KM and Googletrends

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In this post, Rick Ladd observes that the Googletrend for Knowledge Management is steadily declining, unlike the Googletrend for Social Media.

Rick suggests that

"I suppose some would suggest this portends the eventual death of KM, but I really don't think that true . . . or even possible. KM has always been based on the belief that we humans are unique in our ability to pass knowledge on to others, as well as to collectively create new knowledge and retain it for future use".

However rather than compare Knowledge Management against Social Media, lets compare it against some background reference, which we know is not dying. Project management, for example, or risk management, or financial management.

In each case, we see the same decline. The same tail-off in searches for KM is seen for project management, safety management, risk management, and financial management.

So I agree with Rick - this trend does not tell us that KM is dying, any more than project management, risk management, or financial management are dying.

See also this blog by Axel Horn which suggests that if the decline in Googletrends shows that knowledge management is dying, then so are patents, intellectual property, innovation, trademarks, and the European patent office.

I dont know what there are fewer searches for these terms, but its nothing to do with their increasing irrelevance.