Knowledge Management of Social Networks

EDITOR’S SUMMARY Managing perceptions about personal and professional information on the social web is the focus of this Bulletin issue. Contributors offer insights on analyzing our personal presence online to determine whether it accurately reflects ourselves as we intend and on actively creating a personal knowledge profile. We can gain some control over our personal information and its unintended spread by separating social networking with personal information from professional web content and using privacy settings. The importance of user monitoring and participation is emphasized in observations about personal health records. Tools are being developed to limit software that accesses context-aware personally identifiable information. Information sharing and reuse can perpetuate false information, though content analysis of tweets about a series of events shows that irrelevant and contradictory Twitter comments fade rapidly from circulation. Knowledge management within organizations is spotlighted to explore how enterprises learn, grow and are affected by each other in a competitive environment. The many examples presented demonstrate the urgent need to actively manage the proliferation of personal and professional information on social networks.