Using Social Tools in the Enterprise to Filter Information

Social tools for Internal Communications: This is a dense but interesting summary of a discussion that took place at The Social Media Forum for Communicators in Amsterdam last month.

The gist is that the organization has to loosen up the leach on communications and along employees to field public discussions and talk about them among themselves, thus creating a “distributed filter” system where unimportant information is discarded by the group, and critical information filters upward.

To this end, what role do “social tools” — defined here as blogs, RSS, wikis, and the like — play into it?

[…] we are seeing the beginnings of a new approach where internal comms people stimulate, but don’t try to completely control, the conversation within their organisation from a networked perspective.

[…] We need to make people less dependent upon email and sequential task processing and instead cultivate more autonomous behaviours, where individuals use their social networks to filter useful information and then carve out the time and the space in which to collaborate around actionable information and signals.

[…] KM people used to talk about the knowledge pyramid where a wide base of information is filtered to a middle tier of knowledge and then further refined into the ‘point’ of insight. Social tools give us the potential to do this in a networked environment.