Knowledge Management Social Networks And Innovation

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Introduction

For the past few years, consumer’s behavior has changed rapidly and challenging where consumers are in the driver’s seat as every company treats consumers as kings. Most organizations put the customers in the center of businesses by revamping their approach for managing and expanding their customers’ experience, adopting new technologies and trends while consistency engages and understands the consumers through social media. Social media refers to a collection of online services supporting social interactions among users and allows them to co-create, find, share and evaluate the online information repository. According to Steven Van B. (2011), there are four steps to integrate the dynamics of social media and customer centric thinking: "Capability building", "Pilot mode", "Integration mode", and "Leverage mode".

Social Dynamic Model

Capability building, the first step, is a process of setting up an internal and external foundation belief and knowledge. As most organizations need to align on the value of social media and customer centricity, they need to put the right infrastructure. At the same time, they are evaluated by scanning environments to understand organizational targeted potential audiences and using the most popular channels where people discuss related similar industry to deliver to audiences. In general, most companies are not well equipped with knowledge on social media. By contrast, strategy is established through internal people to ensure employees have the capability to achieve the organization goal. It is important to have frequent training programs to guarantee employees are familiar with using social media in an effective and beneficial way. At the same time, creating company-wide knowledge management system assists the employees easier and faster access to search all content repositories through the simplicity of a single search box and share the best practices on collaborative platforms. An example can be the creating of a homepage stating the business goal and organization culture for employees. It is essential to have a good business communication for building a successful business team. Therefore, a conversation manager is needed to organize the conversation management strategy of a company to interact with customers, helping people by giving them example profile descriptions for twitter and LinkedIn. Conversation manager is the central axils in facilitating the dialogue with customers in all touch points. At the same time, he/she stimulates employees to talk to customers in a natural way so as to avoid overly pedantic.

Pilot project which is the second step develops when capability building step has created internal knowledge. This is crucial in displaying the value of integrating social media through tangible output. Its main goal is to enable organizational reacting to social media so as to gain a broader and more comprehensive understanding of the industry. The various kinds of cultures and media are to evaluate the feasibility of the pilot project. Before the businesses start to operate, there is a need to understand the environment not in term of research, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Therefore, business will create a few pilot projects to determine the output of the project’s efforts and learning processes. Organizational can benchmark the level of feasibility through the results in terms of the level of return and cultivate a company-wide listening culture. The pilot project will indicate the most efficient way of doing, increasing the employees experience and understanding the organizational goal. The extensive training project during the capability building step will create internal knowledge and support for the employees. Thus, it is important to show the value of integrating social media through tangible output in the pilot project.

The third step, which is the integration mode, provides more information in bringing organizations and customers closer. This is to improve and redesigning the company structure base which has received from the bad feedbacks. By creating the brand fan communities’site, this can get clients to be involved in the organization. For example, Ben and Jerry did a good collaboration with customers by encouraging the fans community to provide an opportunity to think about innovations of the products/services. (Guardian (2009))After identifying and restructuring the organization, in order to integrate social media, it is important to set a new key success to every different department to measure progress towards organization goal.

Finally, the last phase is about providing company flexibilities to the integration of social media. The objective of the organization is to increase the returns on marketing investment and communication efforts to reach more people and saving time and cost. This is also to provide an easier access to a speedy 24-hour integrate conversation between capable employees and their consumers.

Steven Van B. (2011)

Continuously, Unilever has been chosen to identify how the organization establishes well in social dynamic model. There is a few example of cooperate using social media to develop organizational learning to under base knowledge. It also improves the knowledge collected from internal or external social media which become a catalyst or enhance the competitor advantage.

Unilever’s organization learning

Learning has made increasing strategic initiative for many organizations and being a focal point for competitive advantage. The field of organizational learning explores different ways to design organizations to fulfill employees function effectively, encourage people to reach their full potential, while detecting and correcting error to improve organizational desire. (Franco, M. & Almeida, J., (2011); Gorelick, C., (2005)) Organizational learning has been seen as a process of improving actions through better knowledge and understanding interaction with their environments social networks of organizational learning to raise effectiveness. This is done by exposing them to novel sources of idea, enabling fast access to resources, and information exchange to create a more knowledgably workforce. (Fiol and Lyles (1985); Schwandt, D.R. (1993))

Base on the capacity building, Unilever has motivated employees’ arm with shared resources and dynamic relationships to make use of shared knowledge in social media to enhance learning and create new knowledge within the organization. Social media tools are the best platform of conversation which connects content and best practices to individuals. First of all, we can substantially enrich longer formal programmers’, such as professional and postgraduate qualifications and management development programmers’ by using social media as a vehicle for on-going group collaboration. Many organizations are already benefiting from using forums to discuss issues and share ideas, blogs as learning journals, wikis as a focus for group collaborative projects, and also using podcasts and videos as a means for sharing research. (Shepherd, C., 2011) To be more specify, social network analysis like the Facebook or Twitter can be applied to focus on supplement and enriching organization employee’s social relationships in terms of knowledge acquisition. By using the monitoring tools available, it is effective and efficient to offer a broad insight into the brand image, reputation, arising issues, consumer preferences, etc. for instance, Unilever’s create Facebook and video for youth education (eg. Health education - Wash disease away YouTube (2011)) instead of the traditional hard copy materials and the employees sharing project discussion progress through Facebook can be effective and efficient.

Moreover, organization can be viewed as social systems especially where employees continually generating experiences and assisting improvements in the organizations. (Sparta,P.,2012) Unilever’s corporate intranet access has a ‘learning passport’ to manage own skills development, and specific training that is strategically or legally required. (Unilever (2013)) Thus, providing ever flowing connectivity to all employees with social media creating best practices and approaches challenge the organization’s prescribed methods and the learning programs designed to teach them in pilot project to gain a broader and more comprehensive understanding of the industry. (Thomas, M. & Thomas, H., 2012) Social media tools can support complex work flow and extend formal learning programs (e-learning and classrooms) whereby previous tools are unable to. (Thomas, M. & Thomas, H., 2012) Hence, employees are connected to social media to create best practices and approaches challenging the prescribed methods defined by the organization and the learning programs designed to teach them.

Besides, Unilever contributes social media online communities of practice to share new ideas and debate issues. For those in urgent needs can used micro-blogging services such as Twitter and Yammer to quickly update peers on new developments. At the same time this is to prevent a community to become isolated. (Shepherd, C., (2011)) The outcomes generated by the community are needed to be communicated to the rest of the organization. Likewise, inputs from the wider network are freely flow without restrictions. These challenges are addressed by the leverage pillar. Unilever’s homepage (Unilever.com) updates information maintained so that the employees are aware of the organization’s vision and history. Unilever adopts organizational culture of workplace in order to make it easily understand and update discussion between employees the issues allocated at social network twitter, then update news to public relation and provide highly valuable comments and feedbacks that have led to a substantial improvement through particular topics or videos. Continuous monitoring supported efficiently managed and updating ability and function in current public relation social media space: e.g. YouTube could be a platform for R&D. Organizational familiar public platform changes ability. According to Guardian (2012), "800 million people have no chance to drink clean water", Unilever uses power of social media to help prevent water-borne disease by partners with Facebook to connect people and empower charitable giving more social, personal and relevant. (YouTube, (2012))

Unilever’s Knowledge management

The advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web has made unlimited sources of knowledge available to us all. Knowledge management as an organizational innovation has been with Unilever for more than a decade and is regarded as an invaluable commodity that is embedded in their products (especially high-technology products) and in the tacit knowledge of highly mobile employees. KM as opposed to other information management fields is the ability of knowledge management to address knowledge in all of its forms, notably, tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge (Ma, M., 2000)

Knowledge management is professional practices process which improves organizational capability to enhance sharing their ability by capturing knowledge and transfers or converts by distributing knowledge into competitive advantage. (KimizDalkir (2005)) It helps organizations to address specific customers’ needs effectively so as to enhance customer satisfaction. According to the social media, customer knowledge allows acquiring new customers and retaining the current ones, which in turn, enables organizations to compete more effectively (Zyl, C. Van, 2003.)

Nowadays, knowledge collected is stored in retrievable ways through system, like 70 per cent of the knowledge management literature has been stored through knowledge processing and data management. (Malhotra,Y. (2000)) Base on integrate mode, Unilever has developed Customer Relationship Management system to track the customers’ needs, increasing the company’s reputation and value. In this information culture, empirical data are considered treasure and this data is usually stored in relational databases. (Michalski, C. (1999)) Moreover, Unilever uses Oracle database management by capturing relevant consumer signals in making decisions and take action used in brands. In particular, Twitter and Facebook, Community web are used for management knowledge from and about customers, whereas Foursquare is mainly used for managing knowledge for and from customers. For example: Ben and Jerry have good collaboration with customers by using their idea to think about innovations of the products/services. (Guardian (2009))

Knowledge management is also management of knowledge life cycle within strategic operations management enabling an organization making good decisions on structuring value-chain operations to maximize customers’ satisfaction and co-operate efficiency. Utilizing the knowledge base within an organization to identify any additional knowledge required to increase competitive advantage. Social media services with distinct technical features can help unleash passion among users to engage in knowledge sharing (Paroutis & Saleh, 2009). The openness and participation properties of social media entwine users and content, rendering it suitable for the dynamic and customer-centric. Unilever uses various social media tools for customer knowledge management that can serve as effective branding and marketing instruments for the organization. Through social media, it updated the latest products, activities and events to its customers. Unilever draws knowledge from customers to analyze their expectations, behaviors and preferences. It also monitors what is being discussed among customers to gain a sense of the sentiment on the ground (Chua, A.Y.., (2013)).

Drew (1999) offers some examples of knowledge management in practice. Unilever product life cycle has used knowledge to good effect in its Ragu sauces division and has a series of workshops around the world to map its knowledge of tomato sauce technology and factors contributing to the taste, texture and quality of the product. In this process, managers develop and share new insights on 50 indentified areas of knowledge networks or communities. For Birds Eye frozen foods division, managers discovered they possessed an important area of knowledge not being fully exploited by customers: a world class expertise in nutrition. Unilever has given a lot of attention to organizational learning and building knowledge capture into key processes.

All these issues need to be elaborated in order to design management system of the intelligent system that is able to communicate with the users on one end and the various database and knowledge base management systems of the modules on the other end. The resulting intelligent system can realized vision and help decision makers to improve work quality.

Unilever’s Innovative

Internet is the most outstanding innovation in the field of communication in the history of mankind, whereby newer reliable innovations is available at a speedy communication and also providing entertainment, on-line services, e-commerce and social networking. Information resources through internet search engines, like Google, Yahoo which provide a virtual treasure trove of information. Some minor disadvantages are theft of personal information, spamming and virus threat.

Knowledge is a source of competitive advantage since it fosters innovation (Grant, 1996; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). Therefore, the knowledge that is attained from customers can assist companies to adequately assess and fulfill customers’ needs and also to reduce products failure risks. Besides, Unilever has created a video to social media and they have established a testing event for the organizational product (Marmite). They have collected the feedback from the social network (Eg. Facebook, twitter and so on). The main purpose is to identify the customer satisfaction and manage the knowledge to get more innovation.

Moreover, Unilever redefines the roles of its customers through the use of social media by transforming them from passive recipients of beverages to active contributors of innovation. It follows closely the principle of "design with customers" (Sigala, 2012) by encouraging its customers to participate in dual role of creators and evaluators of ideas. The implementation of ideas that are being contributed by the customers at Unilever’ campaign can further foster customers’ loyalty

In addition, Unilever uses effective strategies to alleviate customers’ reluctance for voluntary knowledge sharing, thereby promoting engagement in social media. (Desouza et al., 2008) Unilever also deploys a number of former and present baristas to offer prompt responses to customers and this indirectly serves as motivation to continue their participation. At the same time, Unilever makes conscious efforts to prevent overload of knowledge in order to avoid being sources of nuisance to customers engaged strategies. Besides that, it also stays attentive to both compliments and complaints, which further encourages customers’ engagement. Unilever make use of those unhappy customers ‘complaints as their opportunities for further improvements and striving to turn frowns upside down

Conclusion

Organizations that operate in fast-changing competitive environments are pressurized to learn in order to survive the threats of hostile competitor and difficult environments. Moreover, Steven Van B. (2011), delivers the theoretical practice of four steps to integrate the dynamics of social media and customer centric thinking. These days’ organizations need to be more innovative. Knowledge diffusion initiatives become a vital consideration for organizational learning and effectiveness.