Metzger Business

December 26, 2009

Twitter Wiki Pages for Your Business. Is Your company monitoring it’s coversation?

Filed under: Big Business,Intranet,Marketing,Social Media — Tags: , , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 9:44 am

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?

August 7, 2009

How many ways can twitter be used

Filed under: Big Business,Intranet,Musings,Social Media — Tags: , , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 1:57 pm

One hundred and forty characters doesn’t give you much space but it sure as heck gives tons of flexibility. I’ve been a member of the Twitterverse for nearly 2 months now, actually longer so let me active member for 2 months. In that time I’ve learned that twitter is
1) The fastest news service on the planet
2) Incredible for personal branding.
3) An awesome research tool. – You can find the best most current and relevant information on virtually any topic.
4) Goofy – Twitter’s twitters are flat out funny.
5) Incredible market research in your local area or for that matter overall market research.
6) Great for company branding.
7) Might take over the world.
8) Drives traffic to your site like no other tool including all other social media forums.
9) Creates viral buzz about a product
10) And now flat out buy tweets from twitters – provided by services such as tweetroi and Izea.

As I was writing this article I just found a new twitter – You can now follow dead president John Quincy Adams brought to my attention by @stonepayton.

As a tool twitter is too public to provide corporations the ability to communicate internally. Even though you can set up private networks in twitter I’m not familiar enough with the security and I certainly wouldn’t recommend to my company that they use it for anything that we want to protect.

That said if a twitter like tool is set up internal to a company intranet, it can really be useful. Companies that want to share information about what employees are working on and even help teams become more cohesive will find incredible value in this tool that simply lets you write short sentences about “What are you doing now?” There are companies contemplating using twitter like tools to replace status reporting and others who will use it to find internal resources with answer to questions that come up in every day business.

July 29, 2009

Wiki Considerations for Corporate Intranets

Filed under: Big Business,Intranet,Social Media — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 10:24 pm

A Wiki is server-based software that enables any person to create and edit published content using only their browser.

Wiki’s supports basic HTML markup including hyperlinks to other documents in the Wiki as well as to locations within and outside of the Intranet. Most Wiki’s provide a Wiki markup language and the best Wiki’s provide WYSIWYG technology, so adding content is as simple as creating a Word document.

Wiki supports centralization and presentation of corporate data source documents in a variety of formats including spreadsheets, word processing documents, PowerPoint presentations, PDF files, e-mail files, etc. Wikis can also be configured to access and display data from databases.

While Wikipedia, the world’s largest user-maintained online encyclopedia, is a great example of a Wiki, the use in business for collaboration on a project goes far beyond simple collaboration on definition of terms.

Wiki Benefits

  1. Permits the rapid exchange of information between departments, teams and diverse members of the organization.
  2. Low technical barrier to usage promotes collaboration across users with varying technical skill sets.
  3. Supports collaboratively building sales presentations, documentation, knowledge bases, etc.
  4. Agenda and meeting management.
  5. Managing after action reports/lessons learned.
  6. Involves the entire organization in helping to build and maintain the corporate knowledge base.

Corporate Considerations
Wiki’s make a great platform for creating a corporate intranet. It is however very important to decide how the wiki can and should be used. Below is a beginning list of questions to consider:

  • Is security needed?
  • Do you want the credentials to be based on another application such as Active Directory?
  • What types of content do you want the wiki to contain?
  • What policies must be in place to ensure the content meets company standards and regulations?
  • Will the Wiki be used as a company Knowledge Base?
  • If so is there search criteria the wiki’s search engine must be able to meet?
  • What is the structure, layout or information architecture of the wiki to best facilitate finding corporate knowledge?
  • Are there Sarbanes Oxley, HIPPA or other regulations that must be followed when adding data to the wiki.
  • It the wiki is used to create or host project documentation what are the procedures for editing project information?
  • How should project teams communicate on a project with the wiki?
  • If the wiki is used as the foundation for the entire intranet then what kind of corporate pages need to be developed and who will maintain them?
  • What department will be responsible for monitoring the wiki and cleaning up old, dirty, bad, or illegal data?

The above list of questions is far from complete but it’s a start and should help you start thinking along the right lines if you’re interested in implementing a wiki in your company.

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