Social Networks and Knowledge Management by Andy Sols

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Social networks and their role in Knowledge Management.

Introduction Knowledge Management and Social Media According to Nick Bontis1, a very famous strategic consultant, capitalizing intellectual assets, finding ways to capture tacit knowledge and turning it into explicit, is what the world should be about from now on. When Nick Bontis was giving one of his famous consultancy speeches about knowledge management and intellectual capital, he used year 2010 as a limit2, a landmark to be precise. 2010 would be the year that technology would make knowledge so easily accessible, that research would take half, and even less, the time it takes us now. It would be a matter of asking the right questions and not searching for them. While writing these words, the calendar shows July 2010 and I am not sure if we are exactly where Nick Bontis thought we would be. One thing I can be certain though, we are getting there, slowly but still towards the right place. Knowledge management is nowadays considered “the next booming economy in a world of recession”3. Typing “Knowledge Management” in an internet search engine4, you get approximately 161 million hits. It’s not bad, having in mind that probably more than 161 million people for sure have the “I cannot exactly put my finger on it” syndrome about knowledge management, myself included up to recently. What is KM though, and why is it so important?

According to Ron Young, CEO/CKO of Knowledge Associates International, “Knowledge Management is the discipline of enabling individuals, teams and entire organizations to collectively and systematically create, share and apply knowledge, to better achieve their objectives”, while GlaxoSmithKline believes that “The capabilities by which communities within an organization capture the knowledge that is critical to them, constantly improve it and make it available in the most effective manner to those who need it, so that they can exploit it creatively to add value as a normal part of their work”. There is not just one way of defining KM5. There are several aspects and fields that this innovative fraction of management is applicable. Knowledge Management is about systems and technologies, is about processes, methods and techniques, is about managing knowledge assets, is about people and learning organizations and finally, having a holistic approach initiative towards the entire organization. Knowledge management is not a discipline. On the contrary, each and every one of us should have established in mind his own definition of KM and what best suites ones organization. Sir John Browne (1997), former CEO of BP, in a HBR article6 defines KM on BP’s aspect: “Most activities or tasks are not one-time events. Whether it’s drilling a well or conducting a transaction at a service station, we do the same things repeatedly. Our philosophy is fairly simple: every time we do something again, we should do it better than the last time”. Coming from a man that spent more than forty years in that same organization, one can assume that his definition comes from experience and not from a theoretical book. On one hand, we have KM and the importance of applying it in our organization in order to improve our product/service and our way of selling it. On the other hand though, we have social networks and a whole different attitude on creating the right

image, communicating, reaching buyers or anybody who is interested in our organization’s work. But what exactly are social networks, media, 2.0 tools etc.7?

Grouping of individuals into specific groups, like small rural communities or a neighborhood subdivision, but mostly done online, can be a very simple definition of what is social networking8. Www.whatissocialnteworking.com introduces its content with a very simple quote: “Social networking. . . It's the way the 21st century communicates today.”

Social networking is based on websites, sites that are created as online communities for users to join creating their profile and search through millions of other users to find people that have common interests and beliefs, share and seek knowledge on many subjects, form professional alliances, find employment and many more. Traditional social networks are created to remove geographical barriers in exchanging knowledge, making friends, learning about new cultures and so on. Specialized networks are created as well, for people that share the same profession or hobby, in order to meet others with the same interests from all around the world.

In other words, so successfully placed by the aforementioned website, a social network is how we now communicate. There is no turning back into old ways of communicating our message, or reaching out to other individuals.

Probably this was what Nick Bontis was talking about in most of his worldwide known shows: A global network, where you will be able to find everything and anything in almost seconds after you thought about it. But now instead of calling it a “library”9, we call it “Social Network”.

Where is the connecting point though? Where do KM and Social Networks meet exactly in order to complement each other? And most importantly, when building a

KM culture for your organization, is it possible to afford not to exploit the capabilities of today’s way of communicating?

Welcome to the future.

Combining KM and Social Networking: Political Campaigning For the purpose of this assignment, we were requested to apply our findings on how KM benefits or can benefit from Social Networking on a specific field of interest within the broad field of knowledge management.

Hansen (2002); Reagans and McEvily (2003) believe that knowledge sharing has become a key concern to organizations, in our case campaigns, not only because of the growing importance and value of the knowledge itself, but because, as Leonard and Sensiper (1998) agree, the importance of understanding that tacit knowledge is of more value than explicit in the innovation process. Most importantly, turning that tacit knowledge into explicit is what defines successful campaigns with knowledge sharing cultures from others that do not practice it.10

Based on my previous work experience, I have decided to study this apply of social networking on Political Campaigns, using as my main case study the “Obama for America” campaign of 2007-2008.

In David Meerman Scott’s book “The new rules of Marketing and PR” (2009)11, one can find many interesting statistics about the internet, and from then on about everything that uses internet in order to be applicable. It took 5 years for the Internet to reach 50 million users, while Radio and TV needed double or triple that amount of

time. But how exactly did these “new rules” helped in spreading the word in the case of the Obama campaign?

Traditional Marketing tools in Campaigning consist of TV ads, Radio ads and flyers mainly, banners in the streets, stickers during speeches, even some flags while news on TV are on. Some years ago, I read a survey about how revolutionary was TV on Elections12, the change it brought some decades ago when USA, with all countries following instantly, started the famous “Debates” on TV with the candidates discussing and answering questions while millions of viewers were deciding who to vote based on the levels of persuasion one had as a gift.

This though, is not the case today. Whoever still uses those means of communicating a message through elections, can already sign his sentence to oblivion. With merely 100 different channels, on cable TV, satellite TV, local channels of every district, let alone counting the hundreds of different radio stations Nationwide, one can realize that “throwing” money into traditional media, nowadays will not work in any case scenario.

Here is where New Media and Social Networking enter the game of communication.

As previously mentioned Social Networking is how the world communicates today13, with this meaning that everything is evolving around the internet. The way we shop, the way we read, the way we research and subsequently the way we vote. People don’t want to be persuaded anymore by no-one. People want to be educated, in every aspect one can be, in order to understand want the candidates stand for. They want to know who the candidate they want to vote for is. His past, his present, his family status, his hobbies, alongside with his beliefs, what he is in favor of, what laws he supports, his financial ideas, his plan and many more. Inspiration comes when 6

you know, and not when you are getting brainwashed by some obsolete ways of communication created by some old-fashioned spin doctors.

When talking about Political Campaigns one should realize that is a service that is created and is every time unique as it never existed before. Harry Beckwith (1997) wrote an amazing book by the title “Selling the Invisible” and he couldn’t have been more right. Selling a service is like selling the invisible. Nobody knows whether is going to work properly or as promised14. Even worse, probably there is nothing to do afterwards. So how do you know when the invisible goes wrong?

Political campaigns as aforementioned could be considered in one aspect as a service. A pricey one, and when non – effective, is as well just a waste of time. Another aspect though, a better one to be precise, is that political campaigns can be considered a huge opportunity of creating amazing information databases15, concerning pretty much everything that there is to be discussed on every political level. In other words, campaigns are a place that tremendous amount of knowledge is gathered, and it needs to be managed!!

Social Networking – the statistics and the Obama Phenomenon

We all heard of these “Social Networks”. Facebook16, Twitter17, LinkedIn18, MySpace19 are some of the most famous ones. Each and every one of us has joined or at least visited the past 4 years a social network. Almost all the planet has “googled” (search in Google engine)20 something at least once. And to be more precise, according to Meerman Scott (2009), 55% of all American adults (74% of all users in USA) used the internet for political purposes during the Obama campaign. All of those searches conducted in a social media form.

45% of “wired” Americans watched videos related to politics.

33% of “wired” Americans shared digital political content with others.

52% of the people that have a social networking profile used it and the site for political purposes.

So if one considers a campaign to be a huge database, a knowledge center to be managed, then for sure social networking is the way to spread your word.

Visiting http://my.barackobama.com one can realize how innovative that campaign was. Reading David Plouffe’s (2009) book on Obama’s campaign “The audacity to win”21, I was left amazed on how simple was to spread their word fast, efficiently without any interruptions by mediators. It was always Obama talking to the people directly through technologies that never were used before in campaigning.

People found out that he was considering Joe Biden to be his running mate as a candidate for the Vice – Presidency through his TWITTER site, long before there was a Press Release in the traditional media. Barack Obama, befriended 5 million people in FACEBOOK, and had the same amount and even more followers on TWITTER, while the emailing list for people that requested information was longtime passed 13 million people22.

The information that can be gathered from these sites, are unbelievable. Using all that information, you create voter personas, you monitor whether people accept some proposals or not, but most importantly you take in what people want to share

with you, giving you the opportunity to utilize their ideas to make your proposals even better than they used to.

The aforementioned web page23 wasn’t useful for the people just for finding information. It helped in educating them in order to become volunteers as well, and spread the Obama message in the word of mouth. Here, I must add that despite the fact that the new rules and social media gave a tremendous boost on communication today, still in election procedures word of mouth still plays a very important role. Anything that makes it go around easier though, is the way to go. And social networking is.

Up till today, August 2010 when these words are written, one can visit the my.barackobama.com website. It is a state-of-the-art website, easy to navigate with amazing graphs and gadgets to see. Direct link to www.youtube.com for videos24, link to Obama’s blog, TWITTER and FACEBOOK and every other social network site ever existed 25(!), sign up pages for e-mail, for mobile sms, for notifications, the list is endless. You can even create your own account, called MyBO (my Barack Obama), or directly donate money to the campaign.

What amazed me though is that, even after the election, the site is still functioning, featuring stories of volunteers, but also getting ready for other elections to come. All this under the title “Organizing for America” placed on a red-white-blue background. Those colors were used a million times before, but maybe never looked so great. On top of that, you can clearly see that the number of followers and supporters of Obama in the social networking sites rises (it reached more than 12 million)26 while the Democratic Party (Obama’s Party)27 has a mere of 111 thousand supporters.

Conclusion

One can say that social networking does offer a tremendous help in applying Knowledge Management in organizations of any kind. Capitalizing knowledge is very important nowadays, mainly in order to keep getting better and better, but not in a function-process kind of way.

In the case of Political campaigning, it’s not too much to say that if social networking and media in general were not invented, it would be an “industry” slowly going towards its end. Of course politics will always dominate the best part of our lives, but campaigning after “Yes we can”28 will never be the same again.

References

http://www.nickbontis.com/BontisCV.pdf http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYXJWDdPqu0 3 http://www.knowledge-management-online.com/the-importance-of-knowledge-management.html 4 http://www.google.com/ 5 http://www.knowledge-management-online.com/Definition-of-Knowledge-Management.html 6 http://hbr.org/1997/09/unleasing-the-power-of-learning-an-interview-with-british-petroleumsjohn-browne/ar/1 7 Arnia Sophia van Zyl, “The impact of social networking 2.0 on organizations”, The electronic library, 26(6): 2009 8 http://www.whatissocialnetworking.com/ 9 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYXJWDdPqu0 10 Laila Naif Marouf, “Social Networks and knowledge sharing in organizations: a case study”, Journal of Knowledge Management, 11(6): 2007. 11 David Meerman Scott,2009,”The new rules of Marketing and PR: how to use social media, blogs, news releases, online video and viral marketing to reach buyers directly”, New York: John Wiley and sons. 12 http://www.kathimerini.gr/4dcgi/news/kath/frontpage_1edition/homepage 13 http://www.whatissocialnetworking.com/ 14 Harry Beckwith,1997, “Selling the invisible”, U.S.A: Barnes and Noble. 15 http://www.obamapedia.org/ 16 http://www.facebook.com/ 17 http://twitter.com/ 18 http://www.linkedin.com/ 19 http://www.myspace.com/ 20 http://www.google.com/ 21 David Ploufe, 2009,”The audacity to win: the inside story and lessons of Barack Obama’s historic victory”, New York: Penguin Group. 22 David Meerman Scott,2009,”The new rules of Marketing and PR: how to use social media, blogs, news releases, online video and viral marketing to reach buyers directly”, New York: John Wiley and sons. 2

23 24

http://www.barackobama.com/index.php www.youtube.com

http://www.barackobama.com/index.php http://www.facebook.com/barackobama 27 http://www.facebook.com/democrats 28 http://my.barackobama.com/page/invite/yeswecanvideo 26