Manage Knowledge Socially

My colleague, Allan, pointed me to this blog by Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald, Social Media versus Knowledge Management. It's generating some discussion in the office. The point of the authors is:

• Knowledge management is what company management tells me I need to know, based on what they think is important.
• Social media is how my peers show me what they think is important, based on their experience and in a way that I can judge for myself.

This is useful model, and it may apply very well to most organizations. The frustrated librarian/researcher/information explorer in me rebels because

• Social media doesn't guarantee information will be shared outside of a social network. Information sharing is a largely social activity. Most of what you know came from someone else. There is no benefit for a group of peers keeping information in a closely held tribe. We have a name for this in the corporate world - it's called a silo.
• Social media is often about the conversation instead of the information. I've been monitoring/moderating an online community. There is a constant call from the corporate knowledge management community to pull knowledge for reuse from the community. The problem is the majority of the value in the community is from the conversation not from an answer the community comes up with. The task of finding "reusable content" in a community like trying to write Wikipedia articles from the debates on what should be in each article.
• Social media only exposes the existing knowledge social network - i.e. who do people ask.
• Social media doesn't protect you from hierarchy, it just creates a different one base on reputation. Each user still has a responsibility to use due diligence assessing information. It is not enough that the author is a Vice President, or has a high on-line reputation.

I believe there is a role for making the shared information available to a wider knowledge. Knowledge should be managed socially - i.e. organizations should be engaged in encourage transparent information sharing, hierarchies be damned.  Systematic sharing is not necessarily anathema to peer review. Academic publishing has been very successful for decades with peer review. Similarly organizations can establish communities of practice and allow users to create and edit documents. Knowledge Centered Support (KCS) is one way organizations can manage information socially. One of the base principles of KCS is "Reward learning, collaboration, sharing, and improving" What is more social than that?