Web 2.0 social networks are certainly reshaping marketing strategies and customer relationships in the online consumer world, but the high-tech enterprise world is still slowly tapping into the phenomenon.
Some enterprises have embraced wikis as a way to dip their toes into the Web 2.0 waters. Wikis are Web sites where every reader can write and edit, with the Wikipedia free encyclopedia being the most famous example. Wikis, companies imagined, would foster vibrant, self-forming communities of knowledge workers who collaborate to serve corporate objectives. In fact, InformationWeek went so far as to declare 2004 the Year of the Enterprise Wiki. And the Gartner Group predicts that wikis will become everyday tools in at least 50 percent of enterprises by 2009.
But while wikis may have had some success in the enterprise, in is the operative word. Fostering internal "social networks" of employees is great, but they're basically just a recast of old school knowledge management systems. Enterprise wikis can't tap the full potential of social networking until they are opened to the world, harnessing the collective intelligence and energy of engaged customers, partners and other outsiders.
But that's what corporate blogs are for, you may argue … letting executives and employees converse directly with outsiders. Blogs are important, but they are a one-to-many communications tool. A chronological list of outsiders' comments to a blog posting is hardly collaboration.
Wikis, on the other hand, are a shared endeavor in the same vein as the open source software world. Participants get involved for altruistic reasons. They want to educate. They want to help. They want to improve the end product. They want to contribute to a goal. And when they happen to be customers voluntarily contributing in your domain, a stronger bond is formed.
What kind of wikis can enterprises create to encourage collaboration? Customer support, product development and customer best practices are three good starting points. For example, BusinessWeek's Heather Green described on her blog how instant messaging startup Meebo created a wiki to tap the power of its customers to do translations for its service in 50 different languages.
The open source community routinely utilizes open wikis to create and maintain user manuals. So why couldn't a software company, for example, apply the Wikipedia model to its own user documentation? They would be more up-to-date, more comprehensive and chock full of insights and workarounds that only comes with the hands-on experience of real-world customers. True, traditional online discussion forums have provided the same kind of user support for decades; however, they have done this in a different, highly structured modality that doesn't really foster community.
FAQs, bug tracking, user-built tools, tips and other contributed add-ons are also good wiki fodder. Novell's Cool Solutions Wiki is a great example. Here, customers and developer partners "work together to edit, correct, improve, add examples to, and generally ripen specific pieces of content of common interest"… from deploying Linux servers to doing patch management with ZENworks.
Wikis are also great tools for marketing and corporate communications. Customers, internal colleagues and your PR team can collaborate more effectively on news releases, case studies and other outward-facing content using a wiki rather than the mind-numbing cycle of passing electronic drafts around. Press lists, reports and plans may also be more valuable as "live," constantly updated wiki-based collaborative documents.
Marketers can take customer participation even further by allowing them to directly share their experience and successes through a best practices program. This not only boosts customer pride and strengthens their belief in your product, but it also yields great customer reference material. Wikis are a natural repository for this purpose. They let you and the customer collaborate on the creation of great case studies that are easily shareable in a public forum.
These examples are just a small start. Examine every point where your company engages a customer in the traditional world and chances are you may find an opportunity to use a wiki to turn customers into a social network of collaborators.
- Steve Hodgdon, SVP Digital & Social Media
