I found an interesting article by Tom Warner. In these two paragraphs, it talks about using Facebook to spread knowledge around. What’s your opinion on this concept?
One such company, Serena Software in San Mateo, Calif., offers a companywide program called “Facebook Fridays,” which encourages employees to find fun and personal connections in the workplace, she says. Each Friday, employees are granted one hour of personal time to spend on their Facebook profiles and connect with co-workers, customers, family and friends.
“This type of Facebook usage encourages people to get to know each other, but it’s more of a knowledge-management concept,” Anklam says. “It’s also a good way for companies to channel the technology and the social platform to support behavior inside companies.
At least in one sense, Facebook is all about knowledge management/sharing … I gain knowledge about what is going on with friends and colleagues there. I see that there is also a lot of knowledge being shared about a broad variety of topics as people share links to videos, blogs, news stories, etc, as well as their opinions on these topics.
I think its a great idea and a way to meet a lot more people. I applied it to GovLoop recently as a result of a meeting I attended. The meeting was a regular gathering of employees in our city government who are designated as ‘champions’ for our process of becoming a high performance organization. During the meeting I thought about the benefit of expanding our opportunities to exchange ideas and stories and gaining input from others outside our organization. I was thinking that maybe I could find a social networking site focused on HPOs, but I could not.
Therefore, I started a group (High Performance Organizations) here on GovLoop and sent everyone in the group an invite to join GovLoop and the group. This has resulted in about a dozen doing so and others on GovLoop joining us. I’ve been working on getting the knowledge flowing by researching sites that write about HPO and providing links to them and regularly sharing info I find on blogs.
Whoa. Facebook has nothing to do with knowledge management. It is completely bottom up — knowledge sharing.
Would love to hear the difference between knowledge management and knowledge sharing. Facebook is a tool that can be used for knowledge management depending on how it is used. While not as robust in features such as LinkedIn or GovLoop for KM, it can be used to hold discussions and share information. I think a great opportunity with social networks is to make knowledge management fun rather than the choir it sometimes seems.
Facebook is a tool that I can use to find people with the same interests or the same questions that I have. I can use it to get in touch with these people to exchange links and actual information (through IM or the inbox). In the larger sense, if a company were encouraging me to use it, it has the potential to assist me in collaboration – and the agency that encourages that environment is an agency I am happy to work in. I agree with Ari that this constitutes knowledge sharing, which I think of as a subset or small part of knowledge management.
interesting concept, however i would not limit it to one company/brand (facebook), as noted by others there are more usefull platforms like LinkedIn but also do not forget Ning 🙂
Management is providing the environment. Sharing is using it….