How Social CEOs Harness Social Media for Knowledge Management
CEOs who learn how to harness the power of social media can greatly improve the flow of information among their employees, while managing shared knowledge with their partners in unexpected new ways. This appealing outcome is fast becoming the norm for a new breed of cutting-edge Social CEOs.
The Social CEO is a new term to describe modern chief executives who are actively embracing social media tools. Social media provides an effective way to escape top-heavy management structures and broadly access community knowledge.
The main problem here involves how to get needed advice and ideas from functional specialists who are spread out across various project teams. One decentralized way to gather knowledge from throughout an organization involves the adoption of internal crowdsourcing software. Crowdsourcing provides a vehicle to produce fresh ideas and insights that will yield a competitive advantage.
Tapping Into the Wisdom of Crowds
Social CEOs use internal crowdsourcing to identify knowledge assets or information resources from a distributed pool of contributors within their companies, or from their partners and suppliers. Crowdsourcing tools include open surveys and user-generated knowledge systems to aggregate and share the information.
Employees can contribute, comment and vote on mutual ideas about how to improve business tasks and services. Through this application of collective intelligence, the best ideas soon bubble up to the top.
Any employee, regardless of job position, education or experience, has the chance to submit an idea. In addition, the team is then queried to vote on the best ways to implement their shared plans. This egalitarian approach increases buy-in from team members, resulting in a more motivated staff and better aligned teams.
In this way, Social CEOs can generate better communications, an improved brand image, and higher employee morale. In fact, four-of-five employees today would prefer to work for a Social CEO who regularly uses social media, according to findings by Refresh.io, an iOS and Web app firm. Yet despite such clear benefits, many leaders remain hesitant to adopt social media tools, including crowdsourcing software. Just 20% of CEOs are now estimated to have a social media account.
This reticence stems mostly from CEOs who have trouble recognizing the difference between “actionable social” information and plain old “social noise.” Think of actionable social as useful data that can be analyzed to improve business results. Conversely, social noise involves a surplus flood of information that drowns out the underlying meanings.
This blast of social noise stems from enterprise social media tools which allow everybody involved to correspond with everybody else. Such a free-for-all environment results in a chaotic rush of information, as the devoted followers tend to chatter back and forth over social platforms, causing their less interested colleagues to pull back and disengage.