Tagged with 'integration'

Last week, I attended a brown-bag lunch on social media organized by the Association Forum. While we started the discussion talking about blogs and various other social media, the conversation soon gravitated to the pros/cons and dos/don’ts of corporate wikis. And if the Society for Information Management’s Advanced Practices Council (APC) study is accurate, it’s no wonder: the study predicts that by 2009, at least 50% of organizations will use wikis as important work collaboration tools.

The APC identified 7 strategies after surveying more than 160 “active corporate wiki users.” I’ll focus on integration and culture.

Integration
I know I’ve already talked about integration in my last two blog posts, but I can’t emphasize this point enough. Just like you wouldn’t hire someone and then seat them in a faraway corner, separated from everyone else, new media has to be fully integrated within the company for it to truly be effective. As the APC report states, the wiki should be integrated as “one of several important tools in an organization’s IT collaboration architecture.”

Culture
One of the APC’s recommendations is to understand that “wikis are best used in work cultures that encourage collaboration. Without an appropriate fit with the workplace culture, wiki technology will be of limited value in sharing knowledge, ideas and practices.”

At Duo, collaboration is one of our core values. To facilitate collaboration, we started an internal wiki two years ago. “At first, I thought only the tech guys would use the wiki, but I’m amazed at how quickly everyone in the company embraced it. Now the project managers use it regularly… and the wiki has become a repository of shared knowledge, great for troubleshooting issues,” said Jason Priestas, a senior developer.

For companies where active collaboration and open sharing of information is not so much a part of the work culture, a fellow participant at the Association Forum brown-bag lunch recommended some ways to make wiki use a habit. For example, instead of simply answering questions over email, people can be incentivized to direct each other to the wiki instead. The APC also suggests assigning a champion to each wiki.

Interestingly, the State Department has its own internal wiki, Diplopedia, a resource that contains biographies of political and business leaders, reading lists and even instructions on how to order lunch. It may surprise some that such a top-down organization is actively using grassroots technology – especially technology that allows anyone to change entries. But according to Noam Cohen, “Diplopedia does not allow anonymous contributors, so bad actors could be tracked down.” Such safeguards have, so far, successfully prevented people from “committing career suicide,” as Mr Johnson from the State Department’s Office of eDiplomacy puts it.

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To learn more about wikis and how to implement them effectively, come listen to the wiki master and evangelist, Stewart Mader, give his keynote address at the Web Content Conference 2009 in Tampa Bay, Florida! Mader is the author of Wikipatterns: A Practical Guide to Improving Productivity and Collaboration in Your Organization and founder of Wikipatterns.com.

I’ve been harping on the importance of fully integrating social media tactics with your company’s marketing strategy and business goals for awhile now. This week, I came across two examples that illustrate my point.

Apparently, Cartier is the first luxury brand to market itself on a mainstream social network – MySpace. My first reaction was: why MySpace?! It’s interesting that out of all the social networks to choose from, Cartier had to choose the one that had a reputation for being: creepy, sketchy, sleazy, and full of perverts, pedophiles, predators and porn. The article talks about how Cartier had to police the people who were friending the brand in order to “respect the brand’s objectives” (if you have pictures of yourself drinking beer at a party, sorry, you can’t be a friend of Cartier). Again, why MySpace?

Taking a step back – why market on a social network in the first place? How does that fit with Cartier’s business goals or branding strategy? It’s true that the current recession has hit luxury brands hard, with people cutting down on spending across the board. Even Louis Vuitton advertised on television for the first time. But is having an official presence on a social network to reach a younger audience worth the risk of diluting the brand? (Unofficial fan pages created by users are a different story for another post.)

At the other end of the spectrum, there is Threadless, a company that grew organically from an online community and is built on a social network. Users submit their T-shirt designs, vote for their favorites, and those favorites are produced and sold. Unlike most retailers, Threadless doesn’t have an inventory problem – and why should they? The T-shirts that are produced are the ones the community has already indicated a desire for. It is the pipedream of every retailer – to be able to know beforehand exactly what consumers want.

In the case of Threadless, the social network and community aspects are so fully integrated into the company that “the Threadless brand is not the shirts but the community experience,” writes Max Chafkin. Jeff Lieberman, quoted in Chafkin’s article, goes so far as to claim that “to say it’s just a T-shirt company is absurd. I look at it as a community company that happens to use T-shirts as a canvas.”

Not every company will be able to achieve the level of integration of social media that Threadless has. In fact, most probably won’t. The point is that social media tactics need to be part of something bigger – part of the business strategy and goals, and part of the company’s culture, from top to bottom.