We have a wiki at the office. It’s not used much. There are a few reasons it’s not used. 1) You have to be on the corporate network. Our sales team who is remote is not set up for remote access or they simply don’t know ho to use it. 2) The wiki is dokuwiki which is somewhat easy to consume but a pain to add pages and info to for anyone who is less technical than a tech type user. 3) The biggest reason that the wiki has not been adopted is that the information out there hasn’t been all that valuable to the population at large.

I know #1 and #2 have to be addressed and they will be with an upcoming intranet project. We’re looking at hosting something on the cloud that we can use LDAP or AD to log on and maintain a single sign-on environment. We also want to find something that will be easy for user’s to add pages and intellectual property to. Finally it will have to serve as a platform for communication to the company. I’m very excited about this project but I’m going to have to reserve the rest of topics 1 and 2 for another post.

The third point I made above has been addressed with 2 initiatives I have completed in the last few weeks. The first was a long process of designing integration strategy and documentation including implementation documentation, project plans, risk scenarios, etc. The second was a simple Twitter page. I want to talk about the value of that twitter page today.

What I did:
I built a page on the wiki that consolidated all the current Twitter chatter about our company and all our competitor companies. I also set up a few searches to monitor our top customers and any discussion with those customers that focus on Shipping. I then showed this page to our Director of marketing, VP IT, director Sales Ops and a few weeks later our CEO. We now have a very nice little dashboard of all the conversations that are happening that are important to us.

How I did it:

1. Go to Twitter.com/widgets
2. Create a search widget for each Company name I wanted to follow, You do this by selection Search widget on the entry screen and filling out Google type search entry form.
3. I copied the code created by the widget
4. I created an HTML Table and started posting the widgets. I gave a cell in the table for each widget.

Marketing Impact/What we have learned:

1. End customers – our customers, customers hate our competitor’s offerings.
2. There is not much discussion about our company out there.
3. When we found an upset customer, we were able to respond quickly.
4. If an upset customer receives their package they probably won’t be upset anymore.
5. Most Important: our company needed a Twitter presence. Our customer’s are there and Our Customer’s Customer’s are there. We now have a service presence and I expect we’ll continue to grow from there.

I do want to make one point. The exercise to build this page took about 3-4 hours. It would take a more skilled person about 1-2. I could do it again now in about 45 minutes.

What are some of the ways you’ve used Twitter in your company?

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Jake’s where everybody who walks in is a ”Legend.” Jake’s is still a central point in the small town where I grew up in NEPA, that is North East Pennsylvania for those who are un-initiated and pronounced Nee-Pa. If you walk into Jake’s on a Saturday all the men in town will be there talking about sports, friends, politics and business. Everyone who walks in knows the conversation and Jake knows everyone. If you aren’t able there on a Saturday morning then you can go in the middle of the week and Jake will catch you up. The environment in that type of business creates friendships, contacts and generates additional business. If someone comes into the shop and says I’ve been having a problem with my water heater Jake or someone else will say oh, call Larry he’ll fix it right up. You need some advertising cha-cha’s Call Big Scotty Schoenberg down at Brucelli.

Now obviously not everybody goes into the barber every week and in most towns there just aren’t those kind of shops where everybody knows whats going on. It’s difficult to find that neighborhood spot because like I said in my post on Neighborhoods they just do not exist in most towns the way they use to. So whats the point and why are we talking about a barber shop?

In today’s world the neighborhood is created online, yes even for you small businesses. You not only need but should want be involved in the conversations. The question is how? How should the conversation be structured? How do I participate? How will it benefit me and my business?

The answer is formulate your conversation just as you would in the barber shop. Talk about sports, friends, politics, business. Make recommendations for your friends businesses. Help people find what they need and find someone in the community who enjoys helping to make those connections happen like my barber Jake.

If you want to learn more about this conversational tone and become a “Trust Agent” Then you should check out Chris Brogan at ChrisBrogan.com and Julien Smith at In Over Your Head and get their book Trust Agents
They do a better job defining how to take part in this conversation than anyone I know. Although the book does assume you know some things like how to start a blog.

If you want to participate in and connect with people in your own communities give me a call, send me an email, ping me on Facebook or Twitter, or LinkedIn and I’ll help you get on your way. Alternatively you can just leave a comment below.

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