Mining Twitter for KM - Part 3
What good is knowledge management if people do not have straightforward, uncomplicated access to the 'managed' knowledge? Traditional knowledge management or knowledge management 1.0 has been allowed to evolve into knowledge management 2.0 by a few changes, on the technology front, with the evolution of the Internet to web 2.0 and also a change in people's mindsets.
With traditional knowledge management, collaboration was seen as extra work, but with knowledge management 2.0 collaborative is seen as the norm and it means that employees co-author outcomes rather than having issues with 'what's mine is mine'. As a result content is more fluid and develops through participation rather than it being protected (Jennifer Okimoto, consultant at IBM Global Business Services).
In today's world there is a seemingly unending amount of data flowing around and the traditional method of managing it i.e. knowledge management 1.0 has become obsolete and has even been called "garbage in, garbage out" by employees of a company in Canada whose name shall remain anonymous for privacy reasons. The employees felt that the data being inputted into the system was not cleaned and often duplicated; this resulted in them creating reports that were inaccurate.
Mining data has been around for ages and has been particularly useful in the marketing industry. The combination of statistics, which is the foundation of most data mining technologies, and artificial intelligence, which attempts to apply human-like thought processes to statistical problems, has allowed the computers to be capable of 'machine learning' (data-mining-software.com). Data mining can be seen as the adaptation of machine learning techniques to business applications and thus used to find previously unknown trends stemming from the same old data.
Enter Twitter, a microblogging site that has taken off and been accepted by over 175million people worldwide. While you may say well Facebook has around 5 times as many users, Twitter is a microblog which has posters limit their inputs/updates/knowledge to 140 characters. This may seem like it is just not enough to get your point across but with the multitasking nature of people nowadays, they are more likely to read and absorb something short and sweet rather than having to go through droves of useless information to find what they are looking for. Some may say that knowledge management 1.0, with straightforward databases and maybe a keyword search is part of the problem that gives searchers all that extra 'useless' information as it finds any document with that word in it.
Twitter has a very useful tool, which is trending topics; these are things that people are talking about at any particular time. If one can extrapolate this type of technology to the knowledge management field then this can be very helpful if a company is working on some important project and they have a Twitter-like microblog in place, this will alert all the users of what is happening and even encourage them to add to the discussion thereby making a solution ever more likely.
Furthermore Twitter allows people to tag their posts with hashtags; this allows people who are posting any piece of information or knowledge to tag it with an appropriate key word which ultimately helps in managing all the knowledge available. So for someone wishing to mine Twitter for knowledge all they have to do is type in the hashtag search and all the topics relevant to them will pop up rather than their search term being found anywhere on the site. For example I searched for #bodybuilding and I found posts from people providing useful information that I could use as well as other people's updates which were not quite as useful. The posts I did choose to read mostly had links in them which took me to other websites with the relevant information. I saw a post by musclechronicle which read "20 songs to get you motivated in gym!" along with the shortened URL and the hashtag. Since 140 characters isn't really that much if you are adding links, which is why there are sites such weebly that allow URLs to be shortened thus taking less space within the allocated 140 characters.
While on the topic of hashtags, it has to be noted that humans are still providing these pieces of information as well as the hashtags. This invariably means that not all the tags will be correct and quite possibly even some of the correct ones will not be useful. One example I came across in my encounters with hashtags was the tag #usefulinfo, posters find something they deem to be useful and tag it with #usefulinfo, but when I searched for #usefulinfo some very interesting facts popped up, but not very many of them at all were useful to me.
This is still not the end of Twitter's functionality as a knowledge management 2.0 tool. A company can have various different departments in place and create 'lists' for each of them which allow a person to be a part of a list and receive updates from people on that list. This can be particularly useful if within an organisation there are certain individuals who are regarded as experts in a particular field, by having the 'experts' post about their experiences and knowledge, other employees who need help in that specific area can just view that person's posts and are likely to find some sort of a solution. This lends to the idea of not having to 'reinvent the wheel'.
References
http://www.slideshare.net/elsua/the-evolution-of-knowledge-management-km-10-vs-km-20
http://www.itworldcanada.com/blogs/ahead/2009/06/24/knowledge-management-is-so-web-10-you-ve-got-to-leverage-it-now/50625/
http://www.data-mining-software.com/data_mining_history.htm
http://twitter.com/#!/
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