Does KM or Social Learning Come First?

Don’t you just love it when things fall into place?  For example, this Thursday I am ready to give a session for DevLearn08 entitled, “15 Objections to Social Learning and How to Overcome Them.”  Then, yesterday, someone at my company put up this comment:

“The Community Portal (the name of our customer facing social media / learning platform) should be a Knowledge Base first, and a Social Networking Site second.“

What a great opportunity to use my presentation and expand on it!  I will have to use this as an example on Thursday.  Here was my response:

When I speak at conferences and talk to other people at other companies and different association meetings this is one of the most difficult thing for them to understand.  Yet when they do finally understand it (usually because they see it in action) they embrace it.  The knowledge base (KB) of the past never really worked.  As we have seen here at GTS in past years, we have it tried a number of times.  Many companies have tried it, internally and externally, and most have eventually abandoned them.  They didn’t work for so many reasons that I won’t go into.  One of them, however, is that it was a repository.  Inherently that is not so bad, but for sustainability it is – and sustainability is KEY to success.  There is A LOT of talk in the KB world that I have been monitoring.  The industry recognizes the limitations and the old mind set of those systems and they (KB professionals) are FLOCKING to social media.

Why?

It creates discussions.  Discussions create interactivity which creates adoption. Interactivity also creates content.  The content creates a repository, but an interactive one. PLUS, the information is created by EVERYONE, not just one group or just by the company.  Sure, we can spend our time adding in information.  But I hope you can see that the more we can get our customers to interact, the more they will create information which will grow the ‘repository’ exponentially.

So, from my view, the CP is first a repository in theory.  In practice, however, it is first a social media site which creates adoption and captures knowledge which creates a repository as an effect.

Interaction is the key to adoption and knowledge growth and what we are striving for here is adoption.

What do you think?