3 posts tagged “wikipedia”

A colleague recently asked me how her clients can integrate social media and web 2.0 into their organisations in order to more effectively work on collaborative projects across mobile workforces. What tools help close geographical borders within organisations? Are there easier ways to communicate other than back-and-forth email, telephone and IM that helps employees share work internally? I figured I would address these questions in a public forum.

As we all know and have heard time and time again, the use of web 2.0 tools in the enterprise is becoming more important and increasingly evident. It facilitates an environment where workers are less constrained by geographic borders, allowing them to communicate and collaborate across dispersed workforces (whether it be different offices, states, countries with relative ease).

There are particular tools that give employees have access to content that helps them be more productive in their job function. Tools such as wikis are helping organisations promote and share talent, IP, experience, case studies, learnings and so forth.

I would make the suggestion for organisations wishing to foster a culture of sharing and collaboration that they take a plunge by implementing an internal Wiki. A wiki is a site that allows you to create, edit and share content easily with one another. A great example is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an online encyclopaedia created and edited by citizen journalists (you and me).

An internal wiki would allow employees to manage work documents efficiently. Allows one to create, edit and link documents that they’re working on. This allows you to track a history of changes to documents and the people that made particular changes. It's a much more efficient and user-friendly system - and is definitely easier than storing down multiple versions of the same document.

This about the documents that you have saved to your work folders. I guarantee if you're anything like me that you have versions titled .final, .FINALFINAL, .v2, .v3, .v3LK_edits and the list goes on. Every Tom, Dick and Harry adds their flavour to a press release (for example) and all of a sudden you are stretched to figure out which is the 'REAL' final document.

From my knowledge as well, a company intranet can be hosted on a wiki - although I look to my blogging community to back me up or knock me down on this one. 

Another fabulous Web 2.0 tool is RSS or 'Real Simple Syndication'. I would have to say that this is one of the most underestimated tools to date. It complements other Web 2.0 tools. For example, using an internal wiki, all employees would be able to subscribe to an RSS feed - which is basically a web feeds. This means if changes are made to the wiki, the new content would be sent directly to the employee (can be in the form of an email update) with a link and possibly even a summary of the content changes. This enables employees to decide whether they want to click through to the site. This means that employees do not have to manually log on to the wiki every so often to check whether amends to internal documents have made been made.

I’d like to build a list of wiki software that exists in Australia (and costs). If anyone has any insight, I invite you to share them with me.

A really interesting thing happened recently. According to an article I was reading on Arstechnica, Warren Hills Regional School in New Jersey has banned students from using Wikipedia as an information source and reference point for assignments and projects. The school has stepped beyond a simple ban and gone so far as to block the site from the PCs in the school. I am sure that this is merely one case of many more that are out there, or many more to come.

Just to give you a bit of background, a wiki is a website or similar online resource which allows users to include and edit content collectively. (please note to appeal to everyone out there reading this, I actually referred to the Wikipedia as the starting point to create my definition). In the case of Wikipedia, anyone who has an internet connection and a PC/ notebook/ mobile internet device can log onto the site and make edits to existing entries. Does this make it a fountain of knowledge, given that we have the ability to tap into the creativity of people around the globe, or does it make it a breeding ground for innaccuracy and misleading content?

I have to perhaps agree that it may be a fair call to ban referencing Wikipedia at primary and tertiary level education but surely those that are implementing the bans could have take some value from the site for educational purposes. The education board should have used Wikipedia as a case study and task to students to collaborate, execute some solid research and improve the site by contributing accurate content to it. Or reverse it, they should have provided the students with links to incorrect entries on the site and made the students conduct their own research and provide a well-researched paper on the topic along with a list of recommendations to changing the current entries.

Wikipedia was never meant to be a source of expert opinion and accurate content, nor was it ever promoted to be. It is merely a launch pad to get people thinking and engaged in a topic so they can then move on and execute a project once they have a general understanding after using the site.

I attended a Dow Jones expert series briefing earlier today that covered off the latest phenomenons in Web 2.0, including tools such as wikis. The conversations were around collaborating on projects via email versus collaborating using wikis. 

Wikis can be extremely useful in business today. More people are collaborating on different projects. To give you a real life example, in our company, a lot of cross-pollination happens across the floor with different agencies teaming up for project work. At the moment, more work is conducted via email, but threads can be long, tedious and attached documents can get lost. People have to keep tabs on what versions have been created, who has the latest updates, did they get saved down to a central system somewhere that everyone can easily access, did someone mistakingly get dropped off the email trail where it was dire for them to be included but no one has noticed.

Where we could benefit with wikis, as could other corporations, is that different working groups can be created where everyone has access to a wiki (or a central page), having the ability to read, create and edit. Using this tool means that everyone can remain in the loop and the wealth of knowledge sits in one central repository that you can always trackback and make reference to. This seems to be a more sensible way of conducting group work.

So in summary:

• Don't reference Wikipedia as a primary source of information when conduction research. Rather use it as a quick hit of information to give you a better understanding of what you are dealing with
• If you do refer to Wikipedia and you notice something is not right (and you know this from your own thorough research) make a point to edit the entry. Every proper 2c counts
• Get started on wikis and stop with the over reliance of email!

I have 18 fabulous free tools to share with you that monitor online buzz/ conversation for companies, with sincere compliments to Marketing Pilgrim.

There are many readily available tools available online that can assist you with tracking companies, reputations and conversations that are happening in the online ether that do not incur a cost. Please note, I am not endorsing these tools as the best/ most effective and the only means to tracking the above. These should be used in adddition with a monitoring strategy that is bespoke to the brand/ company.

The tools, however, are a great way to provide an snapshot of the environment a company and/or person is operating in, what is being said, likes/ dislikes, consumer comments, what the competition is doing and so forth. It will not give indepth, qualitative, well researched conclusions - obviously, as I stated earlier, other methods need to be incorporated into this evaluation process.

1) Track your industry using Moreover and Yahoo:

These sites offer RSS feeds for aggregated industry news and will let you track news that is related to your industry.

2) Track media using Google News:

You can even subscribe to Google alerts relevant to your company, product, a particular person, subject and so forth. You will then get instant RSS updates of relevant news items.

3) Track popular news topics/ buzz using digg and reddit:

These sites will let you track popular submitted news that relates to your business.

4) Track the latest in social media news using my favourite, technorati:

This site will let you track social media sites and and RSS feeds will give you updates whenever a blog mentions the company, subject, person you are tracking for.

5) Search blogs using Google Blog Search

You can set up Google blog alerts to track stories, information you are looking for.

6) Track Blog Comments using Co.mments:

Tools such as this track the comments that people leave on blogs so you can get more insight into what people are saying about a person or company.

7) Track Blog Conversations using BlogPulse:

This site will help you track who is linking to particular blog posts about the relevant company or person.

8) Track Blog Trends using BlogPulse:

This site also lets you track, for example, how well your latest product is going, or a competitor's product. It lets you track whether a keyword is getting growing blog mentions or not.

9) Bookmark using del.icio.us:

 This site is pretty much an online bookmarking service that lets people share online. RSS feeds also make it easy to track whenever someone bookmarks a web page that includes the company, person you are tracking.

10) Track photos using Flickr:

You can use this site to subscribe to an RSS feed that tracks that will update you on any new image that matches what you are tracking (person or company).

11) Track videos using YouTube:

This is just one site that will let you search for new videos that may match what you are tracking.  

12) Track tags using keotag:

This site lets you track to see if someone is using your relevant company and so forth as a key word.

13) Track forum posts using BoardTracker:

This site tracks what people are saying about your company, people on popular forums. The site will alert you by RSS if your cmpany is mentioned in a thread.

14) Track updates on Wikipedia:

This site lets you track what changes/ updates people are making to your company.

15) Track Patents using Google Patent Search:

This site lets you track patents that have been filed and are relevant to your company/ industry.

16) Track events using Yahoo's Upcoming:

This set lets you track upcoming events/ conferences that match your selected keywords.

17) Track keyword referral using Compete:

This site lets you track which websites get the most traffic for particular keywords.

18) Track anything using Yahoo Pipes:

This site lets you develop your own custom buzz monitoring tool and set up your own RSS tracking.

These are more than enough tools to get you started - so go make tracks!