process, as well as
a manager for each of the 200 communities in the enterprise social
network. ―Knowledge sharing really means money to them. It can
cost millions of dollars for each hour an oil rig has to stop drilling
because of a technical problem,‖ he says.
So, Gu and his colleagues tried to understand what factors encourage
knowledge sharing, and he found two of extreme importance. ―One
we called internal cohesion,‖ he says. ―It means everyone participates
in the online communities.‖ Not surprisingly, if only a few people
participate, the
community can‘t flourish, a circumstance Gu found in around 15
percent of the communities studied.
What did surprise the researchers was the second factor needed for
meaningful knowledge sharing: ―external participation,‖ or members
who participate in external communities. External participation may
take away a member‘s time in a focal community, but they could
bring in new knowledge. Gu found that for the most successful
problem solving, groups need both cohesion and a fair share of multi-
group teammates. ―If you don‘t have external participation, you won‘t
have new knowledge coming in,‖ Gu says.
Decision making: The increasing influence of customers Problem-
solving isn‘t the only area where social media participants take on
important roles in an organization‘s operations. As noted earlier, Gu
sees customers now becoming an integral part of the production
function itself.
This production concept can be applied beyond the company
producing a product or service for sale. Gu likens the business of
politics to a manufacturing operation, where the politician‘s
policymaking activity, such as voting in Congress, constitutes firm
output, and constituents buy the politician‘s product with votes of
their own. Since social media breaks the barriers between businesses
and customers, Gu wondered if politicians‘
participation in social media changes the way congressional members
vote on legislation.
He discovered that it does, after doing a careful analysis of
congressional members‘ voting records before and after they started
tweeting. ―Generally, congressional members became more