On one side brand loyalty has eroded due to the recession that’s tightened consumer budgets and heightened cost consciousness (Heidi Cohen).

In 2011, roughly four out of ten shoppers buy the “brand they want most” in terms of consumer goods (namely things bought in grocery stores and drugstore), an erosion of over 10% based on research by comScore.

On the other side Steven van Belleghem argues that consumer are no longer willing to forgive your mistakes as a company, resulting in decreasing customer loyalty. At the same time people are willing to engage themselves with a company. A paradox

The challenge for the conversation manager is to deal with this paradox, so to deal with engagement and at the same time customer loyalty. To meet this challenge you need to understand your own brand.

The most important issue to leverage your brand is brand identification. A nice example of this brand identification is Kinder Surprise (als called Überaschungs-Ei (German), Kinder egg (Englisch) and Kinder Sorpresa (Italian)

Every one knows this product, for example in the facebook ranking it is on the 16th place, and everyone is starting to smile if you mention it. So it has a very high level of brand identification. This level of brand identification is taking care gor a large number of positive conversations, a very nice positive perception and as a result of this: buying the brand, recommending the brand and the brand is idealized.

What do you need for this according to Steven van Belleghem? A conversation manager agreeing that brand identification is key priority for his job! What does he need for this? A very long scope and the vision how to deal with brand identification ,understanding and deciding where the brand stands for!

To be continued……….

Jerry van Leeuwen

Eind februari van dit jaar kondigde Facebook een aantal ingrijpende veranderingen voor bedrijfspagina’s aan. Een fundamentele en voor velen onverteerbare verandering was de introductie van Timeline. KLM was een van de weinige bedrijven die met de herinrichting van hun Facebook bedrijfspagina direct tot een verbetering kwam. De luchtvaartmaatschappij greep de mogelijkheid aan om haar rijke geschiedenis tot in detail op te nemen in de Facebookpagina.

1,4 miljoen Facebook fans

De sterke groei die KLM in de loop der jaren doormaakte, is ook terug te zien in het aantal bezoekers, likes en conversaties. In twee jaar tijd sinds de lancering van de KLM Facebookpagina in januari 2010 vergaarde het bedrijf circa 500.000 online fans.
Maar sinds januari 2012 neemt de blauwe social media brigade – mede door hun nieuwe Timeline – echte een hoge vlucht. De laatste stand toont meer dan 1,4 miljoen fans! Wat kunnen we leren van KLM?

Social Media Marketing als goede PR

KLM gebruikt als aandachtstrekker het sterke beeld van een opstijgend vliegtuig over de volle breedte van de pagina. De profielfoto loopt naadloos over in de cover image: een sterk corporate beeld. Timeline maakt het mogelijk voor bedrijven om online laagdrempelige klantenservice te bieden. KLM maakt hier gebruik van door binnen een uur
te reageren op vragen van klanten. Ze reageren publiekelijk op de post van een klant met de mededeling dat een privébericht verstuurd is om de situatie op te lossen. Dat is goede PR en direct resultaat voor de klant.

Nut van social media marketing

KLM biedt informatieve en vermakelijke inhoud – de belangrijkste motivatie voor bezoekers om langer op een pagina te blijven. De nieuwe Timeline stimuleert meer interactiviteit en merkbeleving en biedt bedrijven diverse mogelijkheden om nog actiever te worden op het platform.

Verbeterde gebruikersgegevens en real-time cijfers geven online marketeers bijvoorbeeld inzicht in wat werkt en wat niet. Deze en andere nieuwe features geven meer inzicht in het nut van investeringen in social media marketing. Dit kan voor de ict-sector van groot belang zijn.

Levende community of Facebook

KLM maakt uitstekend gebruikt van het Facebookplatform. Hun online reputatie en imago stralen betrokkenheid en authenticiteit uit. Fans krijgen het gevoel deel uit te maken van een levende community rondom het merk. Juist door géén focus te leggen op commercie en verkoop, creëert KLM een merkbeleving die traditionele media en de website overstijgt. Op de lange termijn draagt dit bij aan de positieve uitstraling en beleving van het
merk.

Wat kunnen we leren van KLM?

• Stel duidelijke doelen. KLM kiest voor merkbeleving en betrokkenheid. Facebook kan je website ondersteunen maar vervangt deze niet.
• Gebruik de geschiedenis functionaliteit om de merkbeleving te versterken
• De cover foto is het eerste wat bezoekers of fans zien. Zorg voor herkenbaarheid van je merk of bedrijf.
• Stel vragen en daag uit. Discussie en reacties maken een pagina interessant voor bestaande en nieuwe fans.
• Het achterlaten van reacties op Facebook is laagdrempelig en toegankelijk, reageer daarom snel maar  inhoudelijk op vragen en opmerkingen.

Wat ga ik doen?

In juni ga ik samen met duizenden andere fietsers proberen zo vaak mogelijk de Alpe d’Huez te beklimmen in de Franse Alpen. Deze berg van ongeveer 1860 meter hoog staat bekend om zijn 21 bochten en wordt vaak de ‘Nederlandse berg’ genoemd. Tussen 10.00 uur ‘s ochtends en 16.00 uur ‘s middags ga ik op 6 juni 2012 samen met het team van het Cancer Center Amsterdam op deze berg proberen een zo hoog mogelijk bedrag op te halen voor het KWF Kankerbestrijding. Het onderstaande filmpje geeft een goede impressie van de berg en het evenement.

Wat levert het op?

Het doel van Alpe d’HuZes is om een zo hoog mogelijk bedrag op te halen dat besteed zal worden aan onderzoek in de strijd tegen kanker. Tijdens het evenement wordt daarom een antistrijkstokbeleid gevoerd, waardoor alle donaties gegarandeerd voor 100% gebruikt worden voor onderzoek. Dit jaar wordt daarbij geprobeerd om het record van vorig jaar (van 20,1 miljoen euro) te verbeteren. De teller staat nu op 17 miljoen en om het doel te bereiken heb ik daarom jouw hulp nodig!

Hoe kan je steunen?

Alpe d’HuZes heeft een uitgebreide website online staan met alle mogelijkheden om dit evenement te steunen. Het makkelijkste is om een financiele bij te dragen en mij daarmee te stimuleren zo vaak mogelijk Alpe d’HuZes op te gaan voor dit goede doel. Al het geld dat gedoneerd wordt via mijn actiepagina gaat direct naar Alpe d’HuZes en wordt voor de volle 100% gebruikt om onderzoek te doen naar kanker. Alle beetjes helpen, want vergeet niet: “Alleen een dwaas blaast tegen de wind in, maar met zijn allen veranderen we zijn richting!”. Wil je op een andere manier een bedrijage leveren aan ons team en onze prestatie dan via een donatie? Laat dat een berichtje achter bij dit blog en ik neem contact met je op.

Direct steunen!

Steven van Belleghem mainly focus in his book in my opinion on the transformation of nowadays marketeers and salesmanagers into the role of the conversation manager. I would like too state it even stronger: every person in your company should transform into a conversation manager!

What is according Steven the rol of the conversation manager? Everything is about the brand. So the conversation manager should be capable of developing this. This means activation of and conversation with the customer.

De three steps the conversation manager should make: brand – activation – conversation. Everything is depending on the strength of your brand. Only if there is some identification with your brand, the customer is capable of engaging. The brand should be consistent for a long period. To activate the customer is step two. A nice example is the game of Chiquita, where they not only tell you a story about the ethics of the company, but where the consumers are also really experiencing this story .

Still advertising is key, but very different from the traditional way of advertising. Reach of your advertisement is no longer the key of your succes but the way the advertisement stimulates the conversation. Third step is managing these conversations and keeping them alive.

So forget about marketeers and sales managers in your company and transform all the employees into Conversation Managers!

To be continued…….

Jerry van Leeuwen

This time we made a movie impression of this brain-breaking day!

Early in the morning – Everybody is briefed about their challenge for the day. This time the challenges were twofold:

1. Create a concept for a new website, design and develop that website, write all texts and an online marketing plan including linkbuilding and a complete SEO plan. The outcome? www.hoegoedismijnsite.nl
2. Develop a facebook concept for one of our customers, desing, develop and implement the concept and make a full presentation for the customer.

Organizational structure

With organization structure, we mean the design of systems to ensure effective communication, coordination, and integration of efforts across an organization. It designates formal reporting relationships, including the levels of hierarchy and the span of control of managers and supervisors. In this research, we studied the extent to which an organization’s structure supports knowledge sharing and interaction and how this influences employees’ knowledge sharing activities on social media.

Organizational structure significantly influences two parts of knowledge sharing: knowing what others in your network know en retrieving knowledge from this network.  This means that the more supportive an organization’s structure is of interaction and knowledge sharing (via social media), the more their employees know about the expertise of others and the more information these employees retrieve from their online social networks. An explanation of this result is that clearly defined roles en reporting structures provide information about the expertise of others (expertise being connected to one’s role) and about where one should go for knowledge.

The allocation of knowledge into one’s network was however not influenced by organizational structure, suggesting that employees allocate information in their use of SNSs regardless of the organization’s structure, reporting relations and policies.

Management support

Management support is vital for the knowledge practices in an organization. The management of an organization does not only influence knowledge management on the organizational level, but also at the individual level. Whether managers support and actively promote a knowledge sharing initiative often predicts its success.

In line with this theory, management support shows a significant positive influence on all three knowledge sharing processes: knowing what others know, allocating information in your network, and retrieving knowledge from your network. These effects show that the more supportive management is of the use of SNSs and knowledge sharing, the more knowledge sharing will take place. This means that the speed and ease with which one can connect to others for knowledge and information is increased and knowledge sharing runs smoother.

Organizational culture

Organizational culture refers to a system of shared meaning held by members of an organization. It is a set of values, norms, guiding beliefs and understandings that is shared by members of an organization, which often play a crucial role in the success of knowledge management projects. Like organizational structure, culture was measured as the extent to which the organization’s culture supports knowledge sharing and interaction and how this influences employees’ knowledge sharing activities on social media.

Organizational culture directly influences all three knowledge sharing processes in a positive way. If an organization’s culture supports strong ties and knowledge sharing in the organization, employees will have more up-to-date knowledge about the expertise of others, and more information will be allocated and retrieved. A supportive organizational culture stimulates knowledge sharing through social media.

ICT Infrastructure

An organization’s ICT infrastructure is the collection of information and communication technologies and systems used in an organization, plus the connections between these technologies and systems. Technology comprises a crucial part of the structural dimension within organizations for creating and sharing knowledge. Through the linkage of information and communication systems in an organization, previously fragmented flows of information and knowledge can be integrated.

However, when it comes to knowledge sharing through social media, no significant influence of an organization’s ICT facilities was found. This implies that it does not matter what the ICT facilities of an organization look like for knowledge sharing through social media. A possible explanation for this finding is that social media are not integrated in the ICT of an organization, nor are they owned by organizations. Social media exist independent from an organization’s ICT facilities and are not influenced by them. Employees can access social media and develop online social networks regardless of the organization’s ICT facilities, because they only need a device with a connection to the internet to do so. The only way an organization’s ICT can influence social media use is by restricting employees to visit certain websites and services.

Conclusion

The conclusion of this research is that an organization can indeed influence the social media behavior of its employees. Especially management support and organizational culture proved to be a strong influence. Organizational structure also influences social media use, while ICT facilities tend to have no effect.

My conclusion? Far to many hotels forget that their booking process on their hotel website is an important element in the customer buying decision process.

Pretransaction process in Hotels

Verhagen -buidling on the models of Champy et al. (1996) and Creemers (1997)- suggested that websites or online systems can be seen as decision models in the stages before customers make a purchasing decision (prespurchase stage). This process is often modeled as follows:

[1] Problem Recognition > [2] Information Search > [3] Evaluation of Alternatives > [4] Product Choice

As Verhagen mentions, this model is rather rational and linear while this process -especially online- does not prove to be rational and linear. Also these phases ar not always all present. For example: when buying a chocolate bar, you don’t search for information first to find out what is the best chocolate bar; you just buy one. Creemers (1997) states to this respect that factors need to be present that support the customer decision. He proposes: Knowledge, Interaction, Networking, Sensory Experience, Ubiquity, Aggregation, Customization, Selecteion, Advice, Quote and Agreement. These factors support the customer buying decision. Creemers still shows some linear model and states that ICT can help in supporting these factors.

The same process is followed when a guest is finding a new hotelroom to book: he wants to go to a city or has to go their for work > searches for available hotels > evaluates these on the internet > and decides to book a room at a hotel. How can we make sure that this is your hotel?

The Landscape Model

Verhagen now states the following: a website can support buying decisions. So they can help us in selling more to (potential) customers. We have different kind of buyers that require support in different amounts by different factors for different products. So a support system can look like this:

Based on the type of transaction and type of customer this can be a fast and easy process (e.g. repeat purchases) or a complex and long process (e.g. booking a room for the holidays). Based on the earlier mentioned research of Creemers, Verhagen adds the factors around this process. These factors can support the purchase process.

What do these factors mean for your Hotel Reservation System? 

I will shortly discuss these factors and apply them to your booking engine. Of course there are numerous ways to support your guests using these factors. I would like to challenge you to take a look at your reservation system as a customer decision support system and come op with innovative ideas to support them.

• Customization – can customers customize their order to match their needs? An example is to add extra’s to their booking. Can they rent a bike for specified days already during the booking process on your website? Can they make a reservation for the first night in your hotel restaurant? Also, can they customize their extra’s in the room?
• Comparison – can customers compare your offers? This is one of the things that sites like Booking.com are good at. But can’t you do this yourself? Compare your roomoffers. Compare arrival dates and rates on these days. Make sure the guest is able to compare your offers. Maybe you have a lower priced room available; make this transparent.
• Sensory Experience – customers want to feel, touch, hear and see what they buy. Can guests see your hotelrooms in High-Res images? Maybe even in 3D Images? In our booking tool Custom Bookings we provide the possibility of fully integrating a 3D experience of the hotel. Also by fully integrating your hotel design and service in your booking engine in stead of a general booking process, you have guest sense your service.
• Bargaining – give customers the possibility to bargain. Would you do this at your hotel? You can provide customers with bargains, special rates, etc. And why don’t just try it?
• Networking – customers want to talk to other customers. Again websites like booking.com do well in this factor. Guests can leave reviews for other guests. Why don’t you integrate this in your booking engine? Try to open the doors and let potential guests hear from previous guests that your service levels are really as you promise them to be.
• Ubiquity – The customer wants to decide how, when and where he gets his offer. For hotels I would suggest that you can determine the check-in time online. You can already book for the restaurant on a specified date at a specified time. Also inform your customers up front with an e-mail reminder of these times and dates.
• Adaptation – Can customers adapt the offer? How can your guests adapt their offering? Can they strip certain elements from the reservation that will make it cheaper? Can they add things like extra’s and bookings?
• Aggregation – Bring together all relevant information. For example what does your order confirmation look like? Do you even have one? Does is specify exactly what customers need to know? I even know a hotel that sends their guests an e-mail a few days before the come to Amsterdam, what they can do in Amsterdam during their stay. This is aggregating relevant information from multiple sources to help your guests.
• Quote – be clear on your prices. Show prices transparently and how you came up with these prices. Show prices per night, per extra, etc. and show how this adds up to the final price. Don’t forget to communicate taxes!
• Facilitation – Make sure to facilitate your customer when he/she has trouble. Make sure that on every page you have a contact item. How can guests ask for support?
• Selection – Show your offers. Show your rooms, available dates and prices. You can for example use a calendar with prices per day to show for price differences. Us sensory experience like discussed before to show your selection of offers.
• Advice – Customers want advice. If you have complex elements or decision moments make sure to provide advice or help (also see facilitation) to your customer. Make sure to always show the direct number of the helpdesk.

The Process of Booking a Room at Your Hotel

Now what can we learn from this model to apply to your Hotel’s website and reservation system?

1. Your hotel website and hotel reservation system is an important part of the decision process. Far to many hotels don’t realize that their reservation system plays an important role in the final buying decision. In the reservation system the first service is provided to (potential) guests. If you do this wrong, what will happen when the guest enters your hotel?
2. Not all guests book a room for the same reason. For example, there are guests who book at your hotel because the have to; their company has a contract with your hotel. Others like the atmosphere, and others love the location. The website, and especially your reservation module should be designed in such a way as to support these different types of guests.
3. Different types of guests require differnt types of decison support. The model shows that there are different factors supporting the customer buying decision.
4. During the reservation process you should support in the factors stated in the landscapemodel. Based on multiple models and articles Verhagen came with the support factors in his model. These factors need to be present in your reservation system in order to fully support your hotel guest.
5. Clients will book where they are best supported in their decision process. This is one of the reasons that comparison websites do so well. They support almost all factors very well. How can you implement this in your website or booking engine as to increase your direct bookings?

What is it?

When creating a MVC component, a developer can create multiple controllers, views and model to show and manage a variety of information. A basic component in Joomla! usually consists out of a MVC classes to show a list of items (e.g. the static content items) and MVC classes to show and modify one of these items (for example the static content text editor). Obviously, developers often use names for the used classes that represent what they will show like ‘ContentViewContents’ (the list) and ‘ContentViewContent’ (a single item). Joomla! has however a build in pluralization method that is automatically activated within the MVC structure to automatically find classes. A long story short: Joomla! will attempt to pluralize class names when switching between the views of single and multiple items, using the English rules for pluralization (which often means that an ‘s’ is added to the end of a word). This would not really be a problem if the pluralization was well documented and obvious to new developers. However, proper documentation on this pluralization is lacking (or well hidden) and the errors thrown by Joomla! confusing. Below I will outline what happened in my case and come up with a solution that prevents pluralization and gives developers their control back.

Example case

As mentioned, I did not have any problems with pluralization during the creation of my first two components. Now knowing that Joomla!’s automatic pluralization was the problem, the naming of these two components certainly helped me during their creation (having views like ‘project’ and ‘projects’). However, the name of my third component was based on an existing database table: ‘people’. As I did want my class names to represent the various information shown, I created two MVC structures for showing a list of items (named ‘people’) and for showing single item (named ‘person’). Following the tutorial, my ‘PeopleControllerPerson’ class for the component thus contained the following code:

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< ?php
defined('_JEXEC') or die('Restricted access');
jimport('joomla.application.component.controllerform');

/**
 * Person Controller
 */
class PeopleControllerPerson extends JControllerForm {
}
?>

Having created a View and Model for the structure as well, I tried out the component expecting it to work without problems. Unfortunately, this test was just the start of a relatively long debug and research process as the following error appeared:

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500 - An error has occurred. View not found [name, type, prefix]: persons, html, peopleView

As you can see, Joomla! was looking for a View with the names ‘persons’ or class name ‘peopleViewPersons’. However, I never defined this view and I was sure that the word ‘persons’ occurred nowhere in my entire Joomla! structure. To check this, I ran the following command in the root of the Joomla! directory which returned no results:

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count | grep -iR 'persons' *

The solution

Searching the internet, I found various people that ran into the same problem but a solution was hard to find. After a while, I found a topic by a developer that tried to develop a component in his own language (for which the pluralization method obviously didn’t work). Using the information in this topic and the Joomla! API, the solution for the problem is very simple:

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< ?php
defined('_JEXEC') or die('Restricted access');
jimport('joomla.application.component.controllerform');

/**
 * Person Controller
 */
class PeopleControllerPerson extends JControllerForm {

   /**
     * Constructor.
     *
     * @param An optional associative array of configuration settings.
     * Recognized key values include 'name', 'default_task', 'model_path', and
     * 'view_path' (this list is not meant to be comprehensive).
     * @since 1.5
     */
   function __construct($config = array()) {

       $this->view_list = 'people';
       parent::__construct($config);

   }

}
?>

The above code overrides the default behavior of the controller and forces it to use the view defined by the developer. Obviously, Joomla! should never have implemented this pluralization and let the developers decide what Controller, Model and View to load. However, since the developers of Joomla! will probably keep this ‘feature’ to ensure backwards compatibility, the above fix might be an important addition to the reportoire of many Joomla! developers.

Een goed voorbeeld in deze is het Buurtjournalisten Project van Stichting Buurtlink, waarbij lokaal nieuws uit buurten en wijken, gemaakt door buurtbewoners zelf, centraal staat.
Voor de mensen die Buurtlink niet kennen: Stichting Buurtlink startte zo’n vijf jaar geleden een online platform waarop de bezoeker (een Buurtlinker) doormiddel van het invoeren van zijn of haar postcode ziet wat er speelt in de buurt. Vermiste katten, scheefgezakte stoeptegels, een oproep voor de BuurtBBQ en meer, maar allemaal in jouw eigen buurt.
In 2011, vijf jaar later, zijn er de trends burgerjournalistiek en videocontent. Daar wil Buurtlink wat mee en dat is dan ook het startsein voor het omvangrijke Buurtjournalisten project.

De eerste stappen

Het Buurtjournalistenproject loopt nu ruim een jaar en daarom blikken we terug. We zijn begonnen met het formuleren van een doelstelling, namelijk 200 Buurtjournalisten opleiden voor eind 2012.
Tijdens een eerste brainstorm hebben we allerlei praktische zaken benoemd die we nodig dachten te hebben om de doelstelling te halen.
• Een actiepagina,
• 200 camera’s,
• een heleboel workshops op centrale punten in Nederland,
• promotiemateriaal voor de Buurtjournalisten
• etc., etc.

Vervolgens verdeelden we alle losse flarden in overzichtelijke mappen. Wij gebruikten; techniek, juridisch, marketing & promotie, opleiding & begeleiding, werving & selectie en analyse & evaluatie.

Vervolgens ontwikkelden we een tijdslijn om aan te geven wat wanneer klaar moest zijn. Eerst de website ontwikkelen bijvoorbeeld en zorgen dat de juridische zaken op orde zijn, voordat je ook maar iemand op kunt leiden. Maar ook maakten we een inschatting van de tijd die het zou kosten om workshops te geven door heel het land.
Grove planning klaar? Tijd voor een gedetailleerde planning. In zo’n gedetailleerde planning ga je plannen op exacte data en koppel je personen/partijen aan de taak die je benoemt.

Tussentijds evalueren

Tussentijds evalueren kan snel en bovenal efficiënt. Is bijvoorbeeld de website in de testversie opgeleverd vraag dan diverse mensen met verschillende achtergronden de website te testen. Tijdens het overleg kun je vervolgens puntsgewijs de opvallende zaken behandelen waar nodig en een to-do-lijst opstellen voor de webbouwer. Houd je bij zo’n evaluatie vast aan je projectmappen. Onze ervaring is dat je zo de meeting kort en bondig houd en ook je aantekeningen gemakkelijk kunt verwerken.

Tegenvallers en meevallers

Het is in de eerste alinea al gezegd, we willen een efficiënte planning maar wel realistisch en bovenal met de mogelijkheid tot het nemen van een andere afslag dan van te voren bedacht. Bij een groot project zoals het Buurtjournalisten project zul je te maken krijgen met tegen- en meevallers. De juridische zaken bijvoorbeeld, voor dit project kosten meer tijd en denkwerk dan voorheen vermoedt. We investeerden daarom in een goede juriste en lieten alles tot op de bodem uitzoeken. En waar we bij de eerste promotie bang waren voor weinig respons ontvingen we bijna 400 aanmeldingen uit heel het land. We waren blij verrast, maar werden ook geconfronteerd met ons kleine projectteam dat niet alle nieuwe Buurtjournalisten persoonlijk kon opleiden. Nieuwe afslag werd dan ook een maand durende proefperiode met online begeleiding voor alle aanmeldingen na deelname aan een provinciale workshop.

Kijken, luisteren, verbeteren

Waar wordt gewerkt met mensen gaan dingen nooit geautomatiseerd en dat is maar goed ook. Het belangrijkste is dat je kijkt, waarneemt en bijstuurt waar nodig. Vraag hulp bij zaken waar je zelf niet in geschoold bent. Zoek een goede jurist, ga in zee met een betrouwbare webbouwer en schakel professionals in, zoals wij bijvoorbeeld RTL Nieuwslezer Roelof Hemmen vroegen een workshop te geven.
Door de vrijwillige medewerking van Hemmen konden wij een twaalftal mensen een basis geven als Buurtjournalist, ze werden enthousiast en raakten geïnspireerd. Het gaf ons daarnaast de om het project nog verder te ontwikkelen en verder uit te diepen.

Er is een korte impressie gemaakt van de workshopdag gegeven door Roelof Hemmen, deze vind je hier:

Volgende keer

Volgende keer meer over de website www.buurtjournalist.nl. Waarom staat er op wat er op staat, wat kunnen de Buurtjournalisten hier, wat vinden de bezoekers hier voor informatie. Wat zijn verbeterpunten en wat ontwikkelpunten? Volgende keer openen we de map techniek en kijken we wat er technisch verscholen gaat achter dit project.

3 Knowledge sharing processes

When studying knowledge sharing, we can distinguish three processes:

• Developing an understanding of ‘who knows what’,
• Using this understanding to allocate knowledge or information to others (giving knowledge), and
• Using this understanding to retrieve needed knowledge or information from others (receiving knowledge).

To effectively share knowledge with others, it is essential to know what they know and what expertise they have. Without this understanding it becomes hard to figure out which knowledge you can give and retrieve from which people: your knowledge sharing becomes ineffective. So, how did our respondents score on these three processes?

Table 1: Scores knowledge processes (on a scale of 1 – 7)

As we can see in table 1, all three processes are present in our use of social media to the same extent. This means that we do develop an understanding of what others in our networks know, and that we know how to find them if we want to give or retrieve knowledge.

Different tools

Let’s take a look at the differences in these knowledge sharing processes between our four most popular social media tools: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Yammer. As can be seen in table 2, the scores differ significantly between the different tools. What does this tell us?

Table 2: Scores of the social media tools (on a scale of 1 – 7)

For the process of developing an understanding of ‘who knows what’, Twitter scores significantly higher than other services, while Yammer scores significantly lower than most other services. Users of Twitter apparently have the feeling that they get to know a lot about each other through their communication. Because of the limited space for personal information in a Twitter profile, this understanding is likely to be stimulated by the high frequency of messages. The fact that Yammer is a weak tool for this process had two possible explanations. One explanation is that profiles do not play a significant role in this tool and that people do not take the time to view the profiles of other. A second explanation is that Yammer is an intra-organizational tool. Users may already know the colleagues they connect with on Yammer and have an up to date understanding of the knowledge of these people. The result that LinkedIn does not score high on this knowledge sharing process is rather surprising, because profiles are the core functionality of LinkedIn. Also, LinkedIn profiles are very illusive, providing the opportunity to hold a lot of work-related personal information.

On allocating knowledge, Twitter scores again significantly higher than other services, while LinkedIn scores significantly lower. More information is allocated on Twitter, and less on LinkedIn. The high score of Twitter on information allocation can be explained by the fact that Twitter is mostly used to send messages, not to receive them. Users of Twitter probably pay more attention to their own messages than to those of their alters. How much time do you spend on reading the tweets of the people you follow?

For the process of retrieving knowledge, Twitter and Yammer turn out to be most used. The advantage of Twitter in this process is probably the fast communication of the tool. When posing a question, responses often follow quickly. The strong point of Yammer here is the possibility to ask colleagues for help and having the space for an indepth answer.

This analysis shows that Twitter is a rather strong tool for knowledge sharing, which might support a common claim in the knowledge management literature that communication stimulates knowledge sharing. Twitter is built around communication. Fast and easy communication is the tool’s key competence.

While very popular, LinkedIn turns out to be a weak tool for knowledge sharing. Users of LinkedIn do not use this tool to find and retrieve knowledge and expertise. This tool is used more to get to know the people in one’s network than to share knowledge and information with them. This is complementary to the conclusion in my previous blog that LinkedIn is used more to build a network than to do something with this network. Keeping track of what former colleagues are doing is one of the key uses of LinkedIn (Skeels & Grudin, 2009), which fits these results.