Question #1; Corporate blogs and wiki usage
The following question was submitted for the panel discussion chapter meeting held at the end of September. However, due to time constraints, the question was not asked during the discussion. Instead, we’ve placed it here for online discussion. What do you think? Post your comments below in response to this question:
There are some new tech tools out there. What are your views on the use and effectiveness of corporate blogs? What about wikis?
When done well, corporate blogs can have a real, bottom line impact for your company. That’s the key. Selling a blog to an Executive requires number and ROI Calculations, which hasn’t always been easy. Gartner recently released on a study on Corporate Blog ROI that I round really interesting. http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli/2007/01/new_roi_of_blog.html
As for Wikis, we currently use a wiki at my company in our call center. A searchable, easily updatable tool is a huge productivity booster in that environment. There are certainly more uses beyond the call center, and we’re just scratching the surface.
Beyond that, it’s important to note that tomorrow’s workforce will expect that tools like these will be used. We’re talking about the myspace/blog generation, and the quicker companies realize this and start preparing for what experts call “Enterprise 2.0″, the better. Enterprise 2.0 is just a term for using Web 2.0 tools in business settings.
Comment by Keith Hoffman — October 31, 2007 @ 9:36 pm
We’ve recently started using wikis and what we’ve noticed mostly is that you have to be very clear about what they are good for and what they aren’t good for. Good for: internal, informal information sharing. Bad for: Copying and sending to customers without some level of vetting.
We also had to make sure people weren’t just pasting our external documentation into the internal wiki. Instead, we suggested putting links in the wiki to the documentation on our network.
People get really excited about wikis (with good reason), but you have to keep in mind that they are just a tool like everything else and every tool has things it’s good for and things it’s not so good for.
Comment by Maria Herro — November 2, 2007 @ 11:19 pm