“Its about how companies can use social media to revitalise and revolutionise the creation, dissemination and exploration of knowledge within their teams/across their teams”
In 1995, the Harvard Business Review published a book written by Ikujiro Nonata/Hirotaka Takeuchi called “The Knowledge Creating Company”. This was based on a white paper which highlighted the differences in the way that Western and Japanese companies approach innovation. I recently stumbled upon this whilst browsing in Foyle’s Book store as HBR have started publishing smaller abridged versions of these books.
The thinking within the book is something that I found engaging and also massively relevant to a modern digital audience, so I will share now. Nonata and Takeuchi’s thinking pivots around the two common ideas of tacit and explicit knowledge. Tacit is knowledge that is internalised and not shared. Explicit knowledge is shareable. They argue that companies who want to become dynamic need to find ways of moving knowledge from tacit to explicit.
The relationship between tacit and explicit, the shifting of thinking from tacit to explicit, is something that can rapidly occur within the modern enterprise or corporation if social techniques and technologies are deployed effectively. The ability to rapidly upload, categorise and disseminate information in the “social age” surely means all companies should be socially enabled to do this.
If we think about a traditional set-up of a company, you would probably argue that the company operates effectively in internal channels. Sharing information to improve job function, but not sharing externally to improve business dynamics.
The correct implementation of social media technologies within the business, not conducting relationships by email, can only improve business knowledge sharing.
Having sat through the Dell B2B Huddle a month or so ago, what became clear was that there were not a huge amount of examples of companies doing this well. Perhaps this should even be the first testing ground for social media within companies, using it to share information which will help build better products and develop better strategies.
There are many technologies which enable companies to kick-off their social media sharing. The one I like most, at the moment anyway, is Yammer. Yammer is a really interesting bit of microblogging technology specifically aimed at sharing of ideas and projects, Twitter for internal business really. It looks really good, its very topical and certainly something that companies should at least be taking a look at. Once the dynamics are understood here, then more companies should be able to branch out and play for real with Twitter and other social technologies. (It is also a good place to create rules of engagement which can be vitally important when you have multiple employees engaging in social tech.)
Digigen Quick Fixes:
1 Use social media to share ideas across projects. I really like BasecampHQ for this and use it on a number of different clients, across multiple agencies. Its a really good starting point for testing out social sharing of ideas – http://www.basecamphq.com
2 Implement wider company sharing through bespoke technology. Twitter is good, but public. Yammer is a far better solution and is being used widely by a number of companies. https://www.yammer.com/about/product
3 Start to create your own company wide systems and training programmes for social media. There are other great technologies out there that go beyond Yammer. Comment Technologies is a great example of this and we have attempted to use this for a number of clients. http://www.commenttechnologies.com/
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Raj
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mattbambow
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Raj
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Nadia
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mike
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mattbambow
