Mediaboss Marketing

Social media and social networking for internal collaboration and knowledge sharing can raise the productivity of some employees by up to 25 per cent according to a McKinsey report released last month.

However, internal deployment of social technologies by businesses often involves a spike in engagement followed by a drop-off in participation as the novelty wears off, according to McKinsey. This can be a product of failing to integrate social technologies into work processes and a lack of attention to changing workforce culture to maintain internal social networking adoption rates.

To promote the kind of knowledge sharing that will actually increase productivity requires developing users as ongoing participants, not merely passive consumers. Its tackling this problem that led to the development of Barter: A social networking platform created at MITs Media Lab.

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All social media services, especially knowledge-related platforms that rely on users' participation, sharing, and contribution all face the challenge of building incentives for users, says Dawei Shen, the MIT PhD candidate who developed the platform.

One problem faced by organisations with a fixed employee incentive for contributing knowledge, for example $100 per article, is it leads to an oversupply of garbage information, and undersupply of really valuable information, Shen says. A market is a term that's the opposite let the market decide how to allocate resources and what knowledge should be built, and how it should be priced.

Using Barter, people buy and sell ideas, documents, questions and answers using virtual points, and virtual currency in a decentralised way. But building a knowledge market has its own set of problems owing to the nature of knowledge products, Shen says. Knowledge products are peculiar non-rivalrous, non-excludable, and repetition cost is zero. Information asymmetry is severe, and knowledge has spillover effects that are not captured by transactions. My research is to devise mechanism that addresses these problems.

We are applying innovative market mechanisms and established economic theories and practice to the domain of social collaboration/knowledge management software, especially trying to optimise incentive design, he says.

In short, we are building a knowledge economy with currency, market dynamics, and sophisticated economic tools optimising both social and material incentives, instead of simply building another social media website.

The platform consists of three components: Knowledge currency, knowledge markets, and economic policies, which consist of monetary policies and fiscal policies.

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What's your idea worth? Building a social knowledge market with Barter