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social media body of knowledge

By on September 25, 2008 in social media

back when i was a systems architect most of the projects i executed on were overseen by a project manager. their mandate was to ensure the project came in on time and on budget to a sufficient level of quality.

they had help in what they did because of a number of frameworks. one of them was the project management body of knowledge (pmbok). it offered them a toolset that enabled them measure and control the three project factors of time, budget and quality.

it occured to me recently that while we are all out pioneering this social media juggernaut what we are in fact not doing is aggregating our conversations and distilling into a social media body of knowledge (smbok).

this body of knowledge would help build a toolset which we could use to draw upon to help guide our clients through this new phase of communication. it would also help us understand what works and what does not.

the current problems we have are that people continually have to reinvent the wheel the world over, rather than sharing the basic level of knowledge.

i know what some of you agency people are going to say, “it’s intellectual property, that we can charge clients for.” sure, at some point there is a level of innovation that is unique and clearly something that should be capitalised on.

what about the basic stuff though? there are no patents on how the human body works. you go to any hospital with a trained doctor and they can help you with that. same with systems engineers. you go to an i.t shop and they can all help you fix the basic stuff. why don’t we have that for social media?

does anyone else think it’s a good idea or am i alone on this one?

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  • http://magia3e.wordpress.com Matthew Hodgson

    Many disciplines have a BOK, including PMs and BAs, but these knowledge repositories have reverted to more traditional ideas of knowledge, that is approved, edited, and peer reviewed, and expert sanctioned knowledge in much the same form as Britanica.

    If we have a BOK , better to call it a wiki, have profiles for expert contributors, etc, so that this can become knowledge for practitioners, by practitioners, without boundaries as, unlike the discipline of PM, we should never assume that, as web practitioners, we know all there is to know about the web.

    M

  • http://www.jonathannguyen.net jnau

    You were quick with that response!
    I've had some thinking music based on what your thoughts and I think you are right and on two fronts:

    First
    There is no authoritative source at the moment because no one actually knows! We're still working stuff out and there is no empirical evidence.

    Second
    Social media like traditional media is more art than science, so what works for one person may not work for another.

    The question is though how do we establish experts in this early stage. Does expert mean that you have conducted PhD research or does it mean that we adopt a more open source software stance and submit for peer review and consensus?

    I suspect it might be the latter.

  • commaim

    sounds intelligent to me. bring it on.

  • commaim

    sounds intelligent to me. bring it on.