Managing social knowledge management: Balancing the gatekeeping vs. crowdsourcing requirements

Abstract

In a knowledge driven economy, the ability of a firm to grow and gain competitive advantage is defined by its ability to realize economic value from its knowledge assets. In one form or the other, firms have attempted to capitalize on the power of knowledge based economy. Multiple steps were taken by various firms to capture the knowledge and create knowledge bank in form of KM tools and other propriety media. Social media has provided firms with a very powerful tool to appropriate the benefits of such codified knowledge. Social media, in form of both public social network sites and propriety social media tools has enabled collaborative creation and storage of knowledge like never before in human history. Availability of these media has lowered the barrier of entry in a knowledge driven economy by democratizing collection and organization of knowledge. In this chapter, we present an exploratory framework to analyze the implications of use of various types of social media based KM tools on the firm's knowledge collection and sharing strategies. © 2017, IGI Global.