Wisdom of the Masses

Regardless of your industry or the size of your company, your most valuable asset is the one that will never appear on your balance sheet: employee knowledge. This knowledge can be explicitly documented, in the case of policies and procedures, or it can be implicit—as in the case of relationships and experience. Both kinds of knowledge evolve over time as business conditions and the corporate culture change. And both can provide a competitive advantage when harnessed effectively.

Because social media technologies mimic the way informal knowledge often flows in social relationships, they can be extremely effective for capturing information that may have been considered too anecdotal in the past (but is, nonetheless, important to the business). And because social media is designed to let information evolve over time as multiple contributors offer their own data, it can also provide more up-to-date knowledge than traditional knowledge management systems.

Organizations that use social media tools such as wikis and blogs for knowledge management can benefit in a number of ways. For example, social media provides an intuitive, flexible platform for centralizing and indexing best practices; helps break down traditional silos between business units or functional groups; and can enable crowdsourcing techniques that can help solve tough problems quickly.

Implementing social media technologies to capture organizational knowledge is one thing—but actually getting employees to use them is another. Be sure to get top executives on board and get feedback from users before you roll out social media tools. Give the system time to catch on. And then, be sure to recognize and reward top contributors. With the right tools and a best-practices approach to knowledge management, your enterprise can be on the path to leveraging the best of what your employees have to contribute.

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