The Power of Social Media in Fostering Knowledge Sharing

Social media is no longer a negligible phenomenon; tools like Facebook, Blogs or YouTube have taken the world in a storm. Social media has become a mainstream, modified personal relationships, allowed individuals to contribute to number of issues and generated new possibilities and challenges to facilitate collaboration. Organizations have urgent need of not only focusing on innovation of new products and services, but also paying specific attention to effective knowledge sharing, which is of vital importance for their success. The potential advantage of embracing and implementing social media is enormous. Although the interest in social media is increasing, on the one hand knowledge workers and managers are waiting to get involved in this collaborative world, because they may not feel motivated or may not be aware of the advantages of using these tools for work purposes. On the other hand, organizations do not tend to allow their employees to use social media technologies because they may be concerned about the risks and consequences of a potential misuse. Our exploratory survey investigates how internal or external (available through official internal network) social media technologies are being used for knowledge sharing during work or for professional development. The study was accomplished with the help of enterprises and institutions operating in Hungary from profit and non-profit sectors, applying quantitative research methods. In total 299 individuals (white-collar workers, middle level managers, top management) participated by completing the online, web-based questionnaire. The results have shown that Hungarian organizations prefer not to allow the usage of external social media; but where the employees are supported to reach these tools, high proportion of the people utilize them. The paper provides recommendations to the organizations how to foster motivating employees for using social media technologies for work purposes in knowledge sharing. In the discussion, a short summary of our empirical study, managerial implications and new research direction are presented.