As I learn more and more about the social science behind Social Media I am still baffled by how many experienced individuals there are in this field that still swap and maintain multiple identities online. I’m not talking about those happy go lucky individuals who use Twitter as a fun social tool/game, rather I’m talking about those who use it primarily for serious knowledge management and community engagement or to fulfil their innate passions.

I’ll just for the record define what I mean by; changing your identity, as best I can. I know there are many ways to look at identity and I won’t do it justice in this blog post but hopefully this stimulates the topic. Your user name is an identity as it helps identify you. Your avatar photo is a representation of your identity and both these together define your identity online. If you suddenly stop Tweeting and focus on Re-tweeting or you start to rant a lot more online that is representative of your personality and is less about your identity. The government is serious about you maintaining one identity off-line and that’s the whole reason you have a passport and why it’s a crime to forge another person’s identity by creating another passport with your photo and a different person’s name in it. 

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Scholarly thinking has nearly always preceded the definitions tailored by the software industry. Definition's on terminology are important but will differ depending on what side of the balance sheet the definition now sits. KM is now being defined by the people making money from it and who are being paid to evangelize.

The crux of KM comes down to how the company can be more effective and efficient and pay higher dividends to share holders. Staff attrition costs companies millions and is far more prevalent now than it was 30 years ago. That's a paradigm shift! You lose your people you lose your knowledge and often to your competitor. Companies have to get their heads around this and technology has helped. Corporate knowledge attrition is only one aspect of the KM field but I want to relate this comment to it. By capturing the "deltas" of argument / discussion / creation on a daily weekly monthly basis in systems which relate to the particular "environment" in which they are being captured and then aggregating these, provides a knowledge pool. Web2.0 helps capture the "deltas" as well as creating tools which relate and appeal to the "environment" in which they are used. Systems can then aggregate and provide the ability to search and share experiences to prevent reinventing the wheel and slowing the operations down. The skill will be to present the knowledge pool back to the employees in a way that works for everyone. Dr Martin Porter at Cambridge University helped develop some very interesting Natural Language search algorithms back in the late 90's which disappointingly have still not been incorporated into our favourite search engines.

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