1) Who gets to play? Who will have access to the wiki? Who will find the contents useful? Is this a wiki that’s strictly for internal use, or one that’s primarily customer-focused? Are you hoping to bring your employees and customers together so both can contribute in some way? Define the parameters of your desired community. Most of all, what’s the purpose of the wiki? Knowledge-sharing? Collaboration? Define your business goal.

2) How will it get built? Create a strategic plan for the wiki that includes:

- a statement of purpose or charter, explaining who/what/why

- a communications plan showing how you propose to get the wiki populated

- metrics that will help you determine whether or not you’re reaching the goals you defined earlier.

3) Who’s on the team? You will need IT, some legal guidance to get rules-of-the-road established and (most important) an enthusiastic cadre of people who are willing to create content on topics for which they have a reasonable claim to expertise.

4) What about the details? Budget? Infrastructure needs? What software are you going to use to build it? Who will do the technical maintenance? What about the ‘gardening’ of the wiki, or content management?

5) Can we take a second look at that strategic plan? Go back and include details from #4.

Now, you’re ready to build the wiki. Get the technical project plan written, and implement. Muster your initial contributor group, start adding topics and you’re off and running.

Like any other system, your wiki initially will have hiccups and rough spots. Have a pilot phase with a willing group of users; this one step will save you lots of apologies later on, and (more importantly) will help you develop a better, more easily navigable wiki that will keep users coming back for more.

If you’re looking for inspiration, check out a few of these successful wikis:

- World of Warcraft has a justly famous wiki that is a deep resource for the game’s passionate and community-oriented players.

- SAP has a wiki for users and developers, the SAP Community Network.

- Oracle’s developer-oriented wiki

- The Disney wiki is largely fan-written and is quite comprehensive, covering everything from Disney history to the company’s films and theme parks.

Not so fast. Wikis have downsides.

Here’s a list of the top 5 problems faced by aspiring corporate wiki-builders.

1) Content vs. participation. A brand-new wiki is an empty box. There are no articles or topics, and nothing much to see. So you have to populate the wiki with good content. But it’s hard to get people to visit the wiki (and populate it) without having some reason for them to visit the wiki. Like good content. See the problem?

2) Maintenance.  Like a garden, wikis need someone to organize content, help users by adding internal links and structure, and ‘prune’ where necessary in the rare cases where inappropriate content ends up in the wiki (or in common cases where a bit of editing will offer clarity and brevity.) So you will need to add, if not head-count, then at least a new task for someone in the organization – the ‘wiki gardener.’ That person will have to have a rare hybrid combination of social, technical and writing skill. The more traffic the wiki gets, the busier the gardener gets.

3) Longevity. Wikis, like websites, lose their relevance if the information they provide isn’t kept up to date. Most organizations will have more wiki ‘readers’ than contributors, so if you want a diverse selection of content, you’ll have to go ask for it from time to time. You’ll also have ask knowledgeable people to read it for accuracy and quality.

4) The IT side can be messy. Your organization’s existing content management system might offer wiki functionality. If so, and you are only looking for an enterprise wiki, you can vastly simplify wiki construction by using what’s there (if the functionality meets your needs.) If not, you are looking at an IT challenge at some level.

5) Buy-in. If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve probably correctly concluded that you aren’t going to be able to do this by yourself. Correct! You will need willing participants in many parts of your organization who will be willing to contribute to the wiki, as well as buy-in from various departments (IT, corporate communications, legal, and sometimes HR.)

If you still want a wiki, Part III will talk about how to get started.

So, what lessons can a for-profit enterprise learn from Wikipedia’s success? How can we make wikis work for us?

Imagine giving your organization a multi-directional communications platform that is the ultimate resource on any topic related to your business that your people think is relevant enough to share and discuss. Now imagine that all the good stuff that everyone in your organization knows (or made or drew or wrote or videotaped) is all right there, ready to be used by other team members, and vendors and customers, depending on the goals of your wiki and who has access.

Wikis are an amazing knowledge-sharing tool that enable organizations to benefit from anyone who cares enough – or is ambitious enough – to contribute. Wikis should be set up to allow anyone inside the company to contribute. That way, they tap the intellectual capital available at all levels of the organization.

A well-trafficked wiki offers peerless research opportunities for the organization’s leaders. If you want to know what is interesting to your employees, look at what is going into the wiki. And wikis are one way to establish two-way communications within an organization, on a broader scale than email could ever accomplish.

Wikis have a few downsides, too – which I’ll cover in Part II.

It take a village to raise a wiki....

by Ian Harris

I once heard a story about a young British Member of Parliament, who was about to give his first speech on the floor of the house: his so-called maiden speech.

In Britain’s House of Commons, it’s the tradition that a maiden speech has to be delivered from memory. The Member of Parliament isn’t allowed to read it – instead, he or she must ‘deliver it cold’.

This young MP was certain he knew his stuff, and could normally talk with confident authority about the subject he’d picked. But before the speech, he was consumed with nerves. Over and over, he imagined himself failing spectacularly – corpsing in front of all the ‘old hands’ and looking like a fool.

On the day of his maiden speech, the MP perched nervously in his seat next to a veteran ‘old timer’ who had been an MP for years. When he was finally called to speak, he was about to rise when he felt a hand on his shoulder. It was the ‘old timer’ MP. “Enjoy yourself,” the kindly voice whispered, “But remember, nobody’s expecting much!”

“Nobody’s expecting much” should be your motto mantra in internal communications, too.

So many internal communication managers pump out business-as-usual content. Buzzword-ridden memos. Un-targeted newsletters. Communication that leaves staff wondering “what’s in it for me?”

All business audiences are expecting the usual rubbish. You can choose to either meet their expectations by being awful, or surprise them with relevant, fresh content that contributes to their professional lives in a new and original way.

Ian Harris runs www.internal-communication.com, a blog about internal communication

Email is still the number one communications channel in many organisations. But just because you send it, doesn’t mean they’ll open it.

With so many distractions competing for staff attention, it’s worth putting some serious thought into how to optimise your messages to maximise their chances of getting read.

Here’s 3 tips to boost your email mindshare.

#1 – Talk to one person at a time.

“Dear all”. Opening with this line is a fast way to disengage a reader. It sounds like you’re talking to everybody which, these days, is the same as talking to nobody.

When you send a group email, write like you’re only talking to one person.

I know this might seem like a strange approach. After all, you’re emailing hundreds or thousands of people at once! But

in fact whenever you send an email, you’re only ever talking to one person at a time.

Using the word “you” instead of “everybody” is a great tip to make sure you make a connection when you email somebody.

#2 – Forward email from execs

It’s wrong to presume that staff will read email from executives, just because they’re important.

Often, the opposite is true. Staff will see a ‘big cheese’ name in their inbox, and presume

the contents don’t apply to them. You can watch people open the CEO newsletter and hit delete the instant they’ve scanned it for bad news.

When you’ve got content from an executive, a great tip is to forward it yourself. First, have the executive email you, using their normal Outlook signature. Then, you forward it to the organisation – with a quick comment at the top.

Firstly, this approach feels real. There’s a faint sense of danger. The exec’s thoughts aren’t in a sterilised template – they’re in a real live email!  What if they said something that wasn’t meant to be shared?

Secondly, you capitalise on the huge attention grabbing power of a Fw: Subject line. Don’t you always open emails that are forwarded to you?

#3 – Send at lunchtime.

If you have a choice, email just when lunchtime is over.

I used to edit a magazine. One of our advertising team told me that 2pm to 3.30pm is known as ‘prime selling time’, because that’s when a client is most likely to be caught at his desk – usually in a post-lunch daze, and feeling inclined to chat.

If you send your internal communications emails when people are likely to be slumped at their desk, digesting a sandwich, looking for a distraction, you’re much more likely to win their attention.

–

Ian Harris runs Twilo, an internal communications video production agency and blog.

I got to spend a week in Pune and Mumbai on business a couple of months ago. It was such a refreshing change from America, where everyone is miserable because they can’t find a job. I talked to a couple of sharp young twenty-somethings who told me they change jobs (on purpose!) a couple of times a year just to meet new girls. It’s no problem finding new jobs – there are tons, and companies give out raises and bonuses every year just to try and keep workers from jumping ship too frequently.

So does this sound familiar to you?

Me neither.

It was fun thinking about how I’d deal with that novel situation – high attrition due to high demand for skilled workers and a relative shortage of those workers. If you’re going to outsource to India, how do you handle the HR/communications challenges?

Well, you could try to create a workplace that’s too cool to leave. My ideas:

1) Have the nicest office around. Plenty of American and European companies open offices in Mumbai or Hyderabad or Pune and, in an effort to make the most out of what’s probably a cost-saving effort in the first place, choose dank cinder block rooms and furnish them with crappy old furniture and computers. Wouldn’t you rather work someplace nice? The people I met who had been in their jobs for a year or more mostly worked in nice offices with windows, clean new desks and modern computers.

2) Offer a career path without a glass ceiling. If you shipped in a white guy from the States to be the local boss, and you don’t have a reasonable, visible plan in place to put a local in that job eventually, why should anyone ambitious stick around? Make sure there are advancement opportunities, including the training that’s needed to set Indians up for success in those higher-up jobs.

3) Make your workplace a community. It’s easy to leave a workplace behind when it’s a place that you go five times a week to earn your paycheck. It’s hard to leave a place where you know and like the people around you, and you are doing fun, important things with them that make your life better and richer. Set up get-togethers for everyone in the office and make sure they can bring their families to some events, and that there’s good food to eat. Coordinate community service efforts that are meaningful to your team – and ask them to define ‘meaningful’ and ‘service’.

4) Make your company a good place to work. I know, I’m coming back to Daniel Pink AGAIN but he makes such an important point: people aren’t only motivated by money. Your employees in India, like their colleagues in America or Europe, want to do interesting work with people who they like, and they want some ability to self-direct and choose what they do. It’s not all about the money for them, either (although money might be a bigger motivating factor than we’re used to in the States…see #5.)

5) Ask. What does an American consultant really know about any of this, anyway? You can find out what you need to know about how to get your Indian employees to stick around…by asking them. Don’t let your employee research stop at the ‘engagement survey.’ You might get some data that shows your Indian employees are less engaged than those at the home office, but was that a surprise? Do some qualitative research in India and take the time to find out about what really matters to your workforce, before they all leave for better dating opportunities elsewhere.

The big problem with this approach: It doesn’t work.

Corporate communications professionals wrestled with this problem for years. The dreaded communications ‘cascade’ persisted. Then, the advent of social media changed everything. Suddenly, not only did we have new tools with which to reach out to employees and other stakeholders, we had a world that was waking up to the possibilities inherent in new media. Media-savvy consumers tuned into more channels and learned to glean information from many sources, and to contribute their own ideas through those channels.

So, no need for the ‘cascade’ anymore.

Now what?

“From Lincoln to LinkedIn: The 55 Minute Guide to Social Communication” is the answer to that question. In clean, concise and frequently funny language, Mike Klein has written a primer explaining how social can change your communications practice for the better. Hint: ‘Social’ started way before Al Gore invented the Internet (sorry, international readers…that joke was for my American peeps.)

“Lincoln to LinkedIn” offers a strategic approach to putting the social communication to work for your organization in a structured and productive way. Not ready for Twankerbook yet? No worries. Klein points out that “one can run an effective social communication campaign with a phone, an email account and an excel spreadsheet” and shows you how to do it. Social media and social communication are not synonymous, and Klein makes the distinction clear.

Among the concepts that I loved: Klein’s assertion that internal information campaigns can’t truly succeed without engaging  ‘tribal leaders’ and leveraging their influence. ‘Tribal leaders’ are the people (and you probably know who they are in your organization) who might not run a department, or run anything at all, but who have outsized influence on a group of people.  Here’s the connection with Lincoln, arguably America’s best President of all time and a phenomenally skilled politician who understood micro-constituencies as well as he understood message. No, these aren’t modern concepts, but they’re key to understanding how communications can actually change people’s minds and change their behavior. And the ‘tribes’ idea isn’t new, but Klein makes it relevant to the way business is actually done.

Who should read this book? Leaders of medium-to-large organizations. Anyone who does corporate communications for a living, or is thinking about doing it. This is also an excellent purchase for community managers – enterprise social media needs to get more strategic, and this book is a great place to start. HR has a vested interest in making sure that internal communications campaigns succeed, so this is a book for you guys, too.

Disclaimer: Mike’s a friend of mine and he gave me an advance digital copy of the book.

As social media grows and influences business, the distinctions between marketing and communications continue to erode.

Once upon a time, the way we broadcast our messages was very distinct: paid versus earned media. At that stage, marketing dealt with advertising and direct-to-customer, tradeshows and collaterals. Public relations dealt with the media, with executive communications, and sometimes covered investor relations, too, in public companies.

Social media, blogging, and viral communications have changed the landscape so radically that it’s clear the professions are converging. So do you just merge the two?

Maybe. I think that B-to-C companies are going to have a different answer to that question, in many cases, than B-to-B enterprises. That’s because there are other lines blurring out there, too. Internal communications and IT have developed a much deeper connection since the advent of social media – how else do you get all those cool enterprise-level social media tools set up and managed properly?

It’s not all due to social media, but I think the changes are largely due to the proliferation of channels available to us, and the decline of influence in a couple of channels that used to be the mainstay of marketing (television and newspapers.)

I hope it’s a happy marriage. They should have plenty to talk about.

So, your company decided to try out Chatter, or maybe you built a wiki. And naturally you want to measure your ROI. There are lots of great analytics tools out there, right?

Not so fast. What do you want to measure?

A successful social media ‘campaign’ within an enterprise can have outcomes quite dissimilar from those resulting from a successful external social media campaign. There are tools out there that do a great job of measuring transactions, sure. There are even good tools for measuring some subtler stuff, like reach and influence. But if you’re using social media tools inside an enterprise, you probably want to measure their effect on culture and performance. That means collecting and analyzing a different data set that the one you’d seek if you were, say, trying to figure out how many more widgets your Facebook page helped sell…or even, how much your brand awareness increased as a result of your Twitbookspace campaign.

What if you want to measure how your new tool or platform is doing driving internal collaboration? Or knowledge-sharing?

You can measure knowledge by quizzing participants on topics. But what if they’re sharing knowledge on topics you haven’t already identified? And how do you track increases in collaboration?

There’s a ton of room in this field, dear reader – are you entrepreneurial programmers listening? Sure, Jive bought Radian6, clearly someone is already thinking about these issues. But as far as I can see, there’s still plenty of opportunity out there to develop tools to do this kind of analysis. Because, as Rick Ridder likes to say, “If you can’t count it, it didn’t happen.” (I used to work for Rick. He’s forgotten more about research than I will probably ever know.)

So, get on it, IT people…we need more ways to figure out what kind of difference we’re making with these cool new toys.