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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In this series of blogs I will be examining the various social media strategies and the social media tools that support them. I’ll be examining companies that are using the strategies, looking at why a particular strategy might have been chosen and discussing the success of the strategy. All of these companies and strategies are marketing/PR campaigns.

My goal is to write a case study for each of the social media tools and explain what strategies were applied to make the tool successful for the company applying the tool and strategy.

Here are the Social Media Tools we’ll examine.
Blogging
Bookmarking/tagging
Content Aggregation
Crowdsourcing
Microblogginng
Mashups
Online video
Photo Sharing
Podcasting
Social Networks ie. Facebook, Linkedin
VIrtual Worlds
Widgets
Wikis

I’m going to pick companies that have successfully applied these tools and attempt to define and explain the strategies they have applied. Since I want to be impartial I’ll pick the companies from a list that was compiled by Peter Kim in September 2008 of Social Media Examples. The list contains over 300 companies and the tools they are applying. You can find the article here A List of Social Media Marketing Examples.

Look for the first case study early next week.

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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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