Challenges of knowledge management amidst rapidly evolving tools of social media

Social media technologies have been embraced by individuals and organizations on such a massive scale in the last decade that knowledge sharing and application has molded into a totally new paradigm. It has not only changed the social discourse of communication but also affected the knowledge management strategies of organizations. This raises quite a number of fundamental challenges out of which three are being dealt in this chapter. The first challenge is whether knowledge management has fully embraced social media as a channel of mass reach the way it did in case of other means of mass communication. The second one is the question of speed and extent of knowledge sharing in social media. The third challenge is whether social media strategy can provide a high advantage to smaller and newer companies in comparison to older but larger organizations. It is apparent that the commercial aspect of social media is easy for a tête-à-tête but difficult to articulate and design the right strategy because it needs a lot of refinements owing to inherent complexities in the process.