Comments on: Twitter and Knowledge Management: Synergy or Oxymoron?

By: Gerdien Dalmulder

Gerdien Dalmulder — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 18:57:58 +0000

I’m as of yet undecided about the use of twitter in KM. Maybe the alert function as you mention – in a more social interpersonal kind of rss feed idea – has some added value.

I do not think that a culture change and stimulating employees to use twitter is a beneficiary course of action. In fact, I’ve been wondering a lot lately whether the whole notion of trying to induce culture chance (in organizations or elswhere) is even possible…

By: Anthony Bradley

Anthony Bradley — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 15:53:05 +0000

Take a look at this CNET article http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10152437-36.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

It highlights the difficulty in delivering context in a 140 character post. I beleive this lack of context also limits twitter’s value as a knowledge management source.

By: Anthony Bradley

Anthony Bradley — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:42:39 +0000

Yes, changing culture is always tricky and you often need a very compelling reason to do so. I agree that much can be gleaned from twittering around who are your connectors, experts, and people sharing the same interests. This value is more from the social networking perspective. I also think there is significant value in the situational awareness domain with rapid alerting to events, content, coordination, etc. I’m still skeptical that the tweets themselves hold value as knowledge beyond a historical play by play. The shelf life of a tweet seems pretty short to me.

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 04:25:11 +0000

I’m not sure if Twitter IS knowledge management, per se. However, I do believe that Twitter can solve many of the issues formal enterprise knowledge management efforts attempts to.

See Motivations secion here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_management

I believe knowledge is highly social and captured in the lifestreams you mention above. The more we document these lifestreams, index them and make them searchable it becomes increasingly easy to: locate expertise, make knowledge available (imagine if we could search the emails/water cooler conversations and IMs of our best employees?), increase network connectivity, allow employees to gain insights & ideas (perhaps one of the things Twitter does best is let people LISTEN to conversations & draw insights).

The trick, as always, is to change the culture so instead of email & IM employees use a micro-blogging tool (or anything that can be stored, indexed & searched) to update status and carry on conversations.

By: Jeff Mann

Jeff Mann — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 12:05:18 +0000

I use Twitter mostly because it’s fun. I also use it to test mini-ideas I’m thinking about, and keep upo with what others are thinking about. It is mostly about awareness, and keeping contact with a wide group of people without too much effort.

By: Anthony Bradley

Anthony Bradley — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 22:13:14 +0000

Thanks Gina, would you say you are using it as an awareness tool or do you see knowledge management benefits?

By: Gina Spadoni

Gina Spadoni — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 22:01:51 +0000

I had set up a Twitter account months ago and until the last week or so, had failed to use it. I’ve been starting to follow people and I’m starting to understand how I can use it as another tool in my kit for competitive intelligence and trends tracking.