hypergogue

Some key conclusions from the research:

• Activities and interactions that occur in blogs, wikis and social networks naturally provide the cues that are missing from current expert locator systems.
• A search engine that mines internal blogs, for example, where workers post updates and field queries about their work, will help searchers judge for themselves who is an expert in a given field.
• Wiki sites, because they involve collaborative work, will suggest not only how much each contributor knows, but also how eager they are to share that knowledge and how well they work with others.
• Tags and keywords, which are posted by employees and serve as flags for search engines, can reveal qualities in an expert that are far from transparent in any database or directory.

Take-away. Firms have in-house experts. The reasons that other people approach those experts has as much to do with approachability, generosity and perspicacity as it does with expertise.

Blogging, wiki activity and Social Networking seem to be reasonable proxy metrics for all of the above.

Social Media is a means to reputational price discovery.