Wikis

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

H&K’s time-lapse video of Wikipedia Flight 1549 entry

Brendan Hodgson, Hill & Knowlton’s national practice leader (Canada) and reputation management authority, and UK-based H&K digital authority Niall Cook put together a video showing the 176 edits to Wikipedia’s page on US Airways Flight 1549 that took place over a mere 90 minutes. A fascinating glimpse into the way the community collaborates to provide a record of events, along with the negotiations over how the information will be presented. Hat tip to David Jones, also of H&K Canada.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Research brief links engagement, business improvement to internal use of Web 2.0

The value of enabling social media for employees, both inside and outside the firewall, keeps getting reinforced by study after study, yet organizations continue to block access to external sources while resisting internal implementation citing excuses ranging from bandwidth and storage limitations to fears of diminished worker productivity.

Aberdeen Group has produced another study the naysayers can ignore. Focused on talent management and employee engagement, the research brief links the use of Web 2.0 to higher levels of engagement and better company performance.

The linkage doesn’t prove that Web 2.0 was directly responsible for producing these results, however. The fact that “best-in-class” organizations are more likely to use blogs, wikis, and social networking tools than other companies could just mean that best-in-class organizations are generally more inclined to trust employees and adopt new tools they can use to collaborate and share knowledge and information.

Still, companies looking to boost engagement and improve recruiting and retention can certainly learn a lesson by studying the behaviors of those organizations that are outperforming them. According to Aberdeen’s brief, titled Web 2.0, Talent Management, and Employee Engagement (a PDF file):

• 52% of organizations that adopt blogs, wikis, and social networking tools (among others) achieved best-in-class performance levels compared to 5% for those that didn’t. (Note to Aberdeen: I would have liked a definition of “best-in-class.”)
• The same tools were used within organizations that achieved an 18% year-over-year improvement in employee engagement. Companies that didn’t use these tools grew engagement by a mere 1%.

Other highlights from the report—which aggregate findings from several Aberdeen studies—focus on…

Recruiting—A 45% increase in spending on “software that links to networking site (e.g. Facebook or LinkedIn) or other communities of practice” as part of the recruiting process will increase internal recruiters’ ability to connect with potential recruits. These tools also let employees post messages to “lend a voice to the market on the work culture at a particular company.”

Onboarding—Social networking is being used to connect newly-hired employees with mentors and coaches as well as build relationships with other employees. “In addition,” the brief notes, “blogs and wikis are also used as a means for a new employee to provide content/commentary on a topic at which he/she is an expert where others within the organization are struggling.”

Learning and development—About a third of organizations surveyed for an upcoming study from Aberdeen said the biggest growth in learning and development over the next year will come from “informal learning.” The investment these companies will make in blogs, social networks, and communities will “stimulate peer-to-peer learning and ideation, as well as facilitate communities of practice in which organizatoins can leverage the collective knowledge of their employees.”

With the introduction of Yammer, Present.ly, and other internal-facing presence tools, it’s too bad the Aberdeen report was focused exclusively on the first wave of social media tools. But the mere fact that Aberdeen joins companies like McKinsey, Gartner, and Forrester in endorsing these tools as drivers of business improvement can only help those trying to make the case for internal social media with those inclined to resist it.

Friday, June 13, 2008

Who you gonna call? Expert or amateur?

I’m on a real “new media doesn’t kill old media” kick this week.

There has been a lot of interesting commentary in the wake of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s announcement last week. (Disclosure: Britannica has been a client.) In case you missed it, Britannica is broadening its collaborative features, allowing both experts and readers to contribute content without diminishing the authoritative, edited content at the core of its offerings.

One post I read has had me thinking about the issue of experts versus the crowd. Tim Bulkeley, writing in Sansblogue, says…

This reads to me dangerously like the tyranny of “experts” that every successful totalitarian regime in the 20th century ensured. Give me the “cacophony of competing and often confusing viewpoints” over the bland, expert unitary point of view - but then I believe truth is more important than “standing.”

(Note: Bulkeley cites Britannica President Jorge Cauz’s post when referencing the “cacophany of competing and often confusing viewpoints.”)

The phrase “tyranny of experts” is what I’ve been stewing over. I’m not sure when experts—people with special knowledge or ability who perform skillfully—became tyrants, absolute rulers wielding oppressive and unjust power. But enough of dictionary definitions.

In a recent episode of his excellent podcast, “Managing the Gray,” C.C. Chapman resisted being labeled a social media expert, insisting that we’re all still learning this stuff. I sent him an audio comment arguing that, because he focuses full-time on the use of social media for business, because he studies it, that he has special knowledge and ability that allows him to perform skillfully. You’re more likely to get solid, measurable results working with C.C. than with somebody who has a blog and a Facebook profile. C.C. should fly his expert flag proudly. Why else would anyone want to hire him?

Similarly, I wonder with Mr. Bulkeley would feel comfortable driving the first car over a suspension bridge designed by the cacophony of competiting and often confusing viewpoints. I bet he’d be a lot happier driving over a bridge designed by an expert.
In his wonderful new book, “Here Comes Everybody,” Clay Shirky suggests that , most of the time, “the internal consistency of professional judgment is a good thing—not only do we want high standards of education and competence, we want those standards created and enforced by others of the same professional, a structure that is almost the definition off professionalism.” Whether that professional is about to perform surgery on you or repair your television, the fact that he or she has special training increases our comfort in their ability to do the job right.

This is not to suggest that experts always have the answers. Shirky makes the point that professionals often have a worldview that gets in the way of the truth, pointing to the music industry’s professionals as an example. Today, he says, “the problems of production, reproduction, and distribution (of music) are much less serious. As a consequence, control over the media is less completely in the hands of professionals.”

Companies like Wikipedia—because of those same issues of production, reproduction, and distribution (of knowledge, in this case)—was able to ensure that experts provided content that was reviewed by other experts and subjected to rigorous editing before publication. The Net and social media have enabled anybody to publish in Wikipedia, which means control of knowledge is, as Skirky says, less completely in the hands of experts.

Which is fine. Great, in fact. In his post about Britannica’s move, Cluetrain author David Weinberger notes, “Editing and expertise add value. They slow things down and reduce the ability to scale, but Wikipedia’s process makes it possible to read an article that’s been altered, if only for a minutes, by some devilish hand. It all depends on what you’re trying to do, and collectively we’re trying to do everything.”

In other words, the fact that knowledge is less completely in the hands of experts does not mean there is no value in knowledge produced by experts. Wikipedia’s any-anonymous-source-as-contributor model has enabled the encyclopedia to grow to 2.5 million articles in English, including one (as one blogger noted) about the Klingon language. As Weinberger suggests, you won’t find such an article in Britannica because the editing-and-expertise model requires decisions about the topics on which the encyclopedia should focus its resources.

But those topics that Britannica has included are being opened to the crowd. Britannica is opening its model so that readers can contribute to the body of knowledge. It’s not a wiki; contributions are still subject to editing and will be clearly differentiated from the official content, per the screen shot below, in which reader-added content is included by clearly identified as such with the name of the contributor included:

The fact that we have both the experts-and-editors model and the everyone-can-play model is a good thing. I can get information on the Klingon language from Wikipedia and learn about neurology from Britannica. Sure, there’s a neurology section in Wikipedia, but I have no clue who wrote it. The article may have achieved neutrality—the holy grail, in Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’ view—but that neutrality may have been brokered among a group of contributors none of whom have real expertise in the subject. Because they’re anonymous, we’ll never know. They could all have agreed to a muddled explanation of the science. And a good editor, as I’ve noted before, can only improve a document’s readability.

And, to return to the point, I just don’t see how having a person who has received special education, acquired special skills, and is able to perform professionally, becomes a tyrant by virtue of those desirable characteristics.

So which model will win? Both, I suspect; they will co-exist nicely in a world that is rarely black-and-white, either-or. (Contrary to some commonly held beliefs, Britannica is doing just fine, thanks.) Why, in some people’s minds, the world of knowledge must become entirely amateur-driven is an idea that eludes me. 

 

Thursday, February 28, 2008

JotSpot is back as Google Sites; should Microsoft worry?

I’m in the process of preparing a press release (both conventional and social media versions) that needs input from a few organizations as well as some individuals who aren’t affiliated with these organizations. Rather than attach a Word document to an email, I set up a secure one-page wiki at PBwiki, where each of the players is able to jump in and revise to their heart’s content, each one seeing what the previous one has done.

That was yesterday. If I had set up the wiki today, I probably would have done it at Google Sites.

That’s not a slam at PBwiki, which offers a terrific service. But Google Sites, which launches today, is the reincarnation of JotSpot, a feature-rich wiki service that Google bought back in October 2006. While it has taken a while for Google to integrate JotSpot into its Google Apps suite, I’m looking forward to kicking the tires. Neville Hobson and I wrote our book, “How to Do Everything with Podcasting, on a JotSpot wiki, which is also where we coordinated everything from the contract to revisions with our agent. It worked exceedingly well.

Google has done away with the term “wiki,” seeking to make the service more attractive to the non-geek crowd, and shows on its site the various uses to which Google Sites can be put, including intranets, team projects, and employee profiles. It’s a bit of a stretch to suggest a hosted wiki could substitute for a robust intranet, but Google Sites could certainly provide a small company with a simple means of getting an intranet up and running, especially given the features that can be included. Any other Google product can be integrated into a Sites page, such as YouTube videos, Picasa photos, Google calendars, and Google docs.

Google’s idea of what a Site intranet would look like appears below:

Most of the commentary so far suggests that the addition of Sites to the Apps suite is a direct assault on Microsoft Sharepoint. Maybe, but it’ll be a long, long time before a hosted service eats into Microsoft’s market share. The key issue in most organizations is precisely the fact that the service is hosted.

A typical IT response to the notion of introducing social media tools to the intranet focuses on the time and expense involved in testing new applications to ensure compatibility with existing software. If you suggest that the social media tools can be hosted offsite, the odds are pretty good that you’ll be told the information those sites would contain is too sensitive to risk maintaining it outside the firewall.

(This excuse is pretty lame, given that every single one of the US-based companies that has raised this concern in my experience also maintains its employee 401(k) data on a hosted server.)

One reason Sharepoint is so popular these days is that the 2007 version includes social media functionality—blogs, wikis, social networks, RSS, the works. These tools—while not the best looking or most flexible in the world—can be activated simply and without risking any kind of conflict with mission-critical software already running behind the firewall. Organizations like Wachovia—the fourth-largest bank in the US—are relying on Sharepoint to get their Enterprise 2.0 tools up and running quickly.

Others are turning to vendors offering suites of social media tools for the enterprise, like Traction Software and Awareness Networks. A Forrester Report issued earlier this month suggests that smaller vendors—many offering hosted solutions—are able to provide companies with what they want right now, while IBM and Microsoft are offering bits and pieces while still building complete solutions.

In the report—“Web 2.0 Pure Plays Might Be The Right Answer For Your Organization”—author Rob Koplowitz and his team point out:

The fact that Web 2.0 firms are smaller does not mean that they don’t understand what it takes to provide solutions to the neterprise. There are a number of vendors in the enterprise WEb 2.0 space…that not only understand security, privacy, policy management, and integration requirements of enterprises,but they also are ready to demonstrate that their offerings can exceed the new needs of enterprises.”

These services can also do a lot more than Sites, such as integrating employee blogs and enterprise-level RSS into the mix…as can Sharepoint.

All of which means that there are a lot of options out there. The fact that Sharepoint is already inside many organizations means it’s likely to remain a strong player—most organizations are loathe to dismiss such a considerable investment just because better or coolers alternatives emerge, which is why Lotus Notes still runs in so many companies—and there are other options that address the security and integration issues that are top-of-mind for IT departments. If Google is making a run at Sharepoint by introducing its wikis-not-called-wikis, I doubt it’ll enjoy much short-term success.

Not that Google Apps couldn’t do the job, just that IT departments want more than what Apps offers. Still, I’m delighted to see JotSpot return in its new form and I’m sure I’ll be using it again as soon as the need arises.

I expect to see more small organizations and non-business entities using Google Sites.

Other coverage:

• C|Net
• Webware
• Information Week
• Tech Radar
• Web Worker Daily

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

GM’s collaborative history project

There is no limit to the uses to which companies can put social media, but companies have to be willing to experiment in order to discover those uses. A lot of companies are reluctant, for one reason or another, to undertake such experimentation. (See my post on why companies resist social media for elaboration.) General Motors is not one of them.

Tomorrow, GM will go public with a wiki that has been available to employees for a while—the “Generations of GM Wiki.” (The link won’t work until February 7.) The wiki—part of the overall GMnext initiative—is a collaborative effort aimed at compiling the 100-year-old company’s history through contributions of people who have worked for and with GM, past and present—including customers.

Company histories are nothing new. I have a few coffee table books that present a glossy overview of the organization’s past. One is from Phillips Petroleum, produced by Joe Williams. My friend John Gerstner was enticed to stay with his sole employer, John Deere, rather than retire in order to produce a similar book called “Genuine Value for the venerable heavy-equipment manufacturer. Both books are stellar examples of company histories.

Oral histories also are nothing new. One of my favorites is the visual history from the Shoah Foundation, documenting the Holocaust from the viewpoint of survivors. Over 52,000 testimonies are archived there.

Both coffee table books and oral histories, though, are carefully controlled efforts. The books produced by the company highlight just what the company wants to highlight. And the contributions to oral histories are edited and the segments selected to ensure relevance; a lot of footage (or audio) winds up on the cutting room floor.

GM’s history wiki, though, is in the hands of people who contribute to it. That’s why a comprehensive entry is available on GM’s development of a futuristic car for the 1993 Sly Stallone movie, “Demolition Man.” (That’s the flick where Taco Bell is the only fast food joint remaining on the planet.) In a book limited by page count, such a recollection would probably rate a footnote, if anything at all. And an oral history might also reduce the reference because, well, it just doesn’t contribute to the overall understanding of a company’s past.

But that’s not what GM is interested in. The “Generations of GM Wiki” seeks to capture anything that contributes to the creation of a comprhensive view of GM and what the company has meant to any of its constituents. As the “about” page notes,

You are encouraged to contribute your personal stories, recollections, anecdotes, factual information, photos and videos to augment the official timeline and provide a uniquely personal history as told through the eyes of employees, retirees, associates and the generations of families who shaped or experienced GM’s history firsthand. Personal stories posted to the Wiki will not be edited in any way but will be screened to assure they follow the “Rules of the Road.”

There’s nothing onerous or unreasonable in the “Rules of the Road,” just the usual warnings against personal attacks and the like. The rules also make it clear that the wiki is not a discussion forum, but seeks instead “historical account(s) based on fact.”

It’s a pretty gutsy move, but one that is entirely consistent with the rest of the GMnext campaign, which builds on the social media street cred GM has built with its Fastlane and FYI blogs.

Incidentally, you can hear two of the people behind GMnext—Christopher Barger and Scot Keller—discuss the initiative with Neville and me on an FIR interview recorded on January 3.

Monday, August 27, 2007

Wikipedia Scanner: open season on companies

Since Virgil Griffith launched Wikipedia Scanner, it’s been open season on organizations whose IP addresses are linked to changes made to entries on the popular DIY encyclopedia. For example…

• PRWeek’s UK edition notes that “PR agencies are flouting Wikipedia rules demanding they do not edit the site. At least six of the PRWeek top ten UK agencies have edited the site in the past year…FD is the biggest offender filing 25 edits, primarily concerning clients Russ DeLeon and Ruth Parasol—founders of the online gambling company PartyGaming.”
• Wired is taking and publishing submissions in a posting titled “Vote on the Most Shameful wikipedia Spin Jobs.”
• Over 750 blog posts have been contributed on the topic, and a Google search produces 342,000-plus results.

Cumulatively, the number of organizations being outed for making changes is staggering. Rarely does a single tool produce such an overwhelming indictment of institutions’ predlicition for spinning facts and history.

But a little perspective is in order.

I’ve been visiting the Scanner over the last few days, spending time in the “Editor’s Picks.” For example, I spent a fair amount of time clicking through edits made from Exxon Mobil’s IP addresses. As of right now, there is a whopping 1,205 edits made by Exxon Mobil. Outrageous, right? Well, no. In fact, only about 20 of the edits seem to have anything to do with entries related to Exxon Mobil. 

What, then, were all these other edits? Here’s a very small sampling:

• Correction of a typo (“choose” instead of “chose”) in an entry about Disneyland’s Autopia ride
• Addition of a paragraph about how refrigeration cycles work in an entry about air conditioners
• Removal of an offensive addition to the biography of country singer/actress Dolly Parton
• Removal of a gratuitous addition (I LOVE YOU JENNY) to a listing on the history of American Football
• A section on “Economy” was added to the listing for the city of Natchitoches, Louisiana, suggesting that the city’s tourism industry needs little promotion.

Are these blatant abuses by Exxon Mobil? Clearly not. These are employees who also happen to be Wikipedia fans; they don’t care whether they’re at home or at work when they make their corrections and additions. But because their entries from work computers get aggregated with all other revisions from the company’s range of IP addresses, they get added to the total. Without these entries, Exxon Mobil probably wouldn’t have attracted the editor’s attention and become an editor’s pick.

A look at Amgen’s results shows a similar pattern. Most changes were made to entires dealing with a band called Caustic, the late Monty Python alum Graham Chapman, the term “mnemonic,” the New Progressive Party of Puerto Rico, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the like. Reviews of other companies produced the same kinds of results.

And what about the edits to Exxon Mobil entries, the ones that clearly violate Wikipedia’s policy? While some are egregious (deletion of content about the impact of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, for instance), others simply correct facts. For example, the entry about Mobil 1motor oil originally stated that Mobil 1 was introduced two years after Amsoil “marketed the first API certified synthetic engine oil.” The change reflects the fact that Mobil 1 was, in fact, the first API (American Petroleum Institute) certified synthetic motor oil.

At this point, you also have to wonder how many of the edits to company-specific content were business-motivated—that is, deliberately executed by the PR staff—and how many were individual employees who visited the company’s listing and said, “Hey, that’s not right,” and made the change without understanding the consequences. Companies now need policies that limit employee edits to company listings in Wikipedia.

I’ve been on the record opposing the Wikipedia rule that bars companies and their agents from editing company content. Honest efforts to correct mistatements of fact are prohibited by the rule (such as changing the number of employees from 500,000 to 50,000 because the original author added an extra zero) while unethical companies will simply make their inappropriate changes from non-work computers or use proxy services that mask their identities. Meanwhile, thousands of people who don’t work for the company but do have a biased point of view merrily post entries that obviously were never crafted with objectivity in mind.

But my objection doesn’t matter. The rule is the rule and if companies can’t play by it, they deserve whatever heat they take as a result of being outed courtesy of the Wikipedia Scanner. And, to be fair, most of the companies that have been the subject of news reports since the Scanner opened for business have been caught trying to rewrite history.

Still, it’s important to separate the wheat from the chaff, and not much of an effort has been made so far to draw the distinction between truly unethical manipulation of content, minor factual revisions, changes made unwittingly by front-line employees and changes to non-company content by employees accessing Wikipedia from work computers.

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Help define business transparency

I was supposed to be a guest speaker at a meeting on the East Coast last Friday. I was invited by PodCamp founder John Havens, who set up a BlogTalk Radio connection. The group waited for me, but I suffered a computer crash (the first—and still the only—since installing Vista). The dial-in number was on my computer, and by the time I got back up and running, nobody was looking for my call any longer. I sat on hold, but the meeting was well underway.

The topic was transparency and what it really means (as opposed to the inaccurate definitions that have been applied to it in various corners). To faciliate the discussion, I set up a page on The New PR, the communicators’ wiki so ably managed by Constantin Basturea.

Both John and I are anxious for strong collaborative input to a definition and elaboration of the real meaning of business transparency, and the role communicators play in helping organizatons be transparent.

Paul Argenti, who spoke at the IABC Research Foundation luncheon today , said that transparency is a requirement due to increased regulations and have become a key driver of new information and messaging for companies; he also said transparency is both a strategy and a condition. Clearly, there is a need to understand what it means (not what critics say it means), and integrate the concepts and lessons into our communication efforts.

Please join the discussion here.