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:
- Go to Twitter.com/widgets
- 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.
- I copied the code created by the widget
- 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:
- End customers – our customers, customers hate our competitor’s offerings.
- There is not much discussion about our company out there.
- When we found an upset customer, we were able to respond quickly.
- If an upset customer receives their package they probably won’t be upset anymore.
- 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?
