Why do we share?

Maybe a better question is: why do I share? I was wondering about this while reading +Oscar Berg’s post ‘Why do people share?’.
Oscar makes several interesting statements about sharing in his post. Like this one:

The act of sharing something tells our colleagues something about us and that we think and care about what they might be interested in. If what we share is relevant and valuable to them, they will understand that we have really tried to understand what their needs and interests are. Their trust in us grows.

And, citing from an MIT Sloan article about reputation and knowledge sharing:

Reputation also plays a role where rules or systems are unable to spur sharing. Because critical information is often held privately by individuals, workers often can choose to share or withhold such information in their interactions with colleagues without fear of sanction. That leaves reputation as a key motivator in any decision to share or withhold information.

Oscar also relates to the influence of culture on sharing. Furthermore, referring to another article, the content of what you share also depends on whether you’ll share it. People share content that will bring them ‘emotional communion’ and not all content is fit for that.

And at the end of his post he points to a post by Nancy Dixon in which see distinguishes two types of knowledge sharing. One is, in my own words, work-related, the other relation-related. Examples of the first are reports. Experiences are examples of the second. More interestingly, both types of sharing have different motivations. Only the second kind of sharing was done for personal benefit.

Interesting stuff, I think. I’ve been collecting articles about knowledge sharing and blogging about his topic for some time as well. It’s not an easy topic. And the above provide interesting insights, but only scratch the surface of this topic.

At the end of Oscar’s post I was wondering what motivates Oscar to share. I can’t talk for Oscar, of course, but I will share why I share. To me there is one big reason to share information and knowledge (as far as I know them now):
Share to learn: I share what I know and see with others because I want to learn. By wording my knowledge in text or speech in itself, helps me to learn. But I also hope to learn from the response I get from the person I’m addressing or that has asked me the question. I hardly withhold information from people. I will if I think that person does not respect me or will use the information in a wrong way.

I think I can unpack this general reason and distill underlying reasons from it. These are:

1. Share to show-off: to me there is definitely a show-off element to knowledge sharing. It’s not the most important one, but I do share to show what I know, read, bump into, etc. 
2. Share to listen: an important part of learning to me is listening. So I enjoy what others are sharing, because it helps me learn. It also triggers me to share by posting things I find interesting and asking questions. 
3. Share to remember: sharing information is also a way for me to capture things I find interesting. So I bookmark a link, tweet a link or statement, etc. In this way I’ve stored it for later use. 
4. Share to be more effective: I share to learn and this helps me become more productive. Asking a question in my (digital) network, helps me find (partial) answers more quickly. Once I’ve written about something on my blog, I can refer to it later on. This makes more productive in the long run.

So, these are the reason for me to share. Do they make sense? What are your reasons to share?

Being a Member of the 2.0 Adoption Council

This post should have been posted a long time ago...

Being part of a big company was great. One of the great things it brought me was being a member of the 2.0 Adoption Council. The 2.0 Adoption Council is a group of Enterprise 2.0 practitioners working for large companies. I was a member of the Council for a couple of years. It was a great source of inspiration for my work. Lots of smart people are in the Council.

Actually I was humbled to be part of a group of enterprise 2.0 practitioners that are seen as the leaders in this space. Some had many more years experience than I did. You wonder what they get from the Council? Well, that's one of the great things about these communities: we're all in it to learn and help each other. And that's exactly what happened. Even though some have been in this space for a long time, we're all still just getting started.

To cultivate interaction we used Jive, Yammer and Socialcast. And email of course. Even more important were the meetups around conferences. It was great to meet many of the Council at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Frankfurt.

One special thing I'll remember is the Council giving me the opportunity to experiment with a prediction market. I don't see many companies using them yet, but I'm sure they will be in the (near) future.

So, if you're working for a large(r) company and experimenting or responsible for enterprise 2.0 roll-outs, I wholehartedly advise you to join the Council. Information about joining can be found on the Council's website.

The Difference Between Email and Social Bookmarking

Well, Arzu just finished her Masters thesis last week with a good grade! As you know I posted several snippets from her work. Soon her thesis will be public for you to read. I think she did a really good job and the results, though focussed on social bookmarking, are interesting in general if you're interested in technology and social media adoption.


But how do you share bookmarks? Do you use a social bookmarking tool? My experience is not many people use a social bookmarking tool. Of course they bookmarks stuff and save the bookmarks in their browser. Hardly anyone knows you can share them publicly as well.
At least that's the experience I have. I give workshops about social media and I always have a slide about bookmarking. I've been tempted to leave it out. Because every time I get to that slide and ask how many of them know what social bookmarking is and use it, hardly anybody does. The ratio is 1-2 out of every 10 workshop participants.
Is this the reason why Delicious, Xmarks and the like have a hard time? I think so... Most people keep their bookmarks private and share them via email if they're interesting enough. Of course, lots of links are shared (but not stored...) via Twitter.
So, we have work to do. Again it shows social media maybe easy to use, but not always easy to understand and adopt. Training and explaining is necessary. I like the way Arzu explains the difference between email and social bookmarking:

In the e-mail case, the provider anticipates who is seeking or in need of the specific knowledge as a result of inter-personal relationships and therefore intentionally pushes the information through to the recipient. In the social bookmarking case, the provider shares bookmarks without knowing who the receiver is and who might be in need of specific knowledge. In such a case, communication streams are pull-based rather than push-based. The difference between pull and push has two implications for the social bookmarking tool: potential seekers perceive the information in the social bookmarking tool as information overload and potential providers ask for a balance between these two mechanisms. Balancing pull and push processes will optimize the knowledge flow and overcome the problem of information overload by providing people with both awareness of and access to what they need (Alavi & Leidner, 2001; Holtshouse, 1998).

Maybe this points to a design flaw in most social bookmarking tools? Is telling you who's reading your shared bookmarks an improvement? (You can follow each other's bookmarks in most social bookmarking tools.)

Anyway, I'm not giving up my bookmarking tool Diigo any time soon. Just hope they will keep their head up!

What are your experiences with social bookmarking? Are you using a tool? If not, how do you collect and share bookmarks?

Repetitive Interaction Leads to Trust

Some time ago I told you I have a student, Arzu, who's researching enterprise social bookmarking. We'll she's almost finished with her thesis. And I can tell you, I'm really impressed with her work. She's delivered a very fundamental and also practical piece of work. I hope to share more with you from her work in the coming weeks. I'll share a nice quote with you right now. In her final chapters she refers to research done on 'trust' which I find very interesting.

Hsu et al. (2007) explored the effect of trust on knowledge sharing in virtual communities in different stages. They suggest that trust is developed in virtual communities by repetitive interaction of members over time and appears in three stages: economy-based, information-based and identification-based trust. As the relationship develops, the economy-based trust will move to knowledge-based trust, eventually identification-based trust. In the initial stage of participation to virtual communities, new members who have little knowledge about other members and their activities would develop economic-based trust that rests on behavior in general in the community. Economic-based trust (also called generalized-trust by Kankanhalli et al. (2005), competence-based trust by Abrams et al. (2003) ) is related to the economic gains such as increased knowledge, decreased time etc. Once the economic-based trust is set, individuals may feel a moral obligation and urged to reciprocate the contributions offered by the system. In online communities, reciprocity follows a generalized pattern; individuals decide to contribute when they benefit from the use of any publicly available information. The last formed trust is identification-based trust (benelovance by Abrams et al. (2003)) is based on emotional bonds between individuals.

This is really interesting, don't you think? These steps can be used when we build and cultivate communities in general and in the social space specifically. It also helps us do the right thing at every stage. For instance, don't expect employees that have no emotional bond with each other to share voluntarily. When a community is created/started people will decide to join or not. The decision will mostly be made on 'what's in it for me?' criteria. So, you have to be able to answer that question, or else they'll move to the next community and share there.


What do you think? Are these stages helpful? And do they relate to your experience?