Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

A wiki is awesome in theory.

But the problem with them is that it's near impossible to get a critical mass of users so that someone actually adds information of value.

It's maybe 1 in 1,000 visitors who will be willing to spend time working on a Wiki. And that's a stretch, I'd estimate.

So you literally have to have thousands and thousands and thousands of visitors, OR you have to have a really committed group of people who are so devoted to a subject that they will add information of value to it for free.

Wikipedia reached critical mass, and I'm sure most people have visited that site.

But how many of you have actually edited it or added to it? (I must admit that I did edit a page that had an incorrect word, and fixed it.)

Now take that and scale it back. How many people visit YOUR site, and how many (or how few) people would actually bother to work on your wiki for you or with you.

And I don't know about this from experience, but I can only imagine that it would only be a huge spam target too, since spammers love to ruin everything completely so that it is utterly unusable for the regular people.

I have to make a big effort to get people to comment on my blog, so I feel like there's no way I could make a wiki work.

I am curious to see who answers who HAS made it work though, because if there's a trick to it, I am seriously interested in learning and have no problem changing my mind about them.

Lars,

I agree with you on the big picture thought of creating the next Wikipedia, but what about a network or team using it?

I have a group of coaches that would use this tool to contribute content for their own use or ongoing training. I benefit from the user generated and edited content and my coaches, in this case clients, get a great tool.

Sure, as an internal thing it could definitely work, because you have a small group of people who have vested interest.

But what I am curious about is whether anyone out there has used one as an external feature of their web site or blog and been able to get enough traction that it actually takes off and people use it.

At Palo Alto Software we adopted a wiki about a year ago and it's proved a really effective tool for smoothing office communications. People post items at all times, we use it to track progress on longer-term projects, to store useful files, track metrics, notify each other of marketing efforts and tools, reviews, etc. We also use it to store fun files too. Today there's a new post of photos from a company picnic at the local minor league ballpark.

-- Tim

Building a participatory experience in any medium is a big challenge. A wiki is another "how" for encouraging and enabling participation around a shared goal or interest. I personally love wikis (and blogs) because the cost to publish is almost zero, and it delivers on the promise that is the internet. I'm personally committed to helping these experiences flourish whether by running my own wiki, WikiOutdoors , or by working on JumpUp .

A couple of the things that help encourage participation are:
* Making it super easy: On WikiOutdoors, we built templates around specific outdoors topics (i.e. hiking or birding) and saw an immediate increase in new article creation as a result. We tip our hat to WikiHow for their base code.
* Delivering on the "wiifm": On JumpUp, we're seeing a very high participation rate in content development with our spotlights because members who share their challenge and solution can end up on our homepage. It's a win for us, and a huge win for the members who get visibility.

I love the conversation here. Thanks John for encouraging it!

I just posted a 6-page article on Scribd, and an 20-minute audio (with the article) on "Wikipedia Your Personal Brand."

~ Vikram Rajan
PersonalBrandMarketing.com

We built our ProjectForum wiki software for business teams, so not surprisingly our users have come up with tons of interesting uses. Certainly using it for internal coordination and project management is a very common use. Some people who work with a range of clients will set up a wiki for each, and use that to publish intermediate work products, and solicit feedback from their clients. A nice alternative to sending around lots of emails, and gets the project knowledge out of peoples' inboxes and into a place where others can reference it.

When I worked in a computer science research lab I led an effort to create a "boss" blog for research sharing. It was great success, and is still in use. More at: Applying 'Boss' Blogging to a Research Lab
http://ideamatt.blogspot.com/2005/09/applying-b...

I do like the idea of creating one for clients. One example that comes to mind in the productivity realm is Merlin Mann's (http://wiki.43folders.com/index.php/Main_Page). I'm thinking of doing a FAQ for my field.

Thanks again for your blog - I'm enjoying it!