Knowledge managers have a unique responsibility to keep a keen eye on every business channel. This is for the good of the company, but it can get overwhelming at times. Especially with social media, there are numerous moving parts to keep tabs on. Luckily, there are key data points that can give you the critical information you need to inform decision-making and optimize knowledge in your organization. Learn how to harness the power of social media for knowledge management effectively with the following tips.

How Social Media Affects Knowledge Management

Social media interacts with knowledge management in a myriad of ways, often facilitating communication that couldn’t otherwise take place. The data on these platforms can be leveraged, when used effectively, for knowledge acquisition and analysis. This is because the data generated through social media platforms offers a comprehensive view of user behavior, preferences, and opinions, making it an invaluable asset for knowledge managers seeking to understand their target audience better. In B2B and B2C organizations, social media can:

●      Open up communication channels, externally and internally;

●      Provide information regarding potential client interest;

●      Promote strategic cooperation;

●      Store, collect, create, and share information;

●      Provide knowledge of user experience;

●      Help gauge public perception.

It may be difficult at first to delineate which platforms and interactive aspects of social media channels to focus on. Read on to learn the critical components of social media data that will help you level up your knowledge management.

Track Key Metrics

Social media and knowledge management are intertwined due to the intrinsic nature of social platforms to facilitate discussions. First and foremost, you must conduct an audit of where your social media platforms are currently. Take stock of what data points are available, what platforms your organization currently uses, and what they have used in the past. Keep a log of this information to better inform your analysis moving forward.

Once you’ve sifted through the current social media landscape of your organization, you can start to filter out the key performance indicators (KPIs). By tracking KPIs, knowledge managers can gain a deeper understanding of their organization's social media presence and impact. However, you will come across quantitative and qualitative data from social media sources, so it’s important to understand the applications of each.

Quantitative Data

Social media data provides real-time insights into user engagement with content, enabling knowledge managers to understand which information resonates most with the audience. This can be an audience of potential customers, potential applicants, followers, or even internal users of social media platforms that facilitate internal communication. By tracking metrics like likes, shares, comments, and click-through rates, you can gauge the effectiveness of this content and tailor future strategies accordingly.

These KPIs focus on engagement rate and are quantitative in nature, meaning they can be quantified. This type of data is typically easier to track and use to predict future trends. Look for tangible data across social media that can inform your strategy, such as user demographics, competitor engagement rates, and click-through rates. Determine which social media KPIs are most suitable to your particular project goals.

Qualitative Data

Qualitative data is a bit more complex. It can be turned into quantitative data, but you have to dig through less-straight-forward pieces of information in order to gather it. On social media, this looks like discussions, comments, forum threads, and even types of user-generated content.

Social media platforms are a treasure trove of user sentiments and feedback. You can conduct sentiment analysis to understand how customers perceive your organization, its products, and its services. Positive sentiment can highlight areas of success, while negative sentiment can pinpoint potential areas for improvement.

You can also use qualitative analysis to monitor industry trends on social media. Analyzing social media discussions allows knowledge managers to stay updated with the latest industry trends, emerging technologies, and competitor activities. This information helps organizations stay ahead of the competition and adapt their strategies to evolving market demands and audience preferences. You can also stay abreast of social media trends, like short-form videos or VR, that can be incorporated into marketing or internal engagement activities.

Practical Applications of Social Media in Knowledge Management

Social media has a place in internal and external knowledge management applications. Internally, you can use social media to:

●      Engage employees with social visual content;

●      Display information on digital signage;

●      Gamify communication, such as by challenging employees to write a new company motto that gets the most likes;

●      Measure employee influence and activity engagement.

Depending on your goals, using social media inside your company can offer a plethora of insights into how your company culture is ticking. This allows you to adjust your knowledge management strategy in real-time — and have a tangible data log of employee activity for slower analysis.

Externally, social media is invaluable for gauging consumer interest and brand perception. Practical applications of social media for knowledge management of external communications include:

●      Public perception polls;

●      Review monitoring and response;

●      Direct messaging content analysis.

The opportunities are really endless, especially as social media transforms along with technology. Upgrade your knowledge management with social media to keep up with digital advancements and enhance communication in your organization and about your organization.
 

The specific activities and priorities of a knowledge manager may vary depending on the size, industry, and unique needs of an organization. However, the primary objective of a knowledge manager is always to establish a suitable framework for gathering and organizing company knowledge, followed by its appropriate placement fr easy accessibility by others as well as taking relevant measures to drive awareness and adoption through various collaboration channels.

It is imperative to ensure that the knowledge is readily available to all stakeholders, thereby enhancing productivity and efficiency.

Here are some key focus areas for any knowledge manager to successfully establish and implement a KM framework that does not burn out in the long run but actually becomes a part of the organizational culture and day-to-day working of all the employees.

Leading an organization through a significant cultural change will be much easier if you’ve got a team of champions or SPOCs to drive awareness and adoption. That’s why one of the first things you should do as a knowledge manager is finding the employees in your organization who are equally on board with the idea of knowledge management and its perks and are ready to work with you to drive the KM change within their teams.

1. Creating a Knowledge Army

Ideally, you want a team of knowledge champions or SPOCs from different, teams, service lines, offerings, and regions.  Look for people who can influence others to prioritize knowledge management. Sure, technology is important, but it’s the right people who will create the culture change you need and build a knowledge-sharing and collaborative culture. So, focus on finding those rockstar team members and you’ll be well on your way to success!

2. Getting Top Leadership Buy-In and Support

Bringing the senior leadership on board is the first step as well as can prove to be the biggest challenge if your KM plan does not align with the strategic goals and business priorities and clearly highlights the tangible benefits, KM can offer to the organization.

You do not only require their buy-in but also support to drive KM adoption top-down by aligning it with organization culture, and employee growth roadmap. With their backing, the knowledge manager can focus on identifying and implementing strategies that yield immediate results. These quick wins serve as a catalyst for change and help build momentum toward a more comprehensive knowledge management system.

3. Keep Uour Focus on Cultural-level Change

It is a common challenge for workers to resist change, and this is especially true when it comes to knowledge management initiatives. This resistance is not due to a lack of understanding of the value of such initiatives, but rather because workers are already overwhelmed with their existing workload. Collaborating with stakeholders across the organization is essential for implementing a culture of knowledge management successfully. Sharing a vision and establishing a shared mission is crucial to this collaboration defining the value of knowledge management practices for each team. By doing so, workers will understand how knowledge management can ease their workload and provide opportunities for skill development, visibility, and career growth.

When workers understand the importance of supporting knowledge management, and leaders are committed to making it happen, the organization can make the necessary changes to the value system of knowledge workers. This shift in mindset can drive greater collaboration and ultimately lead to a more successful and efficient organization.

Data’s impact on a company’s success is undeniable. Through it, you can learn how to serve customers and employees better, build professional partnerships, and create systems that fuel productivity.

A less-talked-about use of data is in knowledge management. If you’re unfamiliar, knowledge management is the act of collecting, sharing, and managing information and knowledge within a company and ensuring it’s accessible to everyone. 

You can use data to improve knowledge management within a project. But it starts with collecting the most valuable data for this purpose.

Collect the Most Useful Data

To use data to find areas of improvement in knowledge management for projects, you must first collect data that will help you do this. In other words, what kind of data will be most helpful in helping you better your knowledge management?

Data that gives insight into how your team uses your knowledge management system is a great starting point. You’ll gain insight into how each person navigates the knowledge management system for various projects. You’ll also see the information they use most when completing projects.

Armed with this information, you can conclude where more training is needed regarding using the knowledge management system. You’ll also learn which information is most essential to input to complete a project successfully.

Think about the customer, employee, and business data most helpful in improving knowledge management and focus on collecting it in abundance.

How To Best Collect This Data

Project managers can collect data in various ways. But the best approach is combining data collection tools with team feedback.

You should analyze every channel your customers interact with. Likewise, analyze the apps, software, and devices your employees use. Don’t forget about your company systems — data analytics tools are a must on those as well.

Project managers must also be intentional about collecting feedback from their teams. What are they saying about knowledge management? What do they think about it in terms of using it for projects? What are their suggestions for improvement?

Analytics tools and actual feedback are the best ways to collect data that aid the improvement of knowledge management in projects.

How To Use it to Improve Knowledge Management Within a Project

If you’re still unsure about data’s role in improving knowledge management for the sake of each project’s success, these specific examples should get you over the hump.

Identify weaknesses

Data, generally, is monumental in identifying weaknesses. You can use it to identify weaknesses in knowledge management and those in specific projects.

For example, let’s say your team is working on a recession-proof marketing campaign. In this case, you can use customer data to identify weak points in your content that don’t resonate with their needs or who they are in a recession.

In addition, you can look at the customer information you’ve input into your knowledge management system and see if it’s enough to support you in completing the marketing campaign. You may find that you’re missing critical customer data and can then add it to improve your system and project.

Data is instrumental in determining what’s lacking in a project or your knowledge management system.

Streamline communication and collaboration efforts

Two of the most critical factors in completing a project successfully are team communication and collaboration. Without both, completing a project and maintaining its quality is challenging. Knowledge management keeps teams on the same page, pulling from a single source of truth that streamlines communication and collaboration efforts.

You can use data to create a personalized intranet for your team within your knowledge management system. When it has all things company, customer, and project-related in it, working conditions get better, improving team and individual efficiency in the process.

When you know you’re striving for a knowledge management system that acts as a personalized intranet for your employees, you can document what that looks like. Then, you can weigh your intranet vision against your current knowledge management system to determine what you must do to get closer to your vision.

Putting the right data into your knowledge management system sets the foundation for a personalized intranet, streamlining communication and collaboration on every project.

Determine training opportunities

Much of using knowledge management effectively depends on how well-versed your team is in the system you’re using. If they can’t navigate it seamlessly, find the information they’re looking for, or find value in knowledge management, they won’t ever be able to use it to its full advantage.

On the contrary, the benefits are tremendous if your team knows how to navigate your knowledge management system, can find what they need for every project, and deem knowledge management useful.

The key is finding out where your team needs the most help regarding your knowledge management system — data can help you determine that.

Collect data on how your employees use your knowledge management system. Find out how they navigate it. Study how accessible the system is for each team member. Understand how easy it is for them to find information and what info is missing that would move projects forward faster.

All of this data can give you insight into what your team needs training on when it comes to knowledge management.

Conclusion

Knowledge management is one of the best tools a business can have. It ensures you collect, organize, and manage crucial organizational information appropriately and that it’s accessible to every employee. Make an effort to continuously improve your knowledge management system with the help of data. Your team and business will thank you.
 

Users want to find the closest match of ready to consume content that is trustworthy and most importantly something that fills the wireframe that they have put together through their own research. With the rise of the digital age and advancement in technology, users are made aware of Content Relevancy - a key metric to consume content. Users are therefore expecting High-Value Content to be delivered at their fingertips, and here is where the folly lies as most organizations charter KM teams to meet this expectation.

Take for example an IT company which has many employees, some are new entrants into the workforce, others lateral experienced hires, managers, group managers, vice presidents / business heads and so forth. If you now see clearly you are not talking about creating content for an abstract audience, but a well-defined persona of users who rate the content based on how easy is it to consume to enable them to become successful. 

Hence, it’s important we familiarize ourselves with the process of Content Curation, which is defined as Collecting, Organizing, Selecting, Packaging and Promoting the best content that is tailored for an audience (users).  So what are some of those practices that can help us develop better collections addressed towards these personas of users?

Identify trigger points to deliver content to the group

Once we have zeroed down on a user group we need to ensure we are aware of pushing the content to them and enabling them through this medium to get hooked on to accessing our content and pulling them closer to becoming brand ambassadors of our content. Hence it’s important we focus understanding their unmet needs that should be addressed through our content.

Creating Fresh Content  V/s Curate the Content

As a Knowledge worker you come across leaders, champions and a host of networks. Its important you follow some of their best work whether it a thought paper, research article, knowledge nugget, webinars or other credible content. Take for example a newsletter weekly edition every good curator has a weekly planner of how he wants to schedule this content and while the supporting pieces can be curated from various sources it helps to manage the central piece and create fresh content so the story progresses with each new edition.  I guess we all are familiar with the Pareto Principle where it’s your 20% fresh content that delivers 80% of the hits.

Don’t limit yourself as the only Brand Ambassador of your Content

Content is no good if it cannot be marketed. And many a time as KMers we forget that it’s not just our job to make sure our best content gets delivered out there. So how do we ensure we identify which content can be marketed by our leaders, peers and gets noticed. It’s important to have a watch on the competition yes as many marketers are in need of content and pretty much are the brand ambassadors that Knowledge Managers should credit for ensuring higher touchpoints of the content we curate. Yes, making our knowledge systems accessible through blog posts, webinars and the likes ensures some of our experts get noticed by marketers and their content gets externally published making our work shine.  So don’t limit yourself to only managing your content strategy alone. Like they say don’t lose the trees for the forest always have an eye on the bigger picture and how your content is credit worthy to other communities.

Sharing credit can make you 'content searchable'

There is a plethora of good content out there and many times although we design our content well in advance and define the sources to gather them from we notice that the piece has already got posted most often by the author. So how does this handicap our content delivery process does it make our viewers lose interest even before we want them to find the content? What could be the solution? Well it’s important to ensure we reward our contributors before others do and publish them in our hall of fame ensuring they feel valued with providing us a steady stream of content that is well researched, timely and ensures they reach us as a first choice.

CTRL-R Managing your Content and keeping it up-to-date

The same old problem of governance where Knowledge Managers are chartered with archiving content that is dated a year back. We see less viewership and no this signals lesser number of hits and hence call for action to archive the content by triggering a few reminders. What instead if we take the same piece and work on it adding a few relevant links, headlines re-packaging it and sharing it with the author for the final proof read? There is a high chance it goes to the leaders and they take notice and on publishing the content post it on their private handle or tweet it highlighting their POV for an industry topic that they follow.  This could be the silver bullet and differentiates good curators. Content Curation is as much about the presentation of good content and sometimes enabling our audience with re-packaging their content ensures we develop better collections that are up-t0-date based on our own expertise managing topic based content over time.

Invest time to discover new content and be bold to critique it

CoPs are a great place to notice someone’s point of view and credit them. As a Community Manager we are also chartered with ensuring we respond to every post and at times critics play a big role in leading us to the right content. It’s important to not play silent spectator at all times and sometimes engage in a interaction to challenge a viewpoint as it helps us to learn more about the SME and in-time develop some of their content to build on our existing collection.

In-Summary

In this digital world where content relevance is measured by how practical, credit worthy and ready content is to be consumed it’s important we ensure we understand the importance of curation. While we are designing our content strategy it’s also important we are open to understanding our user persona’s and investing in defining the right trigger points to deliver high-value content to them. As Knowledge Managers it’s also our call to action to hone our content writing skills and contribute to enriching existing content through our deep industry research skills and ensure we expand our network of content creators crediting them. Over time we are all called to play critic and engage and identify SME’s some of whom we can co-partner with to sustain our collections of content and invest our time in becoming experts in our own industry or topics a curators.

With the rapidly changing landscape of how offices and organizations approach work, knowledge management (KM) is more crucial than ever. Due to the overflow of information within organizations, the ways in which this information is stored and archived change according to the need, time, and purpose. 

As with everything else, the field of KM in technology has its seasons of trends. However, some trends are here to stay. Why should some trends outstay others, you may ask?

Well, simply because they improve the user experience for the better.

With the changing composition of the workforce, traditional methods of disseminating information are replaced with more agile methods. Let us look at the top five knowledge management trends in 2022.

1. AI is here to stay 

Anyone who is active on the web has watched the trajectory of growth in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Within just a few years, AI has grown tremendously and is predicted to take over many sectors in the future.

Intrinsically, AI and KM deal with knowledge, information and learning. Recent developments in the field of AI can be implemented in the way knowledge management systems work. AI is mostly used in KM to store and retrieve explicit data. AI can dig deep into various channels of content, decipher relevant topics and present useful information when required.  

For example, companies have now started applying deep machine learning in AI-powered chatbots to relay the desired information when and where needed. This knowledge management trend is here to stay with many companies integrating chatbots in their websites for easy communication and problem solving.

2. Easy-to-use collaboration tools 

In 2022, especially with the growth of hybrid work culture, the rise of easy-to-use collaboration tools has grown exponentially. The key idea is to provide a seamless communication flow among employees.

Using the best enterprise knowledge management platform will allow for this collaboration through the integration of multiple apps. According to a research paper by Peter Clark and Maggie Cooper, the rise in collaboration is proportional to the increased possibility of communication through IT.  

Some spaces that now demand collaboration are task management, information sharing, co-editing, and case studies to name a few. This is why tools that encourage collaboration for ideating, working, communicating, and editing will inevitably be a popular knowledge management trend. 

3. Mobile-friendly user experience

According to Google, more than 50 percent of search queries now happen through mobile phones. Mobile users are only going to increase, and so will the search volume through phones. Hence, it is key to optimize your website for mobile. This brings us to a crucial part of knowledge management - mobile apps, as one of the biggest knowledge management trends to stay for good. 

For instance, the increasing use of mobiles has initiated M-learning or Mobile Learning opportunities. In order to make the learning process better for the user, knowledge management processes integrate M-learning apps increasing choice and convenience. 

Even with websites, optimizing your website in order to make it mobile-friendly is crucial nowadays. Google prefers sites that have a good user experience both on desktops and mobile devices.

4. Round-the-clock support 

For any kind of business, the common denominator is customer satisfaction and revenue generation. This makes it obvious that for a business to succeed, providing a seamless customer experience is not negotiable. In fact, customer support is one of the pillars of a business that can determine how successful your business eventually becomes.

Other than collaboration and knowledge-sharing, top-notch knowledge management can improve customer support, and therefore, customer experience tremendously. 

Businesses today can leverage this tool for internal and external business purposes. This would include providing insider business information to support agents that would help them solve customer problems faster and improve their KPIs like average handle time & first call resolution. Hence, there is quicker dissemination of information to customers to educate and inform them about the company’s offers, services, and so on.

5. More media-focused content 

Traditional forms of knowledge base management systems like Confluence knowledge base, Sharepoint knowledge base, etc are composed of really lengthy guides and manuals that make the employees dread reading them.

Humans, in general, focus on getting a job done in the easiest way possible. Whether an employee or a customer, no one would like to overcomplicate or have tedious systems.

Well, worry not! Today’s knowledge management systems are not only new and improved but they are genuinely geared towards improving both the agent’s and the customer’s experience. Another knowledge management trend is the use of media such as images, visuals, and videos to make the interaction more engaging and enriching. 

For the visual-inclined human mind, adding visuals to a text makes it easier for the person to grasp the concept and implement it. So goodbye to the long and boring formats, hello to cool and engaging relevant media. 

Conclusion 

With the emergence of new technologies and changing work cultures, it has now become essential for businesses to adopt efficient knowledge management systems. Besides having access to information, it is crucial to be able to access this information when needed. 

The above-mentioned knowledge management trends focus on enhancing both the business and its employees, and their customers.

Using a knowledge management system is one of the best ways to ensure that employees are not only productive but more importantly, satisfied in their job roles. 

Furthermore, efficient and readily available customer service ensures a good customer experience. And happy customers mean increasing sales and more revenue.

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