What does the phrase ‘knowledge management’ mean to you? Unless you’re someone who works specifically in information or knowledge services, probably not very much. The concepts behind knowledge management however, can make a big difference to you and your business — and best of all, they don’t cost you any money. Here’s a few ideas on how to make knowledge management not only matter, but also to integrate it into the way you do business.

1. Stop calling it knowledge management. It’s a bit of a misnomer. While fields like records management and information management are really about managing the things they describe, ‘knowledge management’ is much more about knowledge sharing than any kind of management — and sharing makes people feel that they can and should contribute to the process.

2. Think about people, then technology. Instead of focusing on what cool technologies can do for your business, think about the basics of how people communicate and share things. I guarantee: the only technologies that will help you be successful in any kind of business have human communication at their root. If you think about people first and technology second (yes, that sounds like a cliche, but it’s true), you won’t get mired down by technologies you don’t need.

3. Don’t buy when you can steal. OK, so I don’t mean stealing in the illegal sense. To put together a set of knowledge sharing activities that are beneficial to you, stop trying to build the perfect solution from scratch. There are all kinds of ways to get people to collaborate and share knowledge that already exist. One idea: use Google Coop to get people to create a list of sites they want to search that are relevant to your field. This has the added side benefit of helping you find out what sites people you work with spend their time at and exposing everyone to new potential resources. Also, don’t forget the money you save by using open source software instead of buying everything you need.

4. Simplicity is good, complexity is evil. Most people don’t like things they can’t understand right away. Think about something like a wiki — the concept and the technology are both pretty simple. Try to keep any solution you implement as simple as possible, since it will help with the initial uptake, but also with the uptake down the road — most people will also be more likely to talk about things they like that are easy to understand.

5. Sell benefits, not features. In my Google Coop example, don’t tell people that they can now create a list of search engines collaboratively with their colleagues that they can all search. Who cares? Tell them they can see where other people spend their time, or that they can now find in 5 minutes what used to take them 10 (but don’t lie — setting false expectations is among the worst things you can do for knowledge sharing).

6. Ask people what they think. As you create ways for people to share what they know, don’t just assume that your great idea is great for everyone. Be willing to listen to people, but also be willing to sometimes admit that your idea just stinks. Figuring out that an idea is not working is even more important than figuring out that an idea is — you usually know when the ideas that work are working.