Corporate Memory and Social Media

When I first worked at Amazon a long time ago, in the high heady days of the bubble, we were all housed in one building on 1st ave near skid row in Seattle. It was a great time to be there, even if the neighborhood was a little sketchy. One of the best aspects of being together in one fairly small building was the rapid learning curve we enjoyed, since the source of all kinds of information was very close at hand.

As we grew, we had to move out to other buildings, as we still did not have a main headquarters large enough to house us all. Micro-cultures and caches of information sprang up in each new building we inhabited. It seemed sometimes like a block away was as good as a continent away.

We poured enormous resources into trying to share knowledge, tips and tricks across sites but the main method was email. It quickly became unwieldy and maybe 1 out of 10 emails really got absorbed by the target audience. We had a home-made knowledge base, with all kinds of information, but no real way to communicate the brand expectations of our rapidly growing customer base. Service took a hit for a while. I’m glad to say those were the bad old days and much, much has been done to smooth out the service experience. Most importantly, I believe Amazon’s online self-help tools are the best around–they’re cohesive and just-enough, without being too much.

But the point here is more about how we share information, corporate memory and culture in times of great change–which for most companies is all the time. There are bigger and smaller waves, of course, but change is what it’s all about.

The problem of sharing knowledge and memory, the “tacit bits,” is what initially drew me to social media like blogs and wikis. I know first hand that the best way to transfer knowledge is to open it up to everyone who has a stake in the end product–in the case above, that means the service delivered to the customer.

The Fast Forward blog has an overview today of companies that are beginning to deploy blogs internally as a way to share experience and knowledge across groups, and gather feedback and new information in exchange. The companies he discusses are using a technology called Awareness, previously known as iUpload. There are other tools out there as well, such as Clearspace from Jive Software. The challenge then becomes: how to harvest the information effectively.

I’m an independent consultant in online customer support strategies, support operations, training and management coaching. With Web 2.0 applications, a new and effective channel for knowledge and information capture and dissemination changes the way we listen to our customers, share best practices, leverage agent “super users” to everyone’s advantege. Social networks better match the chaotic but effective way people actually search for and share information