There was an interesting story featured on inside facebook that talks about how what was traditionally a younger persons application has been adding record numbers of older users.

The stats are rather interesting. It seems while Facebook crossed the 70 million active US user mark this month its college student group ( 18-25 ) decreased by nearly 600,000 users which is 3%.  However older generations are logging on at a staggering pace.

This is definitely a section of users to keep a close eye on as facebook grow

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The last example talked about how Zappos, the online retalier, uses twitter to reach out to its customers. So the questions is would it make sense for your company?

What is twitter  ? ( for those of you who haven’t been caught up in this craze ).

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. While the service cost nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

Since its creation in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained notability and popularity worldwide. It is sometimes described as the “SMS of the Internet”^[3] since the use of Twitter’s application programming interface for sending and receiving short text messages by other applications often eclipses the direct use of Twitter. - Wikipedia

Tweeting is a rather new concept for a lot of people most of whom can’t wrap their head around the concept of sending “thoughts” out on a random basis. It’s facing the very same barriers that blogs faced when corporates first started evaluating them, primarily the question of “how on earth do we use this effectively”?

So why tweet?

Well,  its a great way of connecting with people. However you need to understand the traditional “targetting” methods do not apply as the way you “get” followers is very arbitrary.

It’s probably the wrong medium to use if you want to share large volumes of information but great if you want to send a constant stream of “thoughts” out and get feedback from those following you.

So, before you go anywhere you need to first identify what business problem you’d like it to address. If the medium doesn’t make sense there is no point in wasting time pursuing this direction of thought.Establishing a presence via social medium takes a lot of effort and if you intend to use it as a platform to drive future initiatives a lot of thought has to go into the final solution.

This is meant to engage individuals not large organizations and while some companies do have twitter accounts setup the focus again is to connect with individual users across the web.

Create an account at twitter and play around with it for a while, it is a little confusing initially ( the benefit ) but you’ll eventually get the hang of it.

You can follow me on twitter as well..

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While there are a number of ways to engage in knowledge sharing one of the most powerful ones are of course the Brown Bag Session.

Brown bag seminars are generally offered to update the researching community about ongoing research. Usually held by schools and universities and governmental institutions, they involve lectures, presentations, or talks by researchers, mostly professors about their ongoing research. Professors may visit from other universities to talk about their research.

Brown bag seminars normally run an hour or two. Originally they were scheduled around lunchtime and participants were encouraged to bring their own lunch in a bag, explaining how the practice got its name. - Wikipedia

Why do this?

While there is no doubt that formalized learning, like trainings,  contribute heavily towards professional growth within an organization, however, the single biggest learning tool at our disposal is on-the-job learning. This allows people to leverage existing processes to create a structure around the way they work, while enabling a level of flexibility and creativity. The benefits of this approach would lead to new ways of successfully capturing, storing and share of tacit knowledge. Eventually leading to changes being made to existing processes, introducing new ones and in some cases doing away with the old.

Face-to-Face sessions are always important when it comes to knowledge sharing, this is because there is only so much knowledge a document can impart. Creating a platform which allows people to engage with one another is a very powerful tool.

How would you do this?

At the start of every project team members should be encouraged to present thoughts and ideas based on there previous experience and allow other team members to ask questions.

Some benefits of this approach are:

1. Allows the project manager to get a better understanding of his team and figure out where best to user them
2. Allowing team members to get to know one another.
3. Creating a platform that enables team members to showcase their knowledge and expertise .
4. Ensuring that knowledge and Best Practices from previous projects are re-used.

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In a long list of companies that have started using social media rather effectively Zappos, the online retailer has gone the extra mile by providing customer service using the micro-blogging tool twitter.

The CEO has gotten actively involved in this by participating himself thereby ensuring there is a direct connect with the customer.

Most of the Zappos employees have twitter accounts and there is a page on the main website that aggregates all these feeds to a central location creating a much closer connect by giving faces to the company.

There are a number of blogs that the team uses to talk about a variety of things as well as a dedicated facebook page.

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For any initiative to succeed and be accepted across an organization it requires some level of leadership buy-in, Knowledge Management is no different.

There are certain things that leaders can do to promote the sharing of knowledge in the organization.

• Tie your initiatives to your vision:
• Create and publish an integrated mission, vision, and values statement that endorses and sustains learning and transfer. It’s very important to showcase success stories at each executive meeting. Unless there is a clear indication of progress the executive backing for an initiative like this will quickly die out.
• There has to be an emphasis on re-enforcing management commitment to identifying new ideas and removing barriers to progress.
• This has to be built on top of a robust rewards and recognition program, and most importantly, make sure you have the right people working on this.
• The management as a rule is always looked up to for direction, and its the same with knowledge management, lead by example and show commitment to learning through action. Tell employee groups that the most important thing is to share and use best practices.

Once this has been accomplished start rolling out these initiatives across the rest of the organization.

Aggressive Marketing, Rewards and Recognition programs are but the first steps to spreading awareness on KM. However if are in the business of Knowledge Management for the long haul, culture changes need to be made as executive backing can only take you so far.

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The Ford Social Media Experiment is the latest in a long line of companies looking to leverage social media as a vehicle to promote a product or a service.

So what is this all about?

As part of the Fiesta Movement, Ford’s new platform to promote the 2011 Fiesta in the United States the company has selected 100 “agents” who will drive a new Fiesta for upto six months. Using their social networks ( Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, Twitter and so on ) they will share their experiences with the rest of the world.

It will also act as a platform for Ford to obtain feedback on the car ahead of its planned launch.

“These agents are ready for adventure and eager to spread the word with their friends, fans and followers. They’re going to take our Fiestas on missions across the country and share how much fun they are having.”

– Connie Fontaine,
Ford’s Brand Content and Alliances Manager

This is a clear example of how much of an emphasis Ford is putting on social media.

Even before this initiative has taken flight this has received a huge response from the web bringing a lot of attention to Ford and the new Fiesta platform.

More than 4000 applications were submitted with an excess of 640,000 view of applicant videos on YouTube. The Ford Fiesta has over 300 fans on their Facebook page and over 600 followers on their Twitter account.

“We got a tremendous response from consumers, a lot of exciting people decided to apply,” said Sam De La Garza, small car marketing manager. “Choosing the 100 agents is a critical step in the movement, pulling us one step closer to getting people in the vehicles.”

This address a core business benefit - connecting with the next generation consumer group which will total 70 million drivers by 2010 and using social media ( which most of them use ) is a masterstroke towards building brand loyalty.

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Organizations are growing quickly. mergers, acquisitions and attrition are just some of the challenges to overcome when trying to maintain a knowledgeable workforce.

Companies battle everyday to maximize the capture of tacit and explicit knowledge from their employees and have come up with a number of ways to do so. Collaboration tools, knowledge maps , communities of practice, content management tools, after-action reviews and lessons learned sessions are just some of the methods organizations have devised to counter knowledge attrition.

No single approach however is enough to ensure that knowledge is retained, a mix and match of approaches is required. Though the bottom line is this, unless an organization’s culture is geared towards sharing knowledge, creating systems and processes to enable the sharing of knowledge is a moot point.

These approaches can be followed within the a project as well and become essential tools you , as a project manager, can use to your advantage in running a successful project.

The After-Action review : This is a strategy that has been adopted from the military. Often after an engagement the team will sit down together and go over what occurred, analyzing strengths and weakness. This is an excellent feedback mechanism to promote learning within the team. On a large scale, trends and patterns can be observed by comparing multiple groups, allowing best practices and lessons learned to be replicated across teams.

Communities of Practice: Is one of the simplest ways of connecting people who need knowledge with the groups that have it. Communities of practice are an excellent way to collect and disseminate information to a large audience. In order to maximize the use of a CoP a careful balance of leadership and freedom needs to be given to the community to promote sharing of ideas and knowledge, as a lack of leadership or direction could seriously damage the usefulness of the CoP in the long run.

Expert Directories : Another great way to tap into the tacit knowledge that exists in the organization - the expert directories is a method by which people can interact directly with people considered Subject Matter Experts ( SME’s ) . This however requires voluntary participation by the experts as it requires them to devote time from their busy schedules to address questions that do not benefit them directly.

Information Repositories : The simplest method of extracting and storing explicit information is the information repository. In its most basic form is a large folder with information stored in some sort of a structure. Advanced information repositories or content management systems use meta-tags and taxonomy structures to organize information for the end user in such a way as to provide the maximum value. By creating processes around the system, organization can ensure that all explicit information find’s a place somewhere in the application. It also acts as a medium for the transition of tacit knowledge to explicit.

These are just some of the methods that you could use to promote knowledge sharing and transfer in your organization or project. Keep in mind however that true knowledge retention is a daunting task and unless you have a clear approach mapped out it could lead to some serious complications.

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I’ve talked  about Knowledge Managment, Project Management, Social Networking, Web 2.0 and a whole host of other topics and the one thing I noticed I haven’t talked about was Social Media.

I’m planning to dedicate a couple of posts along the way to this subject and I hope you find it interesting. Being the first post the best source of information is ofcourse Wikipedia.

So here is what it has to say about Social Media.

Social media is online content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal, political and business use. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).

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