Managing Knowledge in Social Media

Abstract

Social media platforms are massive sources of information and knowledge, considering their nature that heavily relies on the concept of media sharing in the form of visuals, written, or other multimedia formats. The ease of accessing these channels and contributing to them is what makes it a very unique yet challenging source to manage. The variety of individuals and their backgrounds, along with the numerous numbers of active users that is rapidly increasing, makes it very difficult to practice basic and traditional KM processes. This systematic review highlights some of the initiatives that have promisingly attempted to acquire the knowledge in SM, verify it, and create a reliable source out of it. While many case studies have proven that the knowledge exists in today’s social platforms can be of a great benefit, very least has been done to easily capture original, relative, and beneficial data from it. We reached to the finding that KM researchers focused on written materials, while neglecting platforms that provided audio/video based content and viral media platforms as well, which could be the richest platforms in containing genuine knowledge. Many notable efforts were attempted to apply frameworks that would effectively capture the knowledge in SM, verify it, and turn it into a reliable knowledge reservoir, and some of the experimental case studies had promising results, but the downfall was the use of traditional KM processes rather than utilizing technological or intelligent tools. We believe that there is a significant amount of data that is being wasted, which needs a technological software that could extract this data and turn it into a knowledge repository.