Technology seems to be impacting society and human life more quickly now than ever before. Social networking sites, for example, seem to be making big news every day. The latest case is Google's announcement to acquire the video sharing site YouTube for an amount of $1.65 billion. YouTube is not a large company, with only 65 employees and several years of life. And it has not begun to make profit. It remains to be seen how this acquisition is going to impact the industry.
It has never been easier for ordinary people to post and share music, pictures, and videoes through the Internet. For knowledge works, wiki and blogging sites promote crowd authoring and collaboration. The participation has never been so easy and attempting for many people who would never thought it would be possible for them to own that much control over a webpage. It's this kind of convenience and power that makes these tools so relevant and valuable for knowledge workers.
How do knowledge management and Web 2.0 technologies join force to impact business strategy? Take mass customization as the example, a company can use blogs to communicate expert insights regarding its products and services to the customers. Customers can be encouraged to dialog with the company regarding their thoughts and feelings. Wiki technology can be used to involve customers in designing new products. The online communnity, if properly nurtured, can represent a cost affordable, technically flexible and scalable, and user friendly tool for gaining susttainable competitive advantage that is difficult to replicate.
Or, what about document processing Websites that let you create, edit, and even share documents without a proprietary word processing software? For small businesses, these tools and social networking tools are not just very useful but also very affordable.
Web 2.0 technologies are everybody's KM tools.
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