At Accenture I've recently started using the term "social learning" in place of "knowledge management". social Learning implies to me that we are about leveraging the experience and skills of other people and the experience in the organization to learn and get our jobs done.

What I like about "social learning" is that it implies an outcome -I am trying to learning/benefit thru others (whether it was documented or not). "Knowledge Management" kind of implies what we attempt to do but doesn't imply the outcome. "Social learning" also supports my continued belief that in many cases a strong connection between training and knowledge management makes a lot of sense.

The only significant concerns I hear is that KM is not limited to learning - we are also about enabling with content and collaboration to help them get their job done. I see the point but I feel I can broadly define learning as being much wider.

I have found that as I have started using the "social learning" term more that for some reason I have had an easier time explaining what I do to others - and in the end I seem to get a more positive response ("wow - that sounds interesting").

Using "learning" in place of "networking" has also helped to separate what we do from things like Facebook.

Tom