Knwoledge management

During the next six months after my graduation, I will be working hard to develop my business idea back home, in Chile. Social media tools will play an important role in what is going to be this business, as the core platform were the services will be available for my customers.

A few weeks ago I won a $40K grant (no equity) from the Chilean Government to develop my business idea. This grantincludes a six-month period of expert advice, office space, and access to angel capital and investors to raise additional money if required.

My business idea is to offer world class working spaces at an affordable price to Entrepreneurs in Chile and Latin America. Actually entrepreneurs have three options, to work in Starbucks, at home or to pay a regular office space in those costly sharedoffices like Regus.com or similar offers. In addition to the office space I will offer additional services on demand as lawyers, accountants, workshops and access to a global knowledge base.

Social Media tools will play an important role in every phase of the business and I will describe how I plan to use them and which tools I will be using in the three phases of the business plan: Development,Implementation and Expansion.

Development – Build the community

These kind of spaces for Entrepreneurs are very popular in the US and Europe, these places are usually called “Hubs” and I have visit a lot of them in Boston, New York, Miami and London. During the research period I realized that the first thing I have to do is to build the community. The main idea of this community is to gatherpeople around the same interests, in this case around Entrepreneurship. As we discussed in class, one of the main factors to build an online community is to continually create content relevant for the members of this community in order to get people involved. As a first step I have to identify the first members; Who are the big influencers? What topics they care about? What technology do membersuse? What are their personalities and motivations for participating online?

Building this community will allow me to listen to my potential customers and learn from first hand what they are looking for. In that way I will be able to adopt my services to match as most as possible what the community needs. In the long term the big benefit from this listening process is to get continuous feedbacksfrom the final customers that can be translated in a better service and a stronger market position for the future.

I will not pretend to be viral, the idea is to target directly to main customers; so in order to measure the success of the community I will not only measure how many members do I have, but I will measure who are this members, if are they all entrepreneurs or entrepreneur-relatedpeople. The Chilean organizations related to Entrepreneurs have over 3,000 affiliates; if I can reach a 30% of that number, I will consider this community as a success.
Implementation – The Knowledge Base

Building and maintaining the community will be something to maintain through all three phases as a core strategy to maintain updated the service approach to what customers need. In additionto that a critical service for the customers will be the access to a global knowledge base.

One of the key elements of this platform will be the content created by the customers, the community members, the other Hubs around the world and institutions related with the entrepreneurial world as Universities and some Government institutions. As it happens in the institutional world, the mostrelevant content is the one created by the employees; in this case the users will create the content. For this reason the big challenge will be to encourage people to contribute and share their knowledge.

The first strategy for this will be to use flexible ways of sharing, making easy and accessible to every person to share their knowledge with others. The site should have a wiki base platform and...