Harnessing social media as a knowledge management tool

Abstract

Knowledge management and social media have become trendy expressions in the business life. Knowledge is seen as the most important strategic asset and knowledge workers play a central role in value creation. Organizations have an urgent need to pay attention to effective knowledge sharing, thus, it is important to understand what encourages individuals to share their knowledge. Social media tools, like Facebook have become mainstream, modified personal relationships and generated new possibilities to facilitate collaboration. An exploratory survey investigates how social media tools are being used for knowledge sharing and examines the characteristics of the different generations. The results have shown that organizations prefer not to allow the usage of social media; but where the employees are supported to reach these tools, high proportion of them utilize these technologies. This chapter introduces these results and provides recommendations on how to foster employee motivation to use social media for work purposes in knowledge sharing.

Keywords Knowledge management, Social media, Organizations