6. Concluding thoughts
Undeniably, social media has changed how we communicate – as individuals, we talk to friends online, as consumers we share electronic word of mouth and connect with brands and as private collaborators we co-create value when we add content to forums, Wikipedia or the movie review site IMDb, to name a few. These new communication patterns, with their pros and cons, are only interrupted by work, where talking to colleagues, superiors, employees, suppliers, partners and other stakeholders often relies exclusively on “old fashioned” technologies (e.g. email and phone). Particularly, as a new generation enters the workforce, of those who never had to learn or adopt social media skills but who have “naturally” grown up with and alongside social media, increasing number of firms question whether their (anti-) social media policies at work still make sense.
Calls are amassing for theoretically robust frameworks to support decision-makers in devising strategies for the implementation of ESM (Galliers et al., 2012; von Krogh, 2012) and strategic knowledge management (including Ferreira et al.’s call for papers for this special issue). In response, we offer a framework that synthesizes a range of extant literature on intellectual capital as a tool for understanding the value of ESM as a strategic knowledge management phenomenon. We argue that ESM, with its unpredictable conversation partners and communication flows, differs substantially from other contexts in which intellectual capital has been applied, and extend intellectual capital with three appropriate dimensions (human, social and structural capital). Given the potentially disruptive nature of ESM and the need to embrace significant cultural shifts to exploit its benefits, our framework helps firms understand the nature of the changes that are needed.
