Microengagement Co-Founder Tim Gilchrist discusses how blogs and wikis change the way vistitors interact with web sites.
Business Value of Blogs & Wikis
By Tim Gilchrist, Microengagement Co-Founder
It has been said the currency of the web is attention. After you strip
away impressions generated by ads, click-thrus and sales of
merchandise, there is still a gaping hole in our understanding of why
people give their attention to a web site. Attention is difficult to
measure outside of the lab but it is the key ingredient to any
successful web site.
The web and television use attention as currency in similar ways. The
economics of both depend on seriously flawed measures of attention,
only making inferences as to what the subject is really doing.
Expectations on the web are far greater; site visitors can complete
transactions, interact with other users and still watch video only TV
could deliver a few years ago. All the above are schemes to attract
attention of web surfers. Sadly, many web site owners do not understand
that a site without some attention-getting device is comparable to a TV
channel without motion or sound.
Fortunately the web has several advantages over TV. Although often
treated as a one-way TV broadcast, web technology can receive
information as well as send. Unlike TV, web surfers are willing to
provide their own content. You can start a conversation on the web, and
it will continue indefinitely as long as people find it interesting and
have the means to participate. Public conversations will happen with or
without the involvement of the conversation’s subject. This fact is
quite troubling to corporate marketers who are used to controlling all
messages relating to their brands. Those days are over. Today,
marketers have a simple choice; get involved with the conversation
relating to your business or get blind-sided by it at the most
inopportune moment. Blogs and Wikis are two phenomena exploiting the
interactive nature of the web and changing the way businesses
communicate.
Blogs
Blogs are web sites that are designed to allow easy updating of content
through a simple graphical interface. There are over 15 million
published blogs (technorati) with 12,000 coming online every day (Pew
Internet Study). Interestingly, blogs are not the first means of
simplified web publishing. Geocities was an early entry in the free
self-publishing space. Before Geocities, there were online forums to
exchange opinions but for some reason blogs have eclipsed previous
self-publishing methods in both public and media attention. Blogs
differ from forums in that discussions are hierarchical with the author
setting the subject and tone for others to comment on. This feature
lends itself to corporate blogs focusing on narrow subjects.
Savvy companies can take advantage of blogs by hosting their own and
helping to guide the conversations that shape their brand or industry.
A good example of a corporate blog is GM’s FastLane
http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/. GM starts conversations on strategic
topics and then provides a platform for car buffs to comment. Microsoft
takes a different tack by adapting a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy with
it’s employee bloggers. Some 800 Microsoft employees run blogs on their
own, often discussing details of company projects and roadblocks they
encounter (Microsoft.com/community/blogs). Consider this post from
employee Chris Anderson on his blog SimpleGeek
(http://www.simplegeek.com/).
"There is some concern that the statistical nature of memory
gates...will produce a system that will fall over too easily when
running in stress conditions."
It would be safe to assume that Microsoft’s PR department would have
phrased this differently. Microsoft’s acceptance of the blog as a
viable communications method is a step towards an honest, uncensored
customer dialogue. Of course, they still pump out traditional press
releases. But if you were a reporter or potential customer, where would
you go to learn about Microsoft?
Microsoft does have an official blog “Channel 9”
(http://channel9.msdn.com/) that includes this wonderfully refreshing
introduction:
“Welcome to Channel 9. We are five guys at Microsoft who want a
new level of communication between Microsoft and developers. We believe
that we will all benefit from a little dialogue these days. This is our
first attempt to move beyond the newsgroup, the blog, and the press
release to talk with each other, human to human.”
Sun Microsystems also provides space for their employee–bloggers (www.
blogs.sun.com). Sun launched their blog space in stages. First creating
an intranet blog and then, when a comfort level was reached, Sun took
it public with this employee message.
“As of now, you are encouraged to tell the world about your work,
without asking permission first (but please do read and follow the
advice in this note).”
See entire Sun blog policy at (http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/blogs/policy.html)
Corporate blogs have the potential to meet three new business challenges:
- There are no more secrets. Employees will leak valuable product
information. Dissatisfied customers will share their poor service
experiences on the web. By entering into the blog arena, corporations
take a positive step in guiding their brands through the realization
that they are no longer a private company asset but a dynamic, open
source for employees and customers to develop.
- Once broadly defined market segments such as boomers and yuppies
have fragmented beyond categorization. Blogs have the ability to speak
individually with these fragments and adjust constantly to their ebb
and flow.
- The presence of a healthy blog on a corporate web site can help
elevate search engine rankings by delivering a fresh supply of content
and hyperlinks every day. All this is done without adding staff. It’s a
form of “outsourcing to the customer.”
Banking is a segment at the forefront of this change. As more and more
immigrant groups seek the American dream of homeownership, the white
middle class demographic is settling into the pack. Recent entrants to
the United States have very different views on savings and credit.
Differences that create opportunities for banks to further segment
their business and capture these markets.
Wikis
Wikipedia or Wiki, (Hawaiian for “quick”) is a phenomena even further
out on the horizon, and one that leverages many of the same
underpinnings that made blogging successful. Specifically, professional
media are no longer the sole source of news and information and
individuals can work together to create viable enterprises that are not
subject to traditional business rules.
Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) is the brainchild of Jimmy Wales, a Tampa
businessman who set out to build an online encyclopedia that relies on
contributions from the general public for its content. Anyone can add
to or create content categories within a virtually self-managing
process. The site is also self-healing. Occasionally vandals will post
carefully hidden obscenities, but the Wikipedia community springs into
action, repairing violations in an average of 1.7 minutes.
Wikis have several functions typically presented as links from individual content articles:
- Edit allows anyone to rewrite an article if they want to.
- Discussion feature, leads to a page where authors can discuss
what should go into an article, give source references and seek
information from other authors.
- History tracks changes to the article and the contributing
authors. Version tracking is a key feature of wikis, and one of the
main ways to control the quality and evolution of wiki content.
At first thought, it would seem that such an unorganized venture might
become mired in a crisscross of conflicting viewpoints. To the
contrary, Wikipedia challenges traditional encyclopedias in quality and
breadth. In a mere four years Wikipedia has surpassed all other
encyclopedias with over 1.3 million articles created by 16,000
contributors. By comparison, The Encyclopedia Britannica contains
80,000 articles and is over 200 years old. Wikipedia is so prolific
because it breaks with the tradition of knowledge producers and
consumers as separate groups. In a wiki, simply viewing the content
makes you part of its evolution, click the “edit” button and now you
are a producer. Wikis parallel open source software development in that
they encourage consumers of information or code to participate in
development. The open source operating system Linux has quickly grown
to replace Microsoft in many international markets because it adapts
quickly to business challenges, and it’s free.
Not all iterations of the wiki are successful. Recently the LA Times
had to shut down its editorial wiki due to an onslaught of vandals
posting irrelevant material. Originally, the LA Times wiki was to be a
public forum where readers could react to news and opinions expressed
by the paper. Readers could even change the content of published
stories. Unfortunately, this freedom became the site’s undoing in just
a few short days.
Wiki’s Implications for business are similar to blogs in that a portion
of the corporate identity is handed over to employees and customers in
the hope of expanding the company’s reach. Wikis differ from blogs
because they allow even casual site visitors to change much of the
content they see. Where blogs leave a record of discussions, wikis are
constantly erasing the chalkboard. Consequently they are better suited
to dynamic subjects.
Wikis are popping up all over corporate intranets as a means of
knowledge sharing. The typical application is to accumulate knowledge
regarding a specific subject (e.g., developing a new product) and tap
the employee’s knowledge of that subject. There is also a heuristic
value in that employees who were not previously cast in the role of
product development are often the wiki’s most prolific and valuable
contributors. Examples of companies who use wikis on their intranets
include: Daimler-Chrysler, Disney, Microsoft, Motorola, Sun
Microsystems, Kodak, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein Bank, and Ziff
Davis Publishing.
Taking the wiki outside the intranet and sharing it with customers and
competitors is less common. Microsoft runs a wiki from its Channel 9
site (http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx). Here development
projects are openly discussed and suggestions for improving Microsoft
products can be found. Noticeably missing is an edit feature for
non-registered users.
While we still have yet to see a major corporation throw down the
gauntlet and allow the world to open source its brand live on the web,
that day may not be far off. Just as blogging started, many unofficial
wikis that exclusively discuss one brand are already online. Dedicated
wikis exist on: Star Wars, Star Trek, Apple Computer, Oracle Computer,
iPod, X-files, Law & Order, and just about any video game you can
think of. It stands to reason that some enterprising marketer will see
how much traffic and attention these wikis receive and create one that
is neatly tied to a brand. Just as delicatessen owners in New York City
ceremoniously bury the key to their front door on opening day, a major
brand wiki will open the door to customer interaction with brands
forever, and a new chapter in marketing will begin.
Sidebars
Trends affecting customer involvement on the web:
Search engines have changed the way they index information from
analysis and categorization of meta tags to a direct analysis of the
page content and measures of how many other sites link to the indexed
site. This change has implications for site owners who want high search
rankings. Sites that encourage links to them will fare better in
rankings. Sites with large amounts of changing content geared to a
specific topic will rank higher.
Increasingly, people receive information in small bites from amateur
media. As newspaper, TV and radio network distributions drop, people
turn to niche media that give them precise information on extremely
narrow topics. Filtering tools such as RSS, search engines, Tivo, and
podcasts allow consumers to target specific media they want to
consume.
No new news. The free flow of information over the web is killing
privacy, both individual privacy and trade secret privacy. It is
supremely ironic the new blog medium helped bring down Dan Rather, the
most famous news anchor of the network news medium. Bloggers also
continually scoop corporations on their own press releases and product
releases. Most famously, Apple computer suffered information leaks on
three of its new products as a result of its own employees sharing
sensitive information on blogs. Consequently, some of the hottest
news can be found on blogs rather than on heavily censored, corporate
media outlets.
Imagine the widespread use of Wikis over traditional in-house R&D?
When blogs do a better job of helping customers than help desks?
Further Reading
Blogs:
Big Blog Company: (http://www.bigblogcompany.com)
Blogging for Business: Wall Street Journal article on commercial value of blogs (from 7/20/05 issue, author Kyle Wingfield)
Wikis
WikiNews: an experiment in open source news (http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page)
WikiCities: off-shoot of WikiPedia for special interest or corporate use (http://www.wikicities.com/wiki/Wikicities)
Social Text: A company dedicated to bringing social networking tools into corporations (http://www.socialtext.com/)
The Book Stops Here: Wired magazine article on Wikipedia (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/wiki_pr.html)
The Unassociated Press: New York Times Article on Wikinews (from 2/10/05 issue, author Aaron Weiss)
Using Wikis in a Corporate Context: Research paper by Dr. Espen
Anderson, Norwegian School of Management
(www.espen.com/papers/EA-CorpWiki-v1.00.pdf)
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