Business Value of Blogs & Wikis

Microengagement Co-Founder Tim Gilchrist discusses how blogs and wikis change the way vistitors interact with web sites.

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)