ANTenna Blog -- Internet/Web

"The Web is littered with dead wikis," admits SocialText CEO Eugene Lee. Here's how to make sure your wiki doesn't add to the junkpile.

So, why do wikis get abandoned? When I spoke to SocialText's Lee at the Web 2.0 Expo last week, he charged that most wikis are "built by nerds for nerds." Formatting and linking often requires using arcane commands, not even standard HTML. His product uses "Wikiwyg" to avoid that, natch.

In addition, some corporate cultures don't encourage collaboration across organizational boundaries. Wiki implementations are often driven from the top down, and users may feel they need to be careful what they post because top execs will be reading their stuff. "That can add friction to the flow," Lee says.

But Lee contends that with the rise of distributed workforces and more agile organizations, "macroeconomic factors are putting stress on that model." To jumpstart wiki use, Lee suggests adding places where people can get comfortable using the wiki without fretting, such as discussions of recipes and restaurants.

Perhaps the key to success, though, is finding the right application for the wiki. Lee identifies 4 key use cases:

1. Collective Intelligence For Sales and Marketing
help information move from the field (sales, customer service, etc.) to headquarters and back out to the entire company. In some cases that can take months. Giving sales and marketing folks access to a wiki can make it almost instantaneous.

2. Participatory Knowledge Base for Service and Support Staff
Wikis make it much faster to identify new issues and share solutions. That can take up to 3 months in highly structured companies. A wiki can do it in 10% - 20% of the time, Lee says.

3. Flexible Time Collaboration For Professional Services
Setting up a wiki for each client is an alternative to emailing drafts of documents or using an FTP site. Lee says wikis can help professionals actually get work done, and capture the results, between meetings. And it's especially valuable when new people come into a project, giving them an easy way to get up to speed -- not only on what's already been done but particularly on what's already been explored and rejected.

4. Business Social Networks For Partners And Customers
For example, Lee cites a small executive coaching firm that uses wikis to tie together its network of coaches who work on contract, not in the office.

Finally, to help avoid any sense that wikis are lonely, empty places, SocialText announced SocialText People, a new set of functions designed to let users add profiles, discover other users of the wiki, and follow their contributions. "They're like Facebook alerts," Lee says, "only more enterprise appropriate."