Often knowledge management is focussing primarily internally to an organization, but more and more the exchange of knowledge with customers is becoming attention. The part that has been in the focus for a while is knowledge about customers and that is where CRM (Customer relationship management) has played a support role.
But what about direct knowledge exchange with customers. Social media has opened up some barriers lately where tradtionally most organizations have had a considerable wall before. There is a lot of talk about engaging more with customers via social media channels now, and a number of organizations are testing the waters to learn from their customers or use the channels to get information, learnings and messages across to them as well as partners.
What is new about those channels is that they are cheaper and more scalable, but in some ways this type of exchange happened before as well of course. On a personal level every customer agent or those working with partners side by side have played a role in that type of knowledge sharing. But scale definitely makes a difference.
One quite effective channel that pre-dates the social media age is that of customer conferences. SAS has been involved in their first one of those in early 1976. Yes, 34 years ago and half a year before SAS was even incorporated as a company and it has been held every year since then. The key to them was that they were and are not just some marketing event. They are organized by customers and SAS is invited to it and serves as a sponsor of certain parts of it (like the opening session). What is quite amazing is that there is thousands of SAS users and partners exchanging knowledge, presenting successes, but also challenges to overcome. The event is a great example of what knowledge flow is about. You create time and place for people with a common interest and common business issues, and they will engage and exchange. It is a way to reduce the barriers that might be existing otherwise (distance, time for engaging etc.) One effect additional effect is that over the 34 years of the conference people come repeatedly and build trust levels with each other that enable even better knowledge exchanges than might happen with complete strangers.
At the conference there are also a number of SAS employees. They learn, they inform on what is coming and they engage in personal conversation. This spans from R&D programmers to executives including the CEO himself.
The next one of those events is coming up in a couple of weeks. SAS Global Forum 2010 will be held in Seattle Washington next month.
While engaging this way has a long tradition and the conference has been tuned year after year to attendees preferences, you can make the experience even more complete with social media. While there is a number of similiar events around the world SAS Global Forum only happens once a year.
Social media is a great additional tool to enhance the experience by extending beyond the event itself. This ranges from twitter to blogs, from Facebook to LinkedIn and includes a special community created by sascommunity.org, the wiki based user driven SAS community.
See more in the following two blog entries - SAS Global Forum Goes Social Take 1 and Take 2.
Today it is not necessarily about replacing one channel with another but offering an intelligent portfolio of channels to create a more complete user experience.
PS.: For those that happen to attend SAS Global Forum 2010, see you at the SAS Publishing booth, where I will be spending some time this year.
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