IQPC Conference - Is a Wiki or a Blog Right for You?

Three corporate communications execs paneled off on whether "a Wiki or Blog is right for you." I presented yesterday and am enjoying being a fly on the wall in the audience today. A refreshing aspect of the panelists and audience members in this group is that none are pundits, blog consultants or vendors (apart from me) so it was an excellent opportunity to see the blog and wiki market from a pure user perspective. Below are the notes I was able to scribble as the dialogue went on. I tried to capture everything relevant as clearly and truthfully as possible.

Panelists

Sarah Bloomer
Manager, Business Application Usability
THE MATHWORKS

Loren Sztajer
Web Manager, Employee Communications
DAIMLERCHRYSLER CORPORATION

Michelle Cullinan
Director, Corporate Web Services Group
NEW CENTURY FINANCIAL CORPORATION

Sarah - We heavily use Wikis in our company. We use it for free form text. We make links to documents. It has gone well because we are collaborative in how we work. I use it to make meeting agendas and we make meeting notes in real time. In development, you will see lists of items and links to information that may relate to requirements gathering. On the intranet team we see them most in our development group. In HR, Finance and Sales they don't like it as much. For them, a developer put up a PHP app which is equally unsecured but is easier to use for those teams. We have added a WYSIWYG editor on the Wiki and that has helped. It's interesting how collaborative and unsecure it is, and how people don't worry about others mucking up their information.

Michelle - We are a mortgage lender with 7000 employees. I am trying to find a good niche for technology. When I got here I found loads of documents in Adobe Acrobat in a file system. Not a very collaborative environment. At that point, I was in Knowledge Management.

I later moved to corporate communication and was chartered with putting up an intranet site. Our site was driven by putting up the policies and procedures and video. We built up an intranet with ~15,000 pages in a content management system. We also have news feeds. We have strict rules on compliance needing to know what was in documents when. When we get a request we have to reply within a tight number of days.

I was going to say we can never do blogs or wikis. But i just spent a little time with Jordan today and he gave me a good idea for how to collaborate on competitive information. For example when we go to trade shows and want to share and discuss what was learned.

We have to figure out how to add value with limitations. So we often look at what we can license and bring in. For collaboration, we have a grass roots SharePoint site which is ugly but people use it and like it.

Loren - At DaimlerChrysler we have done a bit of a hybrid. Done some blog and thought a little about wiki.

Biggest problem I have with wikis is accuracy. If you read about wikipedia when Kenneth Lay died, there was a lot of misinformation posted to the entry about him. I have to go to wikipedia and police the sections about DaimlerChrysler for accuracy. I often go there and have to change inaccuracies.

We have acronyms that mean different things in different divisions. There is a lot of inconsistency in terms of what a term is in Germany vs. America.

I see wikis as possible for project teams. We are using a Notes DB for collaboration right now that is really slow for uploading docs on a portal project I am working on... I can see using a wiki for this project.

As far as blogs go, I kind of consider myself a purist about blogs. I think the term is over used in our industry. People call things a blog when they are not. I have to ask whether someone is really talking about a message board.

A blog is what it is, a web log, a personal journal. Blog is really a technology for delivering information and you can apply that in different ways. GM has a Fast Lane blog which is allegedly written by Bob Lutz but PR is definitely involved. The question to me is about honesty. Sears has an exec that writes his own stuff, and that is a good case.

We did an experimental private blog for the media. Its a closed environment requiring that you get approval to access it. Well, one of our VPs likes to post on it. He wrote his own personal observation on it and it came out as a huge headline that said "Chrysler Blasts Big Oil" which is a massive misinterpretation of the company opinion and should not have been represented as it was in the media.

One employee saw some blogs that said bad things about the Viper. An employee commented in public on the blog with confidential information about the new model Viper. The impact is that people are swayed from buying the current model, waiting instead for the new model. As a public company we have to be very careful not to say things in public that are not disclosed in the proper ways through proper channels.

If we had blogs where people could get confidential information inside the company, we risk proprietary information getting out of the company.

I think the example is good, where blogs are private to groups.

Moderator - Sarah, you used the example of meeting agendas, I liked the competitive information example from Michelle too. What are other examples in a collaborative environment?

Sarah - Requirements are a good example. I am trying to get some of our international people to use it more for that. I am a usability person, so I will post screen examples and ask for commentary.

Loren - I think it may be effective for developing technical documentation. I have thought of suggesting it for our engineering community. Its the open conversation and open posting on general kinds of topics that I think get you into the danger zone.

Sarah - Wiki is a community tool. People come in and edit a version, so it becomes a wash with respect to personal views. It is good for technical documentation.

Michelle - About blogs, I think it may be important to play a participatory role. Recently, I was asked by media relations to watch blogs that reference us.

Audience member - Can someone speak to the technical ramifications. If you compile, edit, compile, edit. What do you end up with?

Audience member - There are different levels of formality. it's a matter of right tool for right job.

Audience member - But you end up with multiple versions. How do you deal with that?

Audience member - Only the current set is shown, and the database with revisions does not grow too quickly.

Michelle - We have a CMS and large website. We are the gardeners of the 15,000 pages. We don't display anything but the current version. When the company structure changes, we move the content. Structure and version control are important but the users don't see any of that.

Loren - Blogs are just authoring tools now. it used to be Front Page, now it's blogs. I think the concept of blogging has been corrupted.

Audience member - How do you differ blogs from discussion forums? We ruled out blogs, but need a message board.

Loren - In the case of WebBoard, its a difference of presentation, you can repackage as a blog. Blog is just a view, really.

Sarah - We haven't had abuse. There are no written policies that I am aware of. But the same rules would apply to this as anything that happens in a public space be it graffiti in a bathroom or something you say at a cocktail party.

Audience member - How do people find the wiki or wikis and what does it look like?

Sarah - It's a bit like a document and a lot of text with links. We tailor ours a bit to match some of our intranet styles. Otherwise very simple with bullet points, URLs, headers, and so forth.

Audience member - I look at the analogy of a requirements document where I can't see the differences readily in Word.

Panel member (I didn't notice which one) - For formal requirements, a Word document is usually the right approach.

Me - We have over 700 posts describing features and bugs that are changed or updated in our current release. Doing this requirements documentation in a Word document would be impossible, and reallocating features to different versions would be a very large chore. If required, we can export to word or PDF but managing the source content in Wiki fashion in Traction is essential.

Audience member - And Wiki can make a table of contents.

Michelle - This approach won't work in the part of the company that is not collaborative.

Loren - You can always password protect your wiki to keep it to a smaller group, private team. A problem I see with Wikipedia is that CNN quoted Wikipedia as a source. I wonder when that became an authoritative source for information, it's often wrong.