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Wikis are a powerful way to unleash the creative power of collaboration, as long as you can get used to the idea of being out of control as Simon van Wyk writes.

Late last year I was asked to write a piece for the ‘My Five’ column for The Australian Literary Review, where I nominated the five books that had most inspired me in my career. Arguably the most influential title was The Cluetrain Manifesto, written by four Internet pioneers from the US and published in 2000.

The ‘manifesto’ is comprised of 95 theses – reminiscent of 16th century German theologian Martin Luther, whose same number of theses formed the basis of the Reformation movement that took European civilisation out of the Middle Ages and set up Protestantism as an alternative to Catholicism.

So what the hell does Internet marketing have to do with European religious struggles? Cluetrain argues that the Internet will bring about changes just as earth-shaping as the Reformation.

Cluetrain is based around the concept of markets as conversations. People used to conduct business through conversation, discussing the weather, family and politics before finally bartering their way to a deal. According to Cluetrain, the most important feature of the Internet is that it allows people to have conversations directly with each other.

This was the first book that encouraged businesses to move from “What does my website need to look like?” to “How can we use online technology across our entire business?” It points out that staff at all levels contact each other and customers in ways they never could before. It’s informal and it’s not easily controlled. In fact, attempts to control it will backfire miserably. Businesses need to loosen up and let these conversations happen.

Core principles of Web 2.0

Although this book was written more than seven years ago, many of its descriptions of the ways the Internet could be used are happening only now. Cluetrain aptly described the core principles of Web 2.0 long before Tim O’Reilly ever coined the term; it is all about the power of the individual, the customer, the conversation between employees and between employees and customers.

As Cluetrain states: “There are two conversations going on. One inside the company. One with the market…. These two conversations want to talk to each other. They are speaking the same language…. Smart companies will get out of the way and let the inevitable happen sooner.”

Those market conversations are now starting to take place, largely through the emerging use of wikis.

Social software phenomena such as blogs, podcasts and portals like MySpace are getting a lot of media airplay, but wikis are lower on the radar screen.

These oddly-named software tools (their inventor, programmer Ward Cunningham, named them after ‘wiki-wikis’, the shuttle buses at Honolulu airport – wiki-wiki is Polynesian for ‘quick’), are focused Web sites that are compiled and constantly edited by a designated group of people – all of whom can not only post material to the site but edit it at will.

Corporate wiki use on the rise

You’ve probably heard of Wikipedia, the online collaborative encyclopaedia known as the Big Kahuna of wikis. While Wikipedia, where ordinary Web users keep the world’s largest knowledge base up to date, is a textbook example of a wiki in action, more development these days is happening in the corporate sphere, where companies are using wikis to communicate between departments and, importantly, with customers.

Wikis are more flexible than a content management system because they allow any site user to make changes, not just those with HTML coding experience or the right level of permissions. They are much simpler and less expensive than online collaborative programs such as Lotus Notes (In fact, IBM, the maker of Lotus Notes, uses wikis for many of its project teams). They’re also a good way of cutting down on excess email traffic as people send emails and unwieldy attachments back and forth across corporate networks, creating dangerous version control situations.

Tony Angrignon writes in his Adventure Capitalist blog that “Wikis are on the rise in corporations. And it’s about time. They are lightweight replacements for heavyweight knowledge management systems and are also a way for your user community to generate content that is better, faster, and probably easier to read than you can as a vendor.

“Your users often know your product better than your engineers and product managers because they have to live with it day to day. And guess what? If they tell the truth about some part of your product being broken – that’s a good thing.”

Examples

In late 2004, a handful of technically-minded employees at Nokia began dabbling with wikis as a collaboration tool. Today, Nokia estimates that at least 20% of its 68,000 employees use wiki pages to update schedules and project status, trade ideas, edit files, etc. BusinessWeek reports that where the company once bought outside software to help foster collaboration, now some of the most interesting material is emerging from within the company itself.

A Nokia spokesperson reported that “it was a watershed moment to find a tool that orchestrates a virtual free-flowing jam session of ideas across different groups and units within the company – something that’s crucial for an organization that thrives on out-of-the-box thinking.”

Other major companies that are reported to be using wikis include Sony, IBM, Microsoft, Disney, Intel and eBay. It’s not known which Australian companies are taking advantage of the tool.

Cindy Gordon, a writer for KM World, says, “Few senior executives have used a wiki or are embracing collaboration patterns at the speed required for competitive advantage. Compared with new firms embracing the architecture of participation, that puts them at a disadvantage.”

Connecting with customers

When it comes to using wikis to connect with customers, media properties are well-placed to take advantage of the community-building aspects of the tool. American Express, which owns US titles such as Executive Travel, Food & Wine and the Travel & Leisure franchise has built wiki-based magazine websites where readers can change and add to other readers’ work in a way that is more cohesive than blog-and-comment styles used on most media sites.

Of course, the key to a successful wiki, whether for internal or external use, is giving up control over the content. Ben Elowitz, CEO of Wiki software company Wetpaint, says, “User-generated content is appealing and a little bit terrifying to traditional brand managers. They have to learn how to give up control in order to take advantage of it.”

Cluetrain accurately predicted the double-edged nature of user-generated content and two-way conversations with customers by using wikis, sounding a warning that is even more potent today: “To traditional corporations, networked conversations may appear confused, may sound confusing. But we are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down. We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.”

Simon van Wyk is founding managing director of HotHouse Interactive. Comment on this story at the HotHouse Blog