The social media revolution: Sharing and learning in the age of leaky knowledge

This paper suggests that social media may be useful for knowledge sharing because they are leaky pipes for communication - the directionality and content of a particular message is visible to people not involved in it. However, social media are only useful for knowledge sharing if some people contribute knowledge that can leak from them and others retrieve knowledge that is leaking. I draw on interviews with employees from a financial services firm to develop a typology of reasons why new employees would not want to contribute what they know to a social media or retrieve from it knowledge contributed by others. Then, I use existing theory on knowledge sharing in organizations, coupled with recent writings about social media affordances, to develop propositions about how these barriers to knowledge sharing might be effectively overcome through strategic use of the social media affordances themselves.