Using Social Media for Knowledge Management in SME

Ulrike Borchardt

Chair of Business Information Systems, Rostock University, Rostock, Germany

Keywords: Social Media, Small and Medium Enterprises, Case Study.

Abstract: Social media is one of the current technology trends in use for marketing and communication, extending the

possibilities for exchange among people. Yet, as every other technology using Social media means effort for

the organization using it. Accordingly the question arises, especially for SME whether this effort leads to

any benefits. Moreover, it is necessary to estimate which social media part suits the enterprise best and how

can it be integrated to support the process of knowledge management. This paper presents two SME in

Germany in a case study addressing this problem and showing the way how and for which purposes they

use social media.

1 MOTIVATION

Continuous knowledge losses between projects and

tasks, in customer and partner communication etc.

strongly influence the long-term business success of

each organization. Rather than losing some of the

knowledge that has been developed in a project or

task, the organizations should use the relevant

knowledge consistently for future projects and tasks

in order to solve future problems and tasks faster, in

a more efficient and cost effective way. Moreover,

they should be able to expand their knowledge

instead of having to develop the same knowledge

over and over again.

One possible solution to address this problem is

the use of social media in the field of Knowledge

Management (KM). However, using social media

efficiently is associated with a certain effort. For an

organization this means employees must have time

for activities in the media. As Small and Medium

Enterprises (SME) are bound to have the problem as

described above as well as limited resources the

question arises whether the use of social media is an

appropriate solution for them.

Already in our earlier work we found by

literature research, that only few examples on SME

practice in the field of KM are available for research

purposes (Borchardt, 2011a); (Borchardt, 2011b). To

close this gap and to gain insight into how the

problem is addressed using social media in SME we

conducted a case study holding two knowledge

intensive SME from Germany to answer the

following research questions:

1. How is social media used in the organization?

2. How is social media integrated in the

organizations business processes?

3. Which benefits are realized by the use of social

media for KM in the organization?

4. Which potentials are not realized within the

organizations?

Especially with question 3 and 4 we address the

problem of naming concrete benefits of the use of

certain technologies for KM, which still remains a

problem due to the character of knowledge which

hardly can be measured in monetary units, whereas

SME with the specific short-termed action horizon

look for fast pay-off opportunities.

In the case study we have a look at the

employees' opportunities to share their opinions,

experiences and insights were examined as well as

the social media instruments and tools that already

used inside the respective organizations.

The paper is structured as follows. Section 2

provides the fundamentals involved in our work and

section 3 introduces the methodology in use to gain

the results. Section 4 presents the organizations as

well as the individual results. Finally, section 5

provides a conclusion.

2 FUNDAMENTALS

This section presents the basic terms in use for our

case study as they were also explained to the

participating organizations in the case study.

Borchardt U..

Using Social Media for Knowledge Management in SME.

DOI: 10.5220/0004133400310039

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing (KMIS-2012), pages 31-39

ISBN: 978-989-8565-31-0

 2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

2.1 Social Media

Even though all media can be considered social,

social media is nowadays mostly associated with

internet-based medial services, which are build upon

the principles of social interaction and the

technological principles provided by web 2.0. The

main idea behind this is the transformation of the

user from a content consumer only to a content

publisher resulting in user generated content.

Principally, social media depend upon fundamental

interaction between people as the discourse and

integration of contents to establish shared-meaning,

using information technology as an instrument.

Social media contents examples of collaboration

technology, in their conventional form known from

the field of CSCW e-mail and Intranet and more

modern social networks as well as wikis. In general

social media can serve especially as a media for

knowledge transfer (Davenport and Prusak, 2000).

Social networks represent one facet of social

media, representing a kind of online communities,

which are based on the technology of web

applications and portals (Boyd and Ellison, 2007).

They are also named social networking services

(SNS) and include the typical examples of the field

as there are Facebook or Xing.

2.2 SME

Though having no standard definition of the term

SME, EU guidelines (Jennex, 2010) distinguish

SME with the help of two characteristics. These two

attributes in use are: number of employees and

annual turnover. With regard to the annual turnover

it is stated that the value of the balance sheet can be

used instead, and consequently one criteria or the

other has to be fulfilled. However, one of the two

and the amount of employees must be met, one

attribute does not suffice. Accordingly, an enterprise

with less than 10 employees is a micro enterprise.

Moreover, the enterprise's turnover is not larger than

2 million Euro per year. This indicates that an

enterprise with 10 to 49 employees and a turnover of

10 million Euro (same value holds for the balance

sheet) is considered a small enterprise.

Consequently, a SME with 50 to 249 employees and

an annual turnover of 50 million Euro (balance

sheet: 43 million Euro) is considered a medium

enterprise. In Germany additionally the term

"Mittelstand" exists, which also counts enterprises

with less than 500 employees into the group of

medium enterprises, as long as their annual turnover

does not exceed 50 million Euro (Statistics agency

Germany, 2007).

Furthermore, it can be stated with regard to KM

that SME apparently suffer stronger from difficulties

caused by information overload than larger

enterprises do. One explanation for this fact might

be the fewer resources, e.g. employees responsible

for certain tasks. An employee in an SME usually is

not as specialized in a certain field as may be in

larger enterprises. Moreover, he or she usually has

no backup. Consequently, KM problems arise when

the employee is no longer available due to e.g.

retirement or illness. One way to address this

problem may be to generate a backup for these

situations without stressing the resources as far as

hiring a new employee, by the electronic capture of

knowledge as supported by KMS and KM

applications.

2.3 Knowledge Management and

Technology Support

Knowledge can be considered the combination of all

individual skills and abilities in use to solve a

problem (Probst et al., 2010). However, as for SME

no official definition on the term of KM can be

given, since the individual definitions provided in

literature vary widely. Assuming that knowledge

enables certain actions, KM within in the

organization is desirable, also with regard to

organizational learning. Yet, it should be noted here

that two main approaches on KM exist, one human-

oriented focusing on the transfer of knowledge

between the employees of an organization, where as

the other technical-oriented approach, aiming at

supporting the process of KM by the use of

information and communication technology (ICT),

results in a Knowledge Management System (KMS).

Though both approaches have their limitations this

paper will focus on the latter, since the first can go

without any technical support at all and is not of

interest here.

As already described in our former work we

assume the model of Maier (Maier, 2007) valid who

categorizes a KMS as an holistic approach which is

about to fulfil certain services, which is depicted in

figure 1. Assuming social media and SNS part of a

possible KMS we consider them especially

interesting for the core KM services “Collaboration”

and “Publication” in layer III, supporting the

provision and exchange of knowledge between the

employees and also with customers.

Though focussing on the technical

functionalities, aspects like organization culture

cannot be neglected as they strongly influence the

KMIS2012-InternationalConferenceonKnowledgeManagementandInformationSharing

attitude of the employees towards the technology

(Boyd and Ellison, 2007).

Figure 1: KMS architecture according to Maier (Maier,

2007).

3 METHODOLOGY

To visualize the needs for and the benefits social

media can have for SME, two SME in Germany

were integrated into the case study presented in this

paper. We therewith follow the action research

approach demanded for the field of KM by

Andriessen (Andriessen, 2002).

Within the study several steps were taken to

show the organizations what KM can offer, as they

have not fully realized the field before. Furthermore,

a partial requirements analysis took place to find out

what was needed in their individual fields of

business. Before starting all concerned employees

were confronted with the term of KM, as several

participants were uncertain whether what they did

could be considered KM.

To gather the results for the case study we

performed the following steps:

1. Identifying the recent state of KM and the

integration of Social Media in the organization.

This was done by confronting the employees with

some statements about KM in their company they

should complete. First, they were to name the

positive aspects, and afterwards the negative aspects

by completing the statements given below in table 1.

The statements were provided on paper with white

space to be completed. This step also served as a

rather informal starting point, which allowed the

individual participant a slow start in the topic

without the pressure of having to come up with ideas

instantaneously in front of a group.

Table 1: Initial statements on KM in the organization.

positive negative

Ideas for the organization

Information is shared by...

I show my knowledge by ..

I find information by..

The distribution of work is..

Problems occurring at work

Why don't I say what I know?

Why is there a loss of Know-

How?

Why is an idea/ message

transported?

Why can't I find the

knowledge needed?

The statements were filled out by each

participant individually and afterwards collected. In

addition the individuals were observed in their

working activities to see which tool they used and

which tasks were part of the regular working day.

2. Doing interviews with the CEO and employees

of the company gathering their expectations and

demands towards possible solutions. The core

questions used in the interviews are provided in the

table below.

Table 2: Questions from the interview.

Question on SNS

Which tools or SNS are used in the organization?

How long have you applied the tools?

How many employees use the tools actively?

How do you support SNS in the organization?

Why did you decide to introduce SNS?

Which goals are to be fulfilled by using specific SNS?

How much effort is necessary to keep the SNS working?

Was there a training accompanying the introduction?

Which contents are to be found in the SNS?

How is quality and an up to date status guaranteed?

What benefits could be gained from the use?

Before a third step could follow the participants

were encouraged to get acquainted to the

possibilities of social media in more detail with the

help of provided literature, video tutorials as well as

exchange with other employees.

3. Brainstorming session to sum up the results and

generate the final ideas for further developing and

integrating social media into the organizationss

business processes.

This session took place in two phases, first there was

an individual session with each employee and

afterwards one session for all participants in the

UsingSocialMediaforKnowledgeManagementinSME

organization. In this part the moderating part was

taken by a member of our research group which was

not involved in the organization and had a rather

objective point of view on the uttered points.

Finally the modus of operation of social media was

discussed, to support the successful usage and

integration in the business processes since the pure

technology is proven to be just a minor part in the

KM.

By following this approach we were able to gain

the results providing an overview of the situation in

the organizations.

4 CASE STUDY

Following we present two knowledge intensive

organizations which can be classified as SME and

their approaches to use social media for KM.

4.1 The Participating Organizations

This paragraph shortly presents the two participating

organizations, which were willing to use social

media to address the KM problems in their business

processes. For both companies the CEO and 2

employees were involved in the phases of the case

study. The case study took place in February/ March

2012.

4.1.1 Organization 1

This organization was founded in 1992 in Wismar,

Germany. The value creating processes of the

company are mainly situated in the field of

consulting and engineering. Their main tasks lie in

consulting services for other SME for e.g. certifying/

auditing processes, as well as image processing and

technical image construction. The organization

employs 10 people (7 full time, 3 students), where

the average age of the full time workers lies between

50 and 60 years. It covers 50 to 70 orders a year

resulting in a net sales volume of approximately

700,000 Euro in 2011. The orders usually are

processed by phone and afterwards face-to-face

consulting. The organization considers itself in the

b2b sector. According to the definition provided in

section 2.3 this company is a standard small

company.

4.1.2 Organization 2

The second organization in the case study was

founded in 2007 and is located in Berlin. The values

of the organization are created in the field of

Amazon retailing, e-commerce and re-selling. In

2001 the business activities resulted in

approximately 1,000,000 Euro net sales volume. To

achieve this volume the organization has to cover

around 100,000 orders a year, mostly with private

customers and consequently can be placed in the b2c

sector. The organization has 16 full-time and 10

part-time employees, all under the age of 30.

Moreover, a high fluctuation of employees exists.

They accomplish order processing mainly via e-

mail, sometimes by phone calls. Considering the

definition this company is volume wise as well as by

the employee number a small company.

4.2 Results

Afterwards the results of the case study will be

described. Therefore for each of the organizations

two partial results will be provided: a) demand

identified in KM and b) identified Social Media

solutions.

4.2.1 Situation in Organization 1

In organization 1 following demands could be

identified:

A wish for more information on the decisions made

concerning the organization was uttered, as there are

CEO opinions as well as possible new jobs and

tasks. Moreover, a better collaboration with

emphasis primarily on employee-to-employee

communication should be established. This also

included the desire for information sharing via

shared documents. In addition, the employees asked

for better and especially more opportunities to

develop ideas. So an idea management is needed,

which was not yet addressed directly. There is a

central weekly meeting but hardly time to talk about

new ideas and since an extra permission to use

working hours for special activities is necessary,

employees do not dare to ask for extra time. Further

when new ideas arise and exchanged they are not

stored for further actions and therewith forgotten.

After emphasizing the strong social component

in KM, which is manifested in the organization's

culture it was hinted, that if KM is a topic time has

to be spared for arising tasks, though they might not

lead directly to an invoice. In the organization there

is also rarely any money left to address KM

problems. Finally, the need to use knowledge for

further acquisition possibilities was uttered.

When looking at the recent state of the art in the

organization the situation was described as follows:

Though being acquainted with the Internet and the

KMIS2012-InternationalConferenceonKnowledgeManagementandInformationSharing

ideas of SNS the organization was not using social

media for a long time. They have tried using an

instant messenger, which turned out to be unreliable,

not freeware, and the complaint was that it did not

allow for exchange between more than two people.

Almost half the employees mentioned that they are

not interested in using an instant messenger at all,

since they do not see any benefits from its use and

feel it would disturb their work. Consequently,

emails were mostly used to transfer ideas and

information. Individual employees used solutions

like Skype, which was in between forbidden by the

CEO and afterwards not re-established. The actual

use of individual SNS is depicted in figure 2. The

time used for activities within the whole company

within a week within a certain SNS is given in figure

Concerning the search for information: there is

an Intranet solution in use, which was also available

from outside of the organization by a static IP

address, however only two employees are actively

working with it. As reasons for this were identified:

it is too complex in access rights, actually finding a

piece of information is difficult since the structure of

the solution and the names of the documents are not

self explaining.

Hence mobile solutions like smartphones were

not common among the staff, only two employees

own one. And after repeating the question for SNS

illustrating it by examples it turned out that there is

one employee who started using Xing for acquisition

purposes. In the beginning this was not supported by

the CEO, yet after it turned out that these activities

actually lead to new customers it is agreed on. Still

this leads to another problem: there is a need for

further information on the abilities of the other

employees and their skills. The activities on this

field last now for about a year. Moreover, two

employees are privately acquainted with Facebook.

Finally, the need for tacit knowledge sharing was

uttered in combination with the establishment of

electronic workspaces, so one can meet despite

being on different locations.

Summing the results gathered here up we gained

the following impression: the organization was

willing to engage in KM, however was not yet able

to come up with concrete ideas on how to do this

and if so only considered the technical point of view.

But more important there is the actual integration in

the business processes and consequently the insight

that time has to be spared for KM tasks. With the

example of the Xing usage, direct monetary benefits

were seen and accordingly that solution was

allowed, yet a strong wish for a direct monetary

benefit to be named for further activities was uttered.

Moreover, we gained the impression that due to the

age of employees not much about the possibilities of

social media was known, the personal engaged

driving employees establishing these media in the

company were missing as the CEO was not engaged

in this topic himself. Moreover, he did not support

possible initiatives due to the sparse resources. This

attitude became also obvious when the interviews

showed that the employees were interested in the

possibilities a wiki can offer but were blocked by the

CEO's doubts regarding time lacks and

communication overload.

Figure 2: Percentage of employees using SNS (red:

organization 1/ blue: organization 2).

4.2.2 Situation in Organization 2

During the interviews in organization 2 these

demands arose:

One of the first points mentioned was a necessary

idea development and management solution, which

should as a second thought also include customers.

By now an exchange only took place informally and

ideas were easily forgotten or no longer worked on.

The participants actually wanted a kind of idea base,

offering the possibility to collect, search and

comment on ideas including a weekly review. In

addition the strong fluctuation among the employees

was identified as a problem which needed to be

addressed. These resulted in the fact that abilities

and skills of colleagues were unknown, which was

accompanied by the wish for a stronger

communication on work problems between the

employees. Additionally the insight was gained that

a working calender system was needed as well for

coordination purposes. The need for exchange also

resulted in the idea of wiki also for customer

purposes to allow for a constant provision of

information and knowledge combined with the

possibility to comment and discuss the available

items. It would be best if this were connected to the

Facebook fan page and enclosed an internal twitter

account.

UsingSocialMediaforKnowledgeManagementinSME

Figure 3: Hours per week spent on SNS (red: organization

1/ blue: organization 2).

Moreover, a demand for web 2.0 technologies

was uttered to stay up-to-date as a sales company.

This should result in a new website including social

media like a Xing business page and a twitter

account that automatically tweets on product updates

and innovations of the organization.

The organization could also imagine to use a

virtual world to improve video and call

conferencing, sales presentation and other remote

meetings, they emphasized the advantage of an

avatar moving instead of the real person which

would save time and money resources.

In contrast to organization 1 this one is already

active in social media. Most of the rather young

employees privately own a Facebook profile and

these are up to 6 years old. The organization also

maintains a Facebook fan page for about 3 years

now which at the moment has about 200 followers.

Furthermore, they run a twitter account which is

filled automatically and is now running for 3 years.

The percentage of employees having access to

different SNS is depicted in figure 2. The

organization is also working with Xing, mostly to

find new employees or experts they need within a

certain field. At the moment they are actually

looking for an external web designer also familiar

with social media to build a new homepage as

desired.

Every employee owns and uses a smartphone,

even if it is only for private issues, so they are

acquainted with the offered possibilities.

Regarding extra tasks the employees mentioned

that they need to ask for permission to spare time on

things KM since there is a strong need to produce

action that can be invoiced. This is especially

disturbing for developing new ideas. Moreover, in

the field of KM they indicated that there is a need

the calenders to be updated to be able to gather

information on meetings and staff this way. A

calender should be agreed on and the employees

were to use it, yet it has to provide suiting access

rights to look into colleagues calenders. For pure

document exchange they mainly use email. Almost

every employee has an instant messenger installed,

however mostly for private use, even Skype is in use

for private as well as business use.

The overall impression of this organization was

that they were interested in almost everything

available in the social media sector, which was due

to the rather young age of the employees and their

personal interest in the available solutions. Yet the

problem is to integrate the social media efficiently

into the business processes. A strategic plan of how

to apply the available solutions was missing as was

someone definitely responsible for the tasks. The

organization has already realized that they have a

certain need for KM and that it is constantly

growing, yet by now they have not adapted their

organization culture to this need. They could not

name the specific benefit of their Facebook activities

besides staying in contact with their customers,

hence have the idea of using the media for their idea

management.

4.2.3 Solutions to Implement

In general these were the main fields of interest for

the organizations in the case study: communication

among employees as well as with customers,

knowledge transfer and innovation management.

Table 3 provides an overview on the solutions

and activities from the field of Social Media and KM

which were considered to be implemented

additionally to the available activities. The

likelihood of implementation and usage was

provided by the CEOs using a Likert scale varying

between “very high” to “not interesting”.

It can be seen that organization 1 tends to

implement a wiki, mainly for idea collection, so

ideas can be stored and discussed and are not

forgotten. As a means for general knowledge sharing

this is only interesting on a long term. However, the

organization sees that they are in urgent need for an

improved communication, and chooses to improve

its instant messaging system. Asked for the reason

for their choice they named the extra status

information available (e.g. availability, recent

activities). The organization does not see further use

for discussion forums or a blog, as they on the one

hand argue that a discussion can be included in a

wiki and on the other hand refer to their weekly

meeting.

Organization 2 is also interested in using a wiki

but on the long term, for them it is more important to

improve their Facebook activities and be better

informed about their actual available skills, which

KMIS2012-InternationalConferenceonKnowledgeManagementandInformationSharing

vary strongly due to the employee fluctuation. They

also want to improve the instant messenger use,

especially with regard to further information and the

separation from private use which lead to a high

variety of products in use.

They regard the idea collection as important as

well but for now are not sure which solution to use.

It was surprising that none of the organizations

was willing to work on information accuracy, which

from our point of view is due to the fact that both are

just beginning to coordinate their activities and are

not aware of the problems arising in that field. Even

the question of who would be reliable for

maintaining the technical solution and giving

support in the case of questions did not arise In

addition we found that some demands can easily be

addressed by changing the organizational culture in

relation to social media, as for example the very

critical attitude of the CEO towards innovations

from that field. Also the wish for quick wins was

confirmed by the behaviour of the organizations

constantly emphasizing an easy implementation and

a fast pay-off.

Table 3: Evaluation of possible solutions and actions from

the field of Social Media.

Org 1 Org 2

Wiki very high middle

Idea collection very high very high

Personnel index middle high

Calendar use middle very high

Virtual World not interesting high

Knowledge sharing middle middle

Improved instant mes-senger very high very high

Information accuracy activities low not interesting

Discuss. forum, blog not interesting middle

By extending their IT solutions both

organizations can overcome the insecurity of mail

exchange they mentioned. Moreover, overhead by

mass mails and resent mails can be reduced. But it is

not the technology only, there is a need for a change

in working mentality from push to pull, yet this

needs user-friendly publish and search facilities. In

addition both organizations have to be aware of

privacy issues, which may arise due to using private

profiles or seeing the activities on a wiki. And

finally the integration into the business processes

must be clarified to be able to determine who owns

important knowledge and is bound to enter it into the

systems.

4.3 Summary

Returning to the research questions on which our

research concentrated we can sum up the results for

these two organizations to:

For the first question: Social media is mostly used

beginning from the private sector, and the more

people are in touch with a certain solution the more

promoters a solution will have within an

organization. Having more customer contact with

minor volumes per order a SNS like Facebook

seems to be more suitable. This also holds regarding

the customer type, SNS seem to be more valuable

for the private customer.

On question 2 we found that both organization had

problems integrating the solutions available into

their business processes, especially in organization 1

with elder employees acting in the b2b sector we

found more barriers established than integration

activities. An automation for some processes like

twittering news is possible as was shown by

company 2. Yet, both companies did not show a

permanent SNS integration in working processes.

On the contrary both organizations emphasized they

fear the loss of time through distraction.

Regarding benefits: In organization 1 we found an

efficient use of Xing as contact platform for

customer acquisition. In organization 2 it is used for

the search for external experts or possible staff

members. However, this is minor KM related.

Although both organizations were looking for

possibilities to share knowledge they had not

implemented social media for this task.

Consequently we can state they have only just begun

to see possible potentials like expert networks,

knowledge bases and discussion forums. In addition

at least organization 2 also saw, yet did not

implement, social media as a means for idea

management. Furthermore, we gained the

impression that SNS are very popular with younger

employees, however mostly for private use. The real

benefits of a business use are hardly known, though

SME see the campaigns of big companies in the

media. Hence, it remains unclear for them how to

efficiently use it, since there may exist literature and

examples on the topic but due to limited time

resources a thorough involvement with the topic is

not possible. And here the core problem is once

again the fact that KM does not deliver invoices

short termed and therefore is often not considered

interesting with a high priority for SME, even

though they might be knowledge intensive like the

two in our case study.

UsingSocialMediaforKnowledgeManagementinSME

5 CONCLUSIONS

Resuming the case study committed and presented in

this paper and relating it to our former work

(Borchardt, 2011a); (Borchardt, 2011b) on KMS in

SME several points were confirmed.

Once more we could see that a proven systematic

approach to introduce KM in SME is still missing,

whereas the question for the monetary benefits to be

gained from such a solution remains the strongest

point while introducing innovations. Moreover, we

could see that the attitude for an active KM in SME

still has to be improved, especially with regards to

the organization culture allowing time to be used for

KM purposes. Here reference values and a reliable

framework could help to build up a good point of

orientation and illustrate the success of such

activities, especially if these were free from

advertisement and a summarizing subjective

illustration.

With regard to social media we found that the

solutions from SNS are known, while others, older

solutions from the field of CSCW like e.g. instant

messenger and discussion forums are almost

forgotten. The benefits of those can hardly be

estimated, especially not in monetary units. The

younger the employees the more involved they are

in social media and able to use it. However, the

mixture with private use also holds the risk of

privacy issues and distraction. Yet, the possibilities

for pure content provision within the company were

not realized as social media is strongly associated

with SNS. But there is a strong interest in content

provision by more than a single employee s well as a

constant exchange This seems from employees side

the possibility to influence the organizations fortune.

However this needs altering the ways of acting and

working in the companies, seeing the KM tasks not

as an extra but as an essential part of the work.

It is (by far) not sufficient to chose the social

media instrument – social media usage requires re-

thinking the question of corporate knowledge

possession, as every new KMS needs motivating the

employees and providing them with as detailed

information as it is necessary to get acquainted with

the technology. A change in operation includes

changing the corporate culture, use activation and

usage instruction (training as well as the

establishment of solutions as a standard). In picking

out Social Media instruments, an organization must

recall that it can use a bunch of ready and well

working Internet applications like Facebook, Twitter

or XING, that are somehow restricted to the use of

the organization or it can adopt applications that are

just designed for the use within its business

processes.

Further work on this case can include a revisit of

the organizations to collect feedback from customers

and CEO to verify the solutions. Maybe within a

year another questionnaire should be conducted to

see how the solutions are working and what results

they delivered by then. This certainly should not be

limited to monetary benefits but could follow the

KM Success model as introduced by Jennex/Olfman

(Jennex, 2008) to also gain an impression on the

perceived benefits the used social media offered the

employees. With the help of these perceived benefits

social media can also be a part of a value-oriented

framework for KMS in SME as suggested in

(Borchardt, 2011a), which is supposed to close the

gap of missing references for SME in the field of

KM. This is certainly still a strong issue since the

implementation and usage of social media for KM

seems to happen by chance instead of being

systematically planned including its possible

benefits.

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UsingSocialMediaforKnowledgeManagementinSME