A blog about web culture, cyberliterature and the digital humanities.

I have written about various social media and web technologies as they relate to knowledge management (KM), and as they are discussed in the literature.  But I haven’t really touched on how the literature approaches measuring the application and success of such technologies in an organizational context.  Prusak notes that one of the priorities of KM is to identify the unit of analysis and how to measure it (2001, 1004).  In this review paper I will examine some of the readings that have applied this question to social media. For the sake of consistency, the readings I have chosen deal with the assessment of blogs for the management of organizational knowledge, but all of the methods discussed could be generalized to other emerging social technologies.

Grudin indicates that the reason most attempts at developing systems to preserve and retrieve knowledge in the past have failed, is that digital systems required information to be represented explicitly when most knowledge is tacit: “Tacit knowledge is often transmitted through a combination of demonstration, illustration, annotation, and discussion.” (2006, 1) But the situation, as Grudin explains, has changed—“old assumptions do not hold…new opportunities are emerging.” (ibid.) Virtual memory is no longer sold at a premium, allowing the informal and interactive activities used to spread tacit knowledge to be captured and preserved; emerging trends such as blogs, wikis, the ever-increasing efficiency of search engines, and of course social networks such as Twitter and Facebook that have come to dominate the Internet landscape open up a multitude of ways in which tacit knowledge can be digitized.

In his analysis of blogs, Grudin identifies five categories (2006, 5):

– diary-like blogs, or personal blogs, developing the skill of engaging readers through personal revelation;

– A-list blogs by journalists and high-profile individuals, as a source of information on events products and trends;

– Watchlists, which track references across a wide selection of sources, reveal how a particular product, organization, name, brand, topic, etc is being discussed;

– Externally visible employee blogs provide a human face for an organization or product, which offsets the potential legal and PR risks for a corporation.

– Project blogs are internal blogs that focus on work and serve as a convenient means of collecting, organizing and retrieving documents and communication.

Lee, et al. make a similar move in categorizing the types of public blogs used by Fortune 500 companies (2006, 319):

– Employee blogs (maintained by rank-and-file employees, varies in content and format)

– Group blogs (operated by a group of rank-and-file employees, focuses on a specific topic)

– Executive blogs (feature the writings of high-ranking executives)

– Promotional blogs (promoting products and events)

– Newsletter-type blogs (covering company news)

Grudin does not conduct any formal assessment of blogs, except to provide examples of project blogs, and to assign technical and behavioral characteristics to that particular sub-type that allowed them to be successful, based on his personal experience (2006, 5-7). Lee, et al.’s approach to assessing blogs involves content analysis of 50 corporate blogs launched by the 2005 Fortune 500 companies (2006, 322-23). In addition to the categories above, Lee, et al. also identified five distinct blogging strategies based on their findings, which broadly fall under two approaches (321):

– Bottom-up, in which all company members are permitted to blog, and each blog serves a distinct purpose (not necessarily assigned by a higher authority)[1];

– Top-down, in which only select individuals or groups are permitted to blog, and the blogs serve an assigned purpose that rarely deviates between blogs.

As the names suggest, a greater control of information is exercised in the top-down approach, while employee bloggers in companies adopting the bottom-up approach are provided greater autonomy.

Huh, et al. developed a unique approach in their study of BlogCentral, IBM’s internal blogging system (2007).  The study combined interviews with individual bloggers about their blogging practices and content analysis of their blogs.  Based on this data, they were able to measure two characteristics of blogs: the content (personal stories/questions provoking discussion/sharing information or expertise) and the intended audience (no specific audience/specific audience/broad audience).  These findings revealed four key observations:

– Blogs provide a medium for employees to collaborate and give feedback;

– Blogs are a place to share expertise and acquire tacit knowledge;

– Blogs are used to share personal stories and opinions that may increase the chances of social interaction and collaboration;

– Blogs are used to share aggregated information from external sources by writers who are experts in the area.

Rodriguez examines the use of WordPress blogs in two academic libraries for internal communication and knowledge management at the reference desk (2010).  Her analysis measures the success of these implementations using diffusion of innovation and organizational lag theories. Rogers’ Innovation Diffusion Theory establishes five attributes of an innovation that influence its acceptance in an organizational environment: Relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, triability, and observability (2010, 109). Meanwhile, organizational lag identifies the discrepancy between the adoption of technical innovation—i.e. the technology itself—and administrative innovation—i.e. the underlying, administrative purpose(s) for implementing the technology, usually representing a change in workflow to increase productivity.  In analyzing the two implementations of the blogging software, Rodriguez discovers that both libraries succeeded in terms of employee adoption of the technical innovation, but failed with the administrative innovation.  This was due specifically to the innovation having poor observability: “the degree to which the results of the innovation are easily recognized by the users and others” (2010, 109, 120). The initiators of the innovation in both cases did not “clearly articulate the broader administrative objectives” and “demonstrate the value of implementing both the tool and the new workflow process.” (2010, 120) If they had done so, Rodriguez suggests, the blogs might have been more successful.

While all of these studies approached blogging in a different way—project blogs, external corporate blogs, internal corporate blogs and internal group blogs—and measured different aspects of the technology—what it is, how it is used, if it is successful—they reveal a number of valuable approaches to studying social media in the KM context. Categorization, content and discourse analysis, interviews, and the application of relevant theoretical models are all compelling methods to assess social media and web technologies.

[1] One of the valuable contributions of Lee, et al.’s study is to also identify the essential purposes for which corporate blogs are employed. Some of these include product development, customer service, promotion and thought leadership. The notion of ‘thought leadership’ in particular, as a finding of their content analysis, is worth exploring; ‘thought leadership’ suggest that the ability to communicate innovative ideas is closely tied to natural leadership skills, and that blogs and other social media (by extension) can help express these ideas. Lee, et al.’s findings also suggest that ‘thought leadership’ in blogs will build the brand, or ‘human’ face of the organization, while acting as a control over employee blogs, evidenced by the fact that it is found primarily in blogs that employ a top-down strategy.