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Knowledge Management and Social Media: The Challenges and Benefits

Social media comprise the set of technological tools for social networking and include blogs, wikis, and other platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. These tools have influenced how organizations and society operate (e.g., through advertising, political movements, and collaborative work). The social media trend follows another major organizational trend, that of knowledge management. Knowledge management has been touted as one of the keys for organizational survival in today’s hypercompetitive and globalized marketplace, and the affordances of social media have stimulated new ways to view organizations, giving rise to the term Enterprise 2.0 that evokes the potential of these new forms of organizations. In January 2012, we cochaired a first-time mini-track at Hawaii International Conferences for Systems Sciences (HICSS) on knowledge management and social media. From this mini-track, interest grew in the creation of a special issue focused on the intersection of knowledge management and social media. We sought papers for this special issue that would cover issues, challenges, ideas, and solutions for two aspects of knowledge management (KM) and social media (SM). On the one hand, SM offers unprecedented opportunities for sharing information and knowledge both among colleagues closely bound by shared interests but also among those representing the “strength of weak ties” (Granovetter 1973). On the other hand, SM, because of the ease with which information can be disseminated, threatens organizational control of information and increases the risk of the loss or misuse of intellectual property and proprietary knowledge. Organizational leaders often perceive a tension between these potential benefits and risks (Barzilai-Nahon and Mason 2010). For this special issue, we encouraged authors from academia, industry, governments, and nonprofits, especially collaborations among these groups, to address these and other tensions or synergies that may arise between KM and SM. We welcomed examination of these tensions at the societal, organizational, group/team, and individual levels of analysis. We solicited case studies, surveys, experiments, qualitative research, and collaborative action research among academics, executives, and policymakers that illustrate innovative approaches, resolutions, and solutions to these tensions, risks, and opportunities.