This chapter introduces the role of Social Media (SM) in Knowledge-Based Organizations (KBOs), thus explaining the concept of KBOs, the difference between KBOs and non-KBOs, the concept of Knowledge Management (KM), the concept of SM, the importance of SM to KBOs, the application of SM in the KBOs, and the challenges of SM in the KBOs. This chapter explains the significance of SM for organizational development and adaptation to the business architecture in order to create knowledge integration environment in the KBOs. SM enables the creation of knowledge value chain to customize information and delivery for a technological business growth. Firms need to be connected to their technological business environment through SM because interacting with external sources of knowledge can effectively improve their capabilities about industry benchmark and competitive advantage. Understanding the role of SM in the KBOs will significantly enhance the organizational performance and achieve business goals in the global business environments.
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Nicholas and Rowlands (2011) categorized SM tools in eight categories: social networking, blogging, microblogging, collaborative authoring, social tagging and bookmarking, scheduling and meeting tools, conferencing, and image or video sharing. In addition, Gu and Widen-Wulff (2010) categorized SM tools for scholarly communication into eight different categories: blogs, mini blogs, RSS (rich site summary), wikis, tagging, social networks, multimedia sharing, and online documents. SM tools are convenient for sharing knowledge in a bottom-up process, whereas traditional KM tools are designed mainly for knowledge and information sharing with a top-down focus such as distribution derived by management (Grace, 2009; Bertoni & Chirumalla, 2011). Definition and classification of SM techniques are classified as blogs, micro blogs, social networks, media sharing content, social bookmarking, and voting sites (Boyd & Ellison, 2008; Singh, Veron-Jackson, & Cullinane, 2008). In addition, Machin-Mastromatteo (2011) stated that SM is used to refer to websites or software applications, which allows the publication or posting of users’ content and the interactions between their users. SM techniques are related to Facebook, Google +, Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest (Machin-Mastromatteo, 2011). SM differs from traditional computer-mediated communications in three primary ways: a shift in the locus of activity from the desktop to the web (meaning greater accessibility); a shift in the locus of value production from the firm to the consumer (deriving from increased interaction/interactivity); and a shift in the locus of power away from the firm to the consumer (Berthon et al., 2012).