Abstract
The development of Internet technologies and Web 2.0 has created tremendous opportunities for Knowledge Management (KM) (Johnston 2008). Among the new directions of KM, customer knowledge management and social software have gained growing interests from both business practitioners and academic researchers. Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) refers to the management of organizational knowledge residing on the customer side. Different from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and general KM, CKM assumes the five basic styles: prosumerism, team-based co-learning, mutual innovation, communities of creation, and joint intellectual property (Gibbert, et al. 2002). Approaches in marketing and CRM cannot successfully capture knowledge from customers, so appropriate methods of CKM have to be employed to retrieve and manage customer knowledge (García-Murillo & Annabi, 2002).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Knowledge Management: The processes organizations utilize to systematically gather, create, store, transfer, and apply knowledge.
Knowledge Base: A specialized database with a collection of data, information and knowledge within an organization that can be used for problem solving.
Customer Relationship Management: Describes all aspects of a company’s strategic relationship with its customers and is often referred as software-based techniques to attract, retain, and manage customers to increase customer satisfaction.
E-Business: The abbreviation of electronic business and stands for any kind of sales, purchasing, services or other business activities on the Internet.
Web 2.0: Refers to the second generation of Internet-based services that encourage people to share information and engage in social networking.
Social Software: Is normally referred as a range of web-based software programs that allow users to interact and share data, information, and knowledge with each other.