media, a handful of best practices can help increase your odds of success. The following guidelines can help ensure that your social media initiatives will catch on:

• Get top executives on board. Without the endorsement of top managers, employees may feel that time spent contributing to knowledge management systems is not considered legitimate work time.
• Get feedback from users before you roll out social media tools. How will employees actually use the social media tools you are considering? Do they find the technologies intuitive and straightforward? By reaching beyond the bounds of the IT department during the design phase for your knowledge management infrastructure, you can identify and correct any perceived obstacles to participation before rolling out the system company-wide.
• Give the system time to catch on. Social media—especially when used to collect and distribute implicit employee knowledge—relies on voluntary participation. Although some employees may initially feel that they do not have the time or expertise to contribute to the corporate knowledge management infrastructure, a positive executive example can help increase widespread participation over time. The base of archived knowledge will also increase as employees begin updating and augmenting wiki entries in the course of their own work.
• Recognize and reward top contributors. Social media gives everyone within the organization—not just people recognized as experts by virtue of their formal training or title—an opportunity to contrib­ute ideas. These discussions often cross departmental lines and therefore cannot be limited to input from just one area of the business. Sometimes, the best ideas may come from employees that work in a completely unrelated business group. By providing community recognition of the best ideas, regardless of their source, knowledge management through social media can help promote a meritocratic corporate culture that rewards innovation rather than rank.

Although employee knowledge can be difficult to harness, social media offers a range of tools that can help you capture and distribute organizational knowledge effectively. With the right tools and a best-practices approach to knowledge management, your enterprise can be on the path to leveraging the best of what your employees have to contribute.