Social Media in Organizations: Leveraging Personal and Collective Knowledge Processes

By using social media, many companies try to exploit new forms of interaction, collaboration, and knowledge sharing through leveraging the social, collaborative dimension of social software. The traditional collective knowledge management model based on a top-down approach is now opening up new avenues for a bottom-up approach incorporating a more personal knowledge management dimension, which could be synergized into collective knowledge using the social-collaborative dimension of social media. This article addresses the following questions: (1) How can social media support the management of personal and collective knowledge using a synergetic approach? (2) Do the personal and collective dimensions compete with each other, or can they reinforce each other in a more effective manner using social media? Our findings indicate that social media supports both the personal and collective dimensions of knowledge, while integrating a social collaborative dimension. The article introduces a framework that classifies social software into four categories according to the level of interaction and control. With certain tools, individuals are more in control. With other tools, the group is in control, resulting in a higher level of interaction and a diversity of knowledge and mindsets brought together. However, deploying and adopting these new tools in an organizational context is still a challenging task for management, owing to both organizational and individual factors.