- Posts tagged Wiki-love
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How Wikis Change Sales and Marketing
From Selling Power Magazine (featuring moi!)
Every sales leader knows that if they could harness the collective intelligence of their people, performance would rise dramatically. The Wiki model of shared writing and editing is slowly entering the world of selling. Wikis are rewriting the rules of team selling and collaboration. Wiki-empowered sales organizations find that productivity increases, teamwork improves, and email information requests drop by up to 50 percent. One company that used Wiki software from Socialtext.com found that salespeople can instantly find the information they need by using the integrated search and tagging functions. Gartner recently ranked Socialtext as the most visionary vendor in the Team Collaboration and Social Software market. A number of companies are applying the Wiki collaboration model to interact with their clients. For example, Salesforce.com created a site called Ideas.salesforce.com that allows customers to share ideas that can improve their business. George Hu, CMO of Salesforce.com says, “We expose our customers feedback to our entire community so that our customers, our partners, and everyone can see it. We use customer feedback as a roadmap for driving our product improvement process. Anyone who visits the site can promote any of the 5,000 ideas contained on the site to increase the idea ranking. A separate site called Apex Wiki allows Salesforce.com partners to quickly learn how to collaborate and create custom applications on the Salesforce.com platform. Many companies are reaching out to their customers to co-create and collaborate in their quest to gain a better bottom line. Dustin Armstrong, EVP of Tenacity Corporation, who adopted a program called BizWiki said, his sharing of ideas helps us support our customers better and grow our business faster. The beauty of the Wiki model is that it has great appeal to people who have little technology savvy. For example, people who want to monitor new developments on a corporate Wiki can opt in to receive an email or instant message when new content becomes available. Enterprise Wikis like Socialtext, Confluence, Brainkeeper, or MindTouch are different from Wikipedia. The emphasis is on collaboration, not publishing; there is no threat of vandalism; and the common goal is to share knowledge. Scott Schnaars, a senior manager at Yahoo! uses an Enterprise Wiki to plan, manage, and execute new product launches across the globe. Schnaars says, ”It is a great way to get a consistent message out to the global sales force.”
[Citation Needed]
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Tags: wikiffiti, wikis, citation_needed
Wiki's & The Educational System
Seth Godin has an interesting post tonight about people that aren't allowed to use Wikipedia for their school work. Obviously, he talks about how dumb this is for so many reasons, but where I think that he fails to tread is the ultimate fate of the American education system.
IMO, the current education system in the US, of which my kid just started, is where the record industry was 10 years ago. They are just on the tip of dramatic change, some of the people in the system can see it coming, but many in the business are having trouble admitting a world changing overhaul is coming. Under the current establishment, the system does very little to prepare students for real life. In the next 20 years, as manufacturing jobs disappear completely and remote work environments become significantly more prevalent, the idea of showing up and leaving at a designated time will become a thing of the past. Employees will roll into their home office with a clear understanding of what needs to be accomplished. If they get it down in 30 hours instead of 50, awesome for them. The structure of the American education system may also be it's downfall.
Second, while it is important to produce well rounded citizens, the overall curriculum needs to be reviewed starting now. When designing a curriculum for students entering kindergarten today, the Department of Education needs to better develop guidelines to prepare kids for what life will be like in 2020, not 2007. This may include flexible hours, work from home, distance learning with other cultures, team building, team collaboration and OpenOffice.
Finally, and the real irony of not being able to use Wikipedia for a report, is that the idea of collaborative knowledge may be the ultimate down fall of the US Education system. As Seth points out, it doesn't matter where you get the knowledge, as long as the knowledge is accurate. As students learn to collaborate and take advantage of the technology available for collaborative learning, their knowledge will not only out pace that of their teachers, they will recognize that, knowledge is power and also very valuable to potential employers.
The current education model is the CD and Napster just launched. Can the DOE learn from those mistakes?
Wikis, Groups & Social Networks
A few months ago, I got an invite from Ryan Kuder, a fellow Yahoo and Willow Glenner, to join Willow Glen 2.0, a Ning based social network for residents of Willow Glen.
The site itself is really nice and Ryan has done an excellent job of maintaining it. I don't really know how much time it takes to maintain, but there are nice RSS feeds from Flickr, Upcoming, local news and the local forum. The network isn't huge, only about 115 people, but it is an important network for people that live in this neighborhood. It allows them to connect with one another, keep track of current events and have a little market to buy and sell goods and services. Like other social networks, WG20 is just that, it is social. It brings people together for a common cause, allows users to discover new information and you can access the site directly or receive updates via RSS.
A search on Yahoo! Groups for Willow Glen yields over 50 public and private groups dealing with various issues on Willow Glen. Like the social network, groups allows members to express opinions and ideas on a common topic. While personally, I'm of the opinion that groups, message boards, forums (whatever you want to call them) are relatively archaic, they are still very popular amongst the masses and generate a ton of traffic. Simply look at the usage of Wordpress' forum to get an idea of the popularity. Message boards / forums bring people together for a common cause, allows users to discover new information and you can access the site directly or receive updates via RSS.
I recently came across WikiSpot, a set of wiki's for physical communities, primarily cities and towns. While there isn't a wiki for Willow Glen yet (I've submitted), there is one for Santa Cruz, where I lived for a few years when I first came to California. The site is really nice, especially if you are a tourist coming to Santa Cruz, but I can see where it would be helpful for locals as well. Editors can upload images, post the latest news, essentially, anything that can be done in groups or a social network. In other words, a local wiki is a site that brings people together for a common cause, allows users to discover new information and you can access the site directly or receive updates via RSS.
So we have three different types of services, social networks, forums & wikis, that more or less do the exact same thing. So which is best for you? Like anything, it is hard to say and depends on the scenario. Right now, I'm pretty high on wiki's and pretty low on social networks and haven't even considered forums for a long time.
There are a number of things that I don't like about social networks as a common portal for a true community. First, I don't like the layout and the ability (or lack there of) to find content. It is great to see what my friends are up to on a minute by minute basis, but in large community, it becomes increasingly difficult to find content more than a few minutes old. For example, if I'm interested in restaurants in Palo Alto (seriously, recommendations welcome), I can peruse my Facebook network or Facebook groups, but the results are somewhat hit or miss. If I'm lucky enough to have a friend who exclaimed how much they loved Zibibbo, well that is a score. If not, I'm pretty stuck.
Wikis, on the other hand, encourage the social component, but do so in a way that keeps the users on topic and also drive the user to regularly provide up to date data. Community members do this because wikis tend to be significantly more altruistic than social networks, much easier to make simple edits on the fly and community members are helping the community for no other reason than to help out. Like any community, once it becomes big enough, the value is limitless. Wikis also offer the sense of popularity so common in social networks by, in many cases, acknowledging who the top contributers are. Users actually have to do something to be popular, not simply click an 'add as friend' button. Finally, wikis seem to have less potential to be hijacked by users looking to distract from the main premise of the community (adding vampires or Hot Potatoes).
I recognize that the two technologies are different, however, they both serve the needs of the community. The social network connects you to friends & colleagues, but this connection seems to have an extra step that frustrates me. 1.) I have a need (restaurants in Palo Alto), 2.) I ask it, 3.) I wait, 4.) I (hopefully) get a response from someone in my network. The time that this takes could be anywhere from a couple of seconds to infinity.
Whereas with a wiki, the knowledge that I gain is real time. I have a query, I ask it, I get an immediate response. Not only is the knowledge that I get real time, providing the community is active, the information is accurate (XYZ restaurant is closed on Mondays or ABC got a new chef, it's no good). The community is being more active in order to make the community better. Unlike a social network, where users are grabbing for a popularity play, in a wiki developed community, popularity comes from activity and enhancing the community.
Ultimately, as social network creep seeps in the value of 'friend' networks decreases (except for spammers). In the end, users will return to the niches that they love be it photography, knitting, or classic car restoration. However, in most cases, they will be looking for answers to accomplish a task not a group of 'friends' to waste time with.
MythBusters Wiki
Cha Ching - Wikinvest Gets $2.5M
From Mashable:
Wikinvest, the wiki community for stock junkies, is officially launching today, with $2.5 million in a Series A round of funding, led by DCM venture capital firm.I remember, when I was a wee lad, being raked over the coals by my CFO for posting something on a message board. Since then, I've avoided them like the plague. I love the idea of Wikinvest, but it is hard for me to see why a.) This isn't simply Yahoo! Finance Message boards on steroids? And b.) Doesn't this have the potential to be an SEC nightmare? Since I'm not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV, I'll have to guess that the impact that Wikinvest has on SEC regulations is somewhat minimal and more inline with message boards. However, with the site being a wiki, I would think that there are more opportunities for a user to pump up a stock with bad information. As for it being a message board on steroids, after checking out the site for a bit, I'm having trouble seeing why it is any more than that. And if that is the situation, right on. The Yahoo board, quite candidly, tends to get filled with spam. Perhaps in wiki form, the community will clean this up. As for me, when it comes to making money on stocks, I've never been a really good day trader. When it comes to doing research about quick spikes on message boards, I've always been of the opinion that by the time it reaches the site, the spike has already happened. In any case, $2.5 million for a wiki site is awesome. Congratulations to the team at Wikinvest.
It's On the Wiki...
Seth Godin had a post yesterday that really struck a nerve. After stewing for a day, I think that I understand why. His opening comment.
I can't use internal wikis. "It's on the wiki" is a dumb thing to say to me.He then provides an excellent post about the difference between Push & Pull marketing.
Sometimes we push information (like spam email, to pick a horrendous example, or the typical vapid fill-in-the-blank PR pitch to bloggers) and sometimes we wait for it to get pulled (like a blog or a wiki). RSS transforms blogs from pull to push. The web transforms TV from push to pull.These are excellent points and I'm not so sure why he is so down on the internal wiki. He never goes on to explain the issue, but I suspect that it has to do with the delivery mechanism. Wiki is definitely a 'you have to go hunt it down' type of technology. Their value comes in a few ways. First, wiki's are an amazing repository for data that multiple people need access to and many of these people have editing requirements. If it was simply me pushing data to the masses, I'd set up a website. For true collaboration, this doesn't work that well. Second, most people can barely attach a photo to an email. When you consider that the majority of the population doesn't know HTML or how to use FTP to put a file on a website, the wiki becomes the most ideal candidate for sharing editable data in a many to many format. Sure, when it comes to doing more advanced formatting, the wiki language is a bit screwy, but for the masses, it is simple text and attach. These first two are pretty wiki universal. The next two points, if you are building an internal wiki are a bit more challenging to manage. If you screw them up, like portals, I can see why using an internal wiki would be frustrating. In the database world, there was an expression 'Garbage In, Garbage Out'. Never has this held more true than in the wiki world. Companies, looking to set up an internal wiki or a MSFT Sharepoint server need to police it in some manner that keeps the site clean. Otherwise, like anything else, it will end up a jumbled mess that no one wants to use. Thankfully for shareholders, unlike portals, wikis are free. Finally, and being a Yahoo employee this is where I get a bit spoiled, taxonomy is vital to the success of an internal wiki. In other words, how do you get around the site? What is the purpose? Are you simply looking to provide single data points to your users (i.e. Wikipedia) or are you looking to allow your users to browse through entire sets of data? You users need to be able to move around the wiki easily. In my world, I use our internal wiki religiously. It is simple for me to look at a project in a couple of different ways. I can see what is going on by department or I can easily identify what changes have been made to the project site since the last time I logged in. Likewise, I can subscribe to the RSS feed of the wiki page and be notified anytime a change is made (slightly more difficult when behind the firewall, but still doable). It is easy for me to make changes and additions to the site and they are all well documented. Is it dumb to tell some one that something is on the wiki? It probably needs cooler vernacular, but so does so many of the phrases in our industry (RSS, anyone?). Like any communication mechanism, it has to start with 'pull' as Seth calls it. Once you have that set up, it becomes a simple push. But is it dumb to point some one, who can add value to a project to a common repository with everyones input? Absolutely not.
Martha Wants A Wiki
Along with our amazing decorative styles, Martha Stewart and I now have something else in common, a love for wikis.
According to an Advertising Age article:
Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia is developing a community-oriented website powered by wikis, President-CEO Susan Lyne said yesterday, addressing the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference in New York. he company already receives enormous traffic to MarthaStewart.com and is a powerhouse in the lifestyle space, but it has apparently decided to see what else it might do.Wiki's - It's a good thing.
