Connecting Organizational Silos: Taking Knowledge Flow Management to the Next Level with Social Media

DEALING WITH CHANNEL OVERLOAD

One trend that I have seen in the last few years is that people increasingly suffer from what I would call channel overload. Tools and platforms are being launched at an increasing speed, and as different people communicate on different channels, there is a certain pressure to follow several of them at the same time. With external social media tools, a good example would be people following LinkedIn, Xing, Facebook, and Google+, all at the same time, as not everyone they want to interact with is on the same platform. Different people will have a different focus and if you really want to keep up, you will have to go multichannel. The same is true within organizations. As users move through channels at increasing speed, one channel that was mainstream only a year ago is suddenly replaced by another. The question is when to jump over to this other thing. As a result, people jump at different times, and multiple channels co-exist.

Another reason they will co-exist is functionality. One channel will be slightly more suitable to use for certain types of communication than another one. Even if they start out with a similar focus, there is always that one feature that is better or worse and, depending on how important it is to you, you will stay or leave earlier or later.

I don’t anticipate channel overload to become any better in the near future, but rather think it will get worse. The solution from an application provider is easy of course: Just use my tool ...