Use of Social Media for Knowledge Sharing in Multinational Corporations

Individual Assignment May 10th 2010

How can certain elements of Social Media such as Blogs, Wikis, Tagging and Social Networking be used to improve Knowledge Sharing in large Multinational Corporations?

James von Funck 30970588

Tutor: Scott Gardner

Knowledge Sharing 2.0: Already a Enterprise Reality With the awakening of Web 2.0, the new interactive Web as a communication platform, came the birth of Instant Messaging, Blogging, and Social Contact Websites such as Face book, LinkedIn and Twitter. Their enormous growth in recent years did not stay unnoticed by the corporate world, the US-Market research Institute Gartner claims: “Social Software is an Enterprise Reality” (Schaffry 2010). It is therefore no surprise that Social Software already have their equivalents in the corporate world, the Market Leaders being Jive Social Business Software, Microsoft SharePoint and IBM Lotus Connections (Drakos et al. 2009). Lotus Connections, for example encompasses five discrete components: Profiles, Blogs, Dog-Ear a.k.a. Social Bookmarking, Communities, and Activities, which all resemble the activities taking place on social websites. The analogy “Enterprise 2.0” is already commonly used, referring to the idea of a networking, communicative enterprise, based on the technology and paradigms of Web 2.0. IBMs claims that social computing encompasses the knowledge management paradigm of focussing on the people, rather than on tools and processes (IBM Website). Gartner predicts that as soon as 2014, 20 per cent of corporate users will use social networking services as their main instrument of communication. This is on the one hand due to a demographic change in companies, as the new generation of employees have a stronger predisposition for alternative ways of communication, on the other hand a change of paradigms as companies are deliberately trying to create social networks amongst employees (Schaffry 2010). The success of Social software is regarded as being based...