The period of calling the global implementation of technological advances is over. Nowadays, utilizing computer technologies is no longer a luxury, nor is it "desirable" or "preferable". It became already a requirement. The world exists in two realities, and virtual reality has become extremely powerful. One should not oppose the idea of it since it is a usual new stage in the process of humankind development. In the era when the virtual world became a new reality, it is necessary to adapt your practices to new requirements. The tools and practices of the system of knowledge managements are, in my opinion those that actually benefit from the new advances.
It is not surprising that on the early stages of establishing a virtual reality, such abstract notions like knowledge would become to be treated as an object, and even more, as a tool to organize work. However, this is how knowledge management and knowledge management systems arose. Awas defines knowledge management as the process of capturing and making use of a firm's collective expertise anywhere in the business - on paper, on documents, in databases, or in people's heads. The author also calls it a fuel for innovation. Malhotra (1999) marks that knowledge management caters to the critical issues of organizational adaptation, survival and competence in the face of increasingly discontinuous environmental change. Essentially, it embodies organizational processes that seek synergistic combinations of data and information processing capacity of human beings. A good summary was made by Taft (2000), saying that knowledge management is the classification, dissemination and categorization of information and people throughout an organization. To simplify, we may refer to the definition presented by the official website of NASA explaining knowledge management as the way of getting the right information to the right people at the right time, and helping people create knowledge and share and act upon information.
As it has been mentioned before, new technological advances and especially the strengthening of virtual communication created a solid platform for the development of knowledge management practices making the idea of sharing much easier in implementation and supervision.
PART1
The quotation from the article by Jonathan Reichental (2011) published online in "O'Reilly Radar"in a peculiar way summarizes the main idea of his work, "The days of the single, authoritative voice are coming to an end. The community has prevailed."
In his article, Reichentaldescribes the whole idea of applying knowledge management to be "elusive". However, the arrival of social media and social networking, in his opinion, gave a new and different approach to its methodology. To illustrate this, Reichentalsingles out two major problems connected with application of knowledge management, namely behavioural and technical. In Reichental's opinion, the behavioural issues here are mostly because of the lack of proper motivation of sharing their knowledge within the organization, as it may seem like this way they lessen their own importance. Technical challenges that are pointed out by Reichental are, in my opinion, a subjective matter, as the arguments given to support this point focus on the inappropriate organization of information on, for example, organization's websites which makes employees of this organization prefer a public search engine rather than an internal website. This is, however, not necessarily true to all the organizations. Another point, which is rather not technical but actually behavioural, was connected with "traditional", or rather "habitual" sharing when employees use knowledge management practices as a habit rather than actually believe in its efficiency.
The reason why social media changed the approach to knowledge management tools in general is because it is capable of multiplying knowledge. Besides, it also reshapes the concept of content, thus in some way changing the notion of knowledge itself. Reichental remarks that when a piece of information is brought into means of social media, say a forum, it instantly becomes a part of interaction and can change their form and meaning as the interaction develops, making the content "unstructured". Whether this is a good point the author is somewhat vague, saying that this makes it "a challenge". However, he focuses on a major positive outcome of this development, which is a complete re-evaluation of knowledge management. According to Reichental, the whole management component will be rethought and reshaped, and it makes knowledge more available and widespread than any other practice. Reichental chose does not focus on the issues of privacy connected with the development of social media, which is a positive side, since it would hardly contribute to the point of the article.
Patricia M. Jones also focuses on social networks as ways of application knowledge management by creating and sharing information within a kind of group. At first, Jones focuses on the explanation of the ideas of knowledge management. She defines the goal of these practices as to "improve organizational performance" by sharing information. However, she also emphasizes that it is not just a technology, as it involves actually dealing with a type of organization or "community", as she calls it, within which the interaction and knowledge sharing takes place, thus making it consider the behavioural peculiarities of those participating in the sharing (which corresponds with the challenge that Reichental singled out in his article) and actually the content of shared information.
Besides, Jones also considered it important to mention that the practices also deal with technological issues. To develop this idea, the author decided to exemplify what should strategies focus on to be efficient. According to Jones, they have to "provide persistence and relevant indexing strategies". The author also considers pros and cons of explicit process models. Then Jones mentions that the complexity of using some tools for sharing information may also influence the quality of the process and management of an organization.
Furthermore, Jones adds one more aspect in the issues of knowledge management application, and it is connected with organizational culture. Indeed, the way that an organization relates to a possible change is crucial to the level to which the tool will be adopted and developed.
Finally, the author also focuses on social networks as one of the effective and contemporary ways to apply knowledge management practices. Emphasizing that a social network is an important object for the research of human behaviour, Jones also mentions social networks function to establish certain groups and build teams. The author also mentions the notion of "knowledge network" as a type of social network or groups of social networks that links shared knowledge. Technology is an effective tool to support knowledge networks, according to the author, who illustrates this by providing the example of such a network, namely IKNOW system in the University of Illinois. Like Reichental, Jones briefly remarks on the privacy issues but does not specify the ways to deal with them.
Christoph Palmert (2012) also conducted the analysis of knowledge management in social media era. His article mostly focuses on the practical side that analyses the same process from another angle, meaning Palmert does not focus on how knowledge management can be implemented through technologies but rather how technologies could help carry out knowledge management. In fact, he is focused on one programme called Enterprise 2.0 that uses the platforms harnessed by Facebook, Twitter and other popular social networks to help knowledge management be applied specifically in business sphere. Palmert mentions that to find social media applications for implementing knowledge management is not actually a difficult task. However, he also emphasizes that more important is who uses these technologies, which is obvious. Moreover, Palmert remarks that employees are actually those who define how this tool is utilized. To illustrate this, the author compares the meaning of implicit and explicit knowledge. The point that Palmert explains in this part can referenced back to Reichental and his assumption how employees may feel reluctant to share to prevent the decrease of their importance in the company. Palmert, however, gives the insight to what the implicit knowledge really is. It includes experiences and correlations, which cannot actually be transferred. Hence, if the value of the employee is defined by his or her implicit knowledge, sharing knowledge does not pose a threat to their status in an organization. However, Palmert realizes that a simple explanation would not create a mutual trust within the whole organization and suddenly encourage massive knowledge sharing. Instead, he suggests creating e-peer groups, which would consists of a certain number of people who trust each other.
Moreover, Palmert, like Reichental, notices how technology reshapes the meaning of knowledge management. Here, the author mentions that knowledge networks in some way lessen the importance of management, as their structure by nature does not require any specific guidance. According to Palmert, it is essentially the group of people who share knowledge, and that is why the whole concept in some way ruins hierarchy.
However, Palmert instantly somewhat contradicts himself saying that guidance is actually required while establishing the network. In reality, Palmert does not mention this explicitly but he means that any company's management has to facilitate the establishment of group networks that are not seemingly guided and where employees can feel free to share information and identify themselves within the group. The role of management here is to ensure that members of separate groups belonged to several networks where they would share information as well, thus still creating a single organization with intertwined separate points. Such interaction, according to Palmert and his assumptions, will ensure company's success.
Robert Mason (2011) also confronts knowledge management and social media. He does not focus, however, on the process of implementation of this connection, but he rather expresses issues that result from it. In his article, Mason first expresses the importance of knowledge and information technology, as they are key factors for innovation and creativity and therefore for the success of an organization. This, in his opinion, has attracted the attention of scholars to the subject of knowledge management as a tool to create a "learning organization" or a "knowing organization" as the only way to be a leader on the market nowadays.
Mason then adds that social media environment is responsible for a change in the sphere of management, thus supporting the above-mentioned points of Reichental and Palmert. However, Mason singles out the issue that was ignored by the previous researchers mentioned, and this is the difference in how technology is used by different generations. Among other issues, he names the nature of those connections created by social media and social networking, which are weak and have no ground to strengthen. Mason also expresses concern about the issue of privacy, also briefly mentioned by Reichental and Jones.
According to Mason, the solution greatly depends on company's policy and company's management, thus he somewhat shares the opinion of Palmert who mentioned the importance of implicit supervision of networking within an organization. Mason also mentions customers and competitors as supporting factors in this sphere.
Comparing and contrasting knowledge management and social media was also the task of Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald (2011). They view both concepts primarily as separate phenomena and prove this point from the beginning of their article, stating that they have similarities like focusing on information, using technology to access it, involve the concept of sharing and collaboration. However, they find it important to mention that knowledge management first of all relates to the employer-employee relationship. According to them, knowledge management is "what company management tells me I need to know, based on what they think is important." Therefore, if we picture the structure of how knowledge management works, this is a vertical plan with a one-direction arrow. On the contrary, social media is more about interaction with your peers, identification of yourself within some group. Social networking here is a round diagram with "me" in the circle and arrows (opinions) coming to me. However, the scheme here lacks hierarchy and imposition, because its purpose is rather "a friendly tip" than "an order from above".
PART2
The idea to use popular social networks as one of the ways to increase customer's attention and customer's satisfaction is becoming popular at recent times. Nowadays, the mostly visited social networks include MySpace, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter and others. Besides, social networks also vary within a country. The previously mentioned systems are global, however, they are mostly preferred in the western world, whereas post-socialist countries, for example, have their own virtual ground favourites. Anyway, it is necessary for the company to analyse the specifics of a social network and the rage of its users before choosing it as a platform for your marketing.
While creating pages in social networks, companies aim at boosting sales first of all. However, this final goal is achieved through several stages which include increasing customer's interests, interaction with customers, creating customer loyalty achieved by relating to your customers, personalizing your interaction and slightly blurring the boundaries of your money- our product relationship.
AT&T is one of the biggest US telecommunications company that focuses on producing cell phones. It also provides service of distant connection, Internet connection, and cable TV. It also widely uses the means of social networks to increase customer's satisfaction.
The company has two twitter pages. If we access the official twitter sources of AT&T, we may notice that it gives references to other pages in other social networks. The popularity of a microblog on Twitter is measured by the number of its followers (readers). So, the company has 170,093 followers, which would be a great number for a person yet not an impressive number for a global company. The last tweet for the moment of analysis was posted on December 28, which means that the company updates its pages regularly but not constantly. Now let us look at the last tweet posted by the company. It includes a piece of news from CNN with a question aimed at involving audience into conversation. The post is having ten retweets, which is a signal for the audience reacting to the post, however, the size if this audience is rather insignificant. Judging from the results, Twitter is probably not the best investment to marketing. On the other hand, the company promoting distance communication and mobile phones most of which have Internet access nowadays is to some extent required to use this particular network. Thus, they should consider changing their way of communication on Twitter to increase popularity.
Facebook page, however, gives a more optimistic view of company's popularity, which is measured by "likes" on this social network. So, the company got over 3 million likes, which is a good result. If to compare its popularity with that of main competitors, T-Mobile USA has over 2 million likes, but over 4 million Facebook users liked Verizon Wireless. It includes, of course, the possibility that the part of these likes are from the same people, but generally Facebook rating is rather significant and should be take consideration during the competitor analysis.
Besides, AT&T also has a newspage in YouTube, which is the most popular video hosting service in the world. So, the company's newspage has over 10000 subscribers, which is a comparatively good result, and the latest video hosted on YouTube got almost 350000 views.
PART3
Before choosing the option of promoting their product with the means of a social network, the companies have to decide what purpose they are trying to achieve. The increasing communication within the organization should probably be implemented through internal networking. However, sometimes the communication in internal networks does not gain the popularity of a social networking to which employees are accustomed to in their lives. This is why companies decide to step out and create, for example, a page in a global or country-scale network. The organization of this page and information shared on this page primarily depends on the target audience. This can be the ground for employee communication. However, this might be a powerful tool for marketing if used wisely.
If to analyse the example of AT&T, the company has chosen the most popular social networks in a modern virtual world, namely Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. As we could see from the three pages analysed, Facebook is the most popular and therefore the most visited page of all three. News that is posted on Facebook gets its likes and comments, which signifies people's interest in the information provided by the moderators.
Twitter is less popular, however, it has its followers. Let us not forget that that the purpose of this social network is different from that of Facebook and Twitter's most popular pages belong first to celebrities who people get the opportunity to communicate in person with. However, the company's posts get their responses, although in significantly smaller scale.
The purpose of a video hosting is first to share videos, and it is obvious that advertising videos from a serious company that produces mobile phones and provides service for distant communication, unless they are very entertaining, will not gain huge popularity. The benefit of YouTube hosts is that you can share their links on other social network pages that is why the company works on it as well.
Another purpose of having a page in a popular social network is, undoubtedly, competitor's analysis. As it has been shown above, it is easy to single out your popularity among the biggest rivals comparing the ratings in social network. It is also possible to analyze what causes this difference in popularity while looking through the posts, which receive the majority of likes and comments.
SUMMARY
This paper analyses the application of knowledge management while using social networks. It gives the review of contemporary researches conducted on the topic and analyses the application of this tool on practice on the example of one of the global companies.
Knowledge management is in its essence a practice of sharing information to the right person at the right time. Its concepts have been established before the increase of social networking popularity, but is in fact of the same origin. The growth of social media users revolutionized the way of sharing information and therefore reshaped the concept of knowledge management as well.
The researchers mostly paid attention to how knowledge management may be reshaped by social networking and social media (having the former in focus). One of the researches, however, shifted the focus to how social media can contribute to knowledge management with the access on the former. One of the groups viewed these two aspects as phenomena that contradict each other, as they use different approaches to information sharing. Behavioural, technical and privacy issues were singled out by the majority of the scholars. Researchers also mentioned the importance of free sharing within a network that has to be created in a voluntary way by people who trust each other. However, some of them emphasized the implicit role of invisible supervision conducted by management and their policy to control the information shared among each other or with customers.
AT&T's implementation of social network for the sake of sharing information was analysed. The company uses the service of three biggest global social networks. Using the abilities the networks provide, the company shares news and interacts with customers. Facebook page is the most popular and gets extensive response from its followers. Besides, as the competitors have similar pages in the same social network, it easy to measure the difference in popularity and compare marketing tools both companies use.
