Enterprise 2.0 and Knowledge Management on Small Medium Enterprises

In México 99.8% of existing enterprises are Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) which generates 52% of Gross Domestic Product and 72% of total employment. A previous study of AMIPCI (2014) shows that in Mexico 8 of 10 enterprises have their own social network profile and 5 of 10 enterprises uses social media for publicity and marketing purposes. There are many studies about social media marketing but just a few about handling knowledge management. Many companies have not realized about the importance of having a knowledge management strategy for their own business. This could allow them to keep useful information by sharing best practices and improved methods to do important things or critical tasks for their businesses. By the other hand there are some companies exploring different methods and tools to improve knowledge sharing within the organization. Specially on SME this could be a big issue due the development costs of this kind of systems that makes them unaffordable. We believe that using social media tools could support the knowledge sharing issue in many SME without spending a lot of money on it. We want to explore the way how SME’s keep knowledge within the enterprise in order to propose an affordable solution by using social media tools. In the beginning, it’s proposed to conduct a survey as a diagnosis tool to find out if SMEs are using social media and how they are using it inside the enterprise, additionally if they have a knowledge management strategy and if they use Information Technology in some way to support it. Secondly, build a social media proposal in order to enable knowledge management processes such as externalization, internalization and use of information in order to transform it in knowledge. Thirdly, applying the proposal in different types of SME in different countries as a comparative case study to identify key success factors and best practices of using social media as a tool for knowledge management.