From consuming content, the web user has shifted to creating content while conversing socially about it. The media which meet these social requirements have been christened Social Media. Some examples are the sites YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia and Twitter. Social media might have an important role in the future of knowledge management. A great benefit that many of social media possess is that they can be great at gathering, storing and spreading all sorts of knowledge. This benefit is being put to use in organizations and has the potential to become a very interesting communication channel. Knowledge management is being put to use in countless shapes and is in a constant evolving process.
As a graduate student at GriDD I am researching effects of the social media phenomona microblogging in organizations. Microblogging is a variant of blogging which allows users to quickly post short messages on the web for others to access. These messages can be restricted to a certain number of individuals, sent exclusively to a specific contact, or made available to the World Wide Web. Twitter is probably the most well known microblogging platform currently available on the web.
To find out if implementing microblogging in an organization has an effect on knowledge sharing, a pilot with the microblogging application WorkVoices has started at TriMM interactive media. I am conducting two surveys and will be hosting a few focus groups to gain the necessary insight in the motivation of the active and non-active users. The first survey has been dispersed and the responses are coming in. The second survey will be spread out in a couple of weeks. When the results are in they will be analyzed. Of course the final article will be shared!
