Knowledge Management is something I have never heard of until January, and it seems like the more I read about it, the more I realize I don’t know. I’m the person with all the answers; thus, asking me to write about something I don’t know is like asking me to skydive without a parachute—never going to happen, because clearly the crash is inevitable.  However, Dr. Burns is acting like that guy in the airplane who says “you can do it!” right before he heaves you out the door, so here we are, and here we go.  Some of my posts may be me just writing as objectively as possible about the article just so it makes more sense to me, and some of my posts may have a little bit more of my, oh goodness, opinion in them…again about a topic I know very little about so chances are my ideas are going to change as they develop in between now and May. Okay. One, two, three, JUMP.

After reading several of the articles (I promise I really have been doing the assignments all along), and not being able to make sense of it all I decided to put my chicken-scratched notes aside and try again. I picked the article by Hemsley and Mason about Knowledge Management and Social Media.  I chose this because social media is something I can relate to, so I thought the application of KM through SM would help me make more sense of all the other things I have read up to this point.  Overall, this article is still kind of over my head but I got the gist of it and the other articles previously read now make more sense so I think my theory worked.  Basically, what I thought this article came down to is the simple question: “How do we make Social Media work for us”, us being firms.

One thing I really liked about this article is the organization of it:  it presented the application of Knowledge Management through Social media for the first half of the article before it started becoming more theoretical; so when parts of the article didn’t make sense, they were almost always followed up with a reference to an example given earlier in the publication that I understood so I wasn’t completely lost for long. 

I was really, really, hoping the article was solve the question “what can firms do to prevent catastrophic events like United from happening, but alas, they did say they were “investigat[ing] the question”, not solving it.  Since they didn’t answer it, I’ll diverge and take a stab at it.  I think the main thing firms can do, especially big firms who have a lot to lose when remarks of their customer service are less than appealing, is take the little person seriously.  I was reading the article and thinking about power and influence.  Let’s think about this:  Let’s say Miley Cyrus (I know, I’m sorry, but hear me out).   Miley may have 17.2 million people following her on twitter. But, caveat, she’s only one person. There are 645,000,000 tweeters out there, (http://www.statisticbrain.com/twitter-statistics/) and the average tweeter has about 208 followers.  So while Miley is big on twitter, she’s not that big.  There’s a whole lot more average girls on their iPhones with 208 followers in the world than our one Miley with her 17 million.  So, numbers don’t lie and the average girl (all 628 million of them) wins.  I say all that to say, the little guy always wins.  This is the idea that firms must learn.  Firms must realize that the little guy is David, they are Goliath, and that even though they’re big, they’re vulnerable.  In the video David said the first line of assistance, the flight attendances, were indifferent.  Perhaps if they were more compassionate from the beginning he wouldn’t have been so heated at the end.  Maybe if someone in United (394K followers) took the time to appease David somehow in the beginning, chances are there would have been no video (made July 6^th), because it would have seemed as if United cared, which is taking away point from the song trilogy.  (Of course, no one knows this for sure, because this didn’t happen).  Now, let’s say that United didn’t do this initially—as they didn’t, and the guy got upset, and made the video, and someone tweeted about it, let’s say hypothetically on July 7^th.  Why didn’t United catch that then?  Where was the United Airlines representative that peruses twitter for bad publicity?  If he or she was there and acted, look at would have happened:  First, if BoingBoing did see the tweet on July 7^th or 8^th , there would have been nothing to blog about.  It wouldn’t have been a story at all, or atleast a negative one.  Any story would have been one in favor of the airline, because BoingBoing saw a complaint that was already taking care of it.  Let’s say BoingBoing did still write about it, embeds the video, and says, by the way, United saw this before I embedded it, it’s taken care of, but it’s still hilarious, then instead of walking away with the notion “United is evil” all of those readers would have thought “how considerate of big industry United to take the time to address this one guy’s issue.  It took them a while and he had to get creative, but deep down they must really care, because they dealt with this before it went viral. Maybe I’ll fly with them next time I have to go somewhere, because they will think of me like they thought of him.”  What else would have happened?  Secondly: Who else would have seen that tweet response to the complaint?  Some of the now 394,000 United Airlines followers.  Because they would have wondered what this reply was to, and would have click on the tweet to investigate, they would have seen United was following up with a complaint, and would have also had the warm fuzzies.  One more thing:  What if United not only saw the complaint, and not only addressed it, but then also clicked the “follow” button and decided to be a subscriber of David’s tweets?  They may have possibly made a foe a friend, and I would have no clue who David is.  Now, people tweet, and Facebook, and Instagram, and YouTube, and blog a lot, especially when they’re complaining, so will United have time to get to every complaint (and honestly will they want to)?  I don’t know.  But I do know that the little guy has a lot more power than people estimate, clearly.  If it was not that case, we wouldn’t be reading this article.  In terms of follower/friends/networks on social media sites, a celebrity may have more follow depth, but the six-hundred-million average persons, with their 4 degrees of separations, has more breadth, and the squeakiest wheel gets the oil.  Utilizing social media for customer service is the way to go. 

So, I whole-heartedly agree that social media can definitely affect a firm, positively and negatively, and I think the article gives great examples of that.  However, maybe I’m not thinking about this correctly, but I’m missing the jump made from “Social Media is influential” to “we need twitter and Facebook in the workplace, because it’s attracting young people”.  I feel like we need to pump breaks and think about who we’re talking about, because we might be putting too much faith in our workers, and come up with a better strategy. 

I don’t know if I agree with the whole “young people want to use social media, we want young people, so we need to have social media available at work” idea.  I guess I’m thinking it depends how young you’re talking.  If you’re talking people around and over 30, then sure…but I know all of my Facebook friends, though we’re now pseudo-professional, aren’t friends with their bosses, because they still have pictures from their college glory days in their albums, and because they are tagged in their friends albums doing the Macarena in the middle of the street, and they are in no rush to alter their profiles because they are marked private so they (think they) control who is seeing their profiles.  Their profiles are what I’m calling “pre-professional”, and thus, “unprofessional”. 

I’m not being ageist when I say people over 30, because I think there is a very, very distinct line separating basically 20 year-olds with everyone else. The first group grew up using social, (we’re affectionately referred to the selfish “Me Generation); and the second group who did not grow up with it.  So you have these young adults who were masters of social media long before grad school was a consideration, who used media for personal and recreational reasons and is just now considering utilizing those outlets professionally; and those who grew up, became professionals, or professionally-minded, and then was introduced to social media.  So the twenty-somethings have had their profiles for years, I’ll say “pre-professionally”, which means the majority of their relationships, strong or weak, unless they had an epiphany and deleted all of their friends and started from scratch after graduation, are “pre-professional” relationships that aren’t professional, so they are “un-professional relationships”.  So, if the average twenty-something hopped on Facebook during work hours, and posted work related question to their personal profiles, who is going to see it? The college buddy who never grew past his glory days, the girl from high school who grew up way to fast and now has five kids, and the frienemy who is just waiting for you to post something negative about your relationship to make themselves feel better.  Yes, there will be someone who is also professional who might see your question, and may then decide to post a response, but there’s no telling how many statuses are posted on their own newsfeed, and like the article says, there are some friends/followers you just don’t pay attention to.  So the question, and the point tying of all of this to Knowledge Management, is:  Can social media be effective in a work place?  Answer:  “Yes, but.” If a firm utilizes social media, great things can happen.  For example:  Instead of sending someone off to be trained in something that will be useful for the firm, they can sit at their computer desk and watch a YouTube video about the concept, read a blog about it, hop on twitter, and ask the author of the blog a question, get an answer back, and ta-da:  the firm now has a smarter employee and saved hundreds on airfare.

BUT.  I don’t think having the green light to watch YouTube videos all day is the way to go.  With no restrictions, everyone has had a day where they start out doing something productive online, which leads them to something kind of productive, and the next thing you know its midnight and you spend most of the day watching precious puppies and kittens on reddit.  So where’s the middle ground?  I work at Lexmark, and one thing that I think is really interesting is that they have their own social infrastructure called Innovate, and it’s basically a professional social media site for just Lexmark employees.  You can post pictures of you and your dog and your spouse and make your profile yours, but who is going to see it? Your boss, your coworkers, and those underneath you.  Your professional circle.  You can start a conversation about this really great idea that just can’t wait until the staff meeting, but even that comes with a caveat:  If your boss just implanted a new plan, do you want your boss reading your discussion board about how much you hate the plan, how dumb he or she is for implementing it, and why your idea is significantly better?  Probably not.  What if you want to connect with people outside of Lexmark?  Then you can do that on your personal time, so when the idea to find the cutest puppy on twitter crosses your mind, you don’t have to give your temptation a second thought and can go for it in comfort, dressed in your favorite fleece onesie. 

So, because this is a KM class, I again agree with the article and think social media plays a huge role in how knowledge, both explicit and implicit, is communicated, received, and perceived.  Firms need to figure out how to make social media work for them, but I think instead of giving their workers more social media access, firms should focus their attention on their customer’s and their use of social media to portray the organization.  Let their customer’s happy tweets speak for themselves.