Knowledge Management

5 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 17, 2010)

2010-04-30
By: James Royal-Lawson

Twitteranvändning i Sverige

There has been constant speculation about how many active Twitter users there are here in Sweden. This article (in Swedish) makes public some research that Microsoft has commissioned. That survey states that 8% of Swedes have used Twitter. 5% use twitter monthly, 3% user it Weekly. Clearly being 35-44 and a daily user makes me quite special!

Why We Share Information

We are more willing to share with people with trust, especially mutually. Repeated communication helps build up that trust (doesn’t need to be very frequent or even face to face).

How to Break the Tyranny of E-mail

Oscar Berg writes about how to beat email as the tool of choice within the enterprise organisation. Summarising his post to it’s simplest possible – email is incredibly easy to use and flexible; your collaborative alternatives need to be equally as easy to use, and you need to train and coach people effectively.

Why I don’t like Facebook ‘Likes’

Facebook is a company that needs to make money, and it’s going to do that via fantastic amount of data it has about it’s 400 million users. It’s a marketeer’s wet dream. Biggest risk with Open Graph and “likes” on web pages is that it could tip the balance just a little too far. Remember that social networks always die in the end, just a matter of when.

Six things you can do in-house to improve your SEO

Not necessarily a list of the simplest and easiest things you could do in-house, but it’s a worthwhile read and not at all wrong.

if we do our change management correctly all we need is micro-blogging, a document management system that gives URL’s and maybe a link-trimmer

Is Twitter Knowledge Management? by Dave Mastronardi.

Like Dave, I’m increasingly convinced that a microblogging tool could solve many knowledge management and intranet effectiveness issues while at the same time improving co-operation and social networking skills within an organisation.

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Intranet social networking for small businesses

2009-09-01
By: James Royal-Lawson

Over the past 18 months I’ve been overseeing the implementation of Yammer (intranet social networking tool) in a small business. The goal was to reduce the amount of ideas, discussions and knowledge circulating in emails sent to a limited audience and increase knowledge sharing and learning.

It’s taken over a year for a majority of employees (and close partners) to find a place for micro-blogging in their daily communications. At first it was just myself and two other early adopters who jumped in and started talking. Then, as time passed, real-life conversations started to bring up Yammer conversations and shared links – increasing the curiosity and interest of non-active colleagues in joining our social network.

As Nielsen have pointed out, growing a social network internally isn’t something you do overnight. You have to have the patience to let it develop organically.

Everyone currently follows everyone else. It’s a small enough company to cope with that, but as the network grows, I’d expect people to begin being selective about which collegues they actively follow and for more groups (or side-discussions) to appear.

With Yammer, this small business now has a searchable database of ideas, links, conversations – company assets that would normally be lost in email. They also have the ability to do all this in real time; asking questions and sharing experience. For a small company with consultants who are often working across a number of client sites; Yammer has become an active hub, leaving the formal, structured intranet as a reference library.