publications

The Newest Online Communication Tool: Collaborative Web Pages Anybody Can Edit

By Shel Holtz, ABC

Yet wikis are poised to become one of the most important online communication tools we’ve seen in a long time. While blogs are justifiably getting most of the attention paid to the online world these days, wikis are quietly weaving their way into both the external and internal communication world. Like most online communication channels, wikis require both content monitoring and adoption by communicators.

A Community-Built Encyclopedia

The Wikipedia is the best known example of a wiki. This community-built online encyclopedia boasts more than a million entries. Some 25,000 entries are added or edited each day. Entries have been submitted in more than 100 languages.

Compared to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Wikipedia is a knowledge powerhouse. Its 250 million words of text eclipses Britannica’s 44 million. And while it can take months to add a new entry to Britannica, anything deserving of a new submission can appear overnight in Wikipedia. Take podcasting, for example (the brand-spanking-new process of producing radio-like shows and distributing them via RSS feeds so they are automatically loaded onto digital audio players like Apple’s iPod). Podcasting has only been around for a couple months, but Wikipedia already has an extensive article about it. Not even Google is that caught up and is still asking, “Did you mean broadcasting?” when responding to a query on podcasting.

Arguments continue about Wikipedia’s credibility. Without the accountability of an authoritative encyclopedia, who can be sure the entries are accurate? Supporters counter that mistakes are quickly fixed by the community-at-large in what might be characterized as the world’s largest peer-review process. In case you’re wondering, the owners of a wiki can configure the system to send notifications when changes are made, and, if a change is inappropriate or inaccurate, revert to the last saved version.

Wikis in Business

But Wikipedia is just one of the wikis on the Net. (If you want to read more about Wikipedia, there’s a comprehensive article at the Mail & Guardian and another at the Annenberg School’s Online Journalism Review.)

For example, public relations practitioner Constantin Basturea has created The New PR. Communicators have contributed a variety of documents and resources on changes to the PR profession. There’s an open-source PR project on the site, along with a list of CEO blogs. When IABC Chairman David Kistle started a blog, Amsterdam-based member Neville Hobson, ABC, did not have to notify Basturea and wait for the site owner to update the CEO list. Hobson simply edited the page himself.

I have a wiki. “The Employee Communications Manifesto” is an attempt to get the community of internal communicators to create a baseline of knowledge that anybody entering the profession should have.

There are wikis for recipes, education, project management and research. The staff web site for the University of Minnesota libraries is a wiki. “We decided to try a wiki in an effort to get more staff involved in the editing and maintenance of the site,” said one library staff member. “We also felt a wiki could help us enforce a template on the site.”

Affinity Ltd., a New Zealand-based management consulting firm, uses a wiki for its web site, noting, “The secret of wiki is that it lets us update our web content whenever we like, wherever we are, with little fuss. It’s an exciting and powerful tool, and you don’t have to be ‘technical’ to use it. There’s no major drama about updating web content—to remember how to use a wiki, you just write a little, and more often.” The firm is also exploring the use of its wiki as a collaboration tool for working with clients on strategic projects, for a web-based journal, and for shared space for developing publications and presentations.

Wikis Gain Traction

BusinessWeek magazine reported on the proliferation of wikis in its 7 June issue, noting that companies like Kodak, SAP, The Walt Disney Company and Motorola are taking advantage of the technology. In fact, just one out of many versions of a wiki, Twiki, has been downloaded more than 35,000 times, with two-thirds of the downloads going into businesses.

According to the BusinessWeek article, Kodak is considering establishing a wiki for photographers where friends and relatives could add comments and stories about pictures on the site. But most companies are using wikis on intranets. At Aperture Technologies, a Stamford, Conn.-based company, employees use wikis for brainstorming, tracking progress on projects, creating and editing product documentation, and coordinating marketing efforts. “‘Wikis allow this collaboration much better than anything else, so we get things done faster,’” BusinessWeek quotes Aperture’s Nicholas Pissaro, Jr.

Wikis are open-source software, meaning they can be downloaded and used for free, but generally also without tech support. Many of the wikis’ authors are available via message boards or mailing lists. Pierre Michaud, author of pmWiki (the one I use), answers virtually every e-mail he gets on a list to which users can subscribe. In addition to wiki software you run on a server, there are also several services that host wikis, like EditMe, TeamFlux and Seed Wiki.

But as the wiki phenomenon spreads, companies are producing commercial-strength versions of wikis. JotSpot is a hosted wiki solution where companies can maintain wikis that serve business needs such as project management, trouble-ticketing and recruiting. SocialText is another wiki company, the one Disney and Kodak use.

Wikis and You

The implications for communicators couldn’t be more clear:

• Company sites that move to the wiki infrastructure require extra vigilance, given the speed with which they can be changed.
  
• We need to add wikis to our thinking about external communication. Where does it make sense to turn the power to publish over to our audiences? There certainly will be marketing opportunities. Why wouldn’t a food ingredient company open a wiki to encourage customers to post their recipes?
  
• The potential for wikis on intranets is huge. In addition to project-focused wikis (which I’ve already proposed to one of my clients), there is great potential for the growth of employee-driven newspapers and other communication vehicles to supplement the official material produced by communicators.
  

Shel Holtz, ABC, principal of Holtz Communication + Technology, has helped companies synthesize sound communication principals into their online strategies since 1996. He has over 25 years of experience in the corporate and consulting worlds, and is the author of the best-selling book, “Public Relations on the Net,”and the manual, “The Intranet Advantage,” in addition to other books, manuals and articles.