In Part 1 of this post I shared 12 Tips for Effectively Implementing Wikis in your organization. These tips included Form Following Function, Harnessing Peer Power, and Finding the Wiki Champion(s) in your Organization.

To continue the thread, here are 13 more tips that will help you to effectively implement wikis in your organization.

13. Reward activity

Create simple graphical reward badges for frequent contributions, moving a project to the wiki or any other activity that promotes adoption of the wiki. Badges should be placed on the user’s wiki page for everyone to see.

14. Create navigation pages to guide browsing across the wiki

Support for dynamic content is a must here, as the content will remain evergreen.

15. Encourage ownership and personalization

User pages are a great opportunity to experiment with features and gain familiarity with the wiki. Encourage users to personalize their own pages with widgets, badges (see tip 13),photos and feeds.

16. Use the wiki first

Most users already search the Internet but don’t know that the same facility exists inside the company. Whenever an opportunity arises, remind users to use the built-in wiki search first to find the information they are looking for before defaulting to other avenues.

17. A little latitude goes a long way.

Let users make mistakes; good wikis make it easy to reorganize content.

18. Integrate your wiki with in-house systems

Integrating the wiki with your AMS and other CMSs and allow users to create their own dashboards and mashups for daily activities.

19. Make the wiki part of the culture

Self-expression is important in teams and across organizations. Wikis are a perfect embodiment of self-expression that transcends organizational structure. Just make sure you know your culture and whether it will embrace a wiki or reject it before heading down that path.

20. One size does not fit all.

Wikis don’t work for all organizations. Your organizational culture needs to embrace the open exchange of knowledge and information in order for a wiki to succeed. Furthermore, single all-encompassing wikis seldom work in organizations. With wikis implemented at the organizational level, the concept of “spaces” or “projects” are almost always required.

21. Security is a must

Granular security with the ability to specify permissions—even at the page level—is often required for enterprise wikis.

22. Find support from those that stand to benefit the most.

Start with those who need it most. There is no single best practice on how a wiki should be rolled out within a large organization. However, it is often most effective to implement a wiki within those groups or departments that have immediate use for it. Forcing the wiki as a organization-wide mandate is usually not a good idea.

23. Let it go viral

As users within the organization send out wiki links or e-mail wiki pages, other users will get interested—or at least curious.

24. Know Thy Users

Depending on what wiki platform you choose to use, some require detailed configuration to use some of the more advanced features and functionality. Make sure you know what users want before rolling out your wiki and make sure that the functionality meshes well with the need.

25. It’s a numbers game.

The older the wiki, the more frequent the access. The greater the access the great number of lurkers. The greater the number of lurkers the more potential contributors. It all adds up.

Obviously this list is not all inclusive. What did I miss? What have you learned from your own Wiki implementation that others can benefit from?

References: eWeek - 25 Tips for a Better Wiki Deployment

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I’ve been doing a lot of catching up on my blog reading over the past few days and just came across a great article on the Acronym Blog. Jen Miller has a great write-up on how Associations can use Wikis. I found the post really well written and chocked full of some really solid suggestions. I want to use Jen’s write-up as an impetus to expand on the idea and move from the what to the how.

Trailing below are the first 12, of 25, tips for effectively implementing wikis in an organization based on recommendations from a recent article from eWeek. If you are considering trying to implement a Wiki within your association these tips are for you!

1. Form follows function

The use of Web 2.0 tools requires imposing some, but not too much, administrative structure on the collaboration environment. Too much structure inhibits innovation and interaction. Too little structure can devolve into purely social interactions, engender conflict and produce little valuable knowledge.

2. Establish ground rules early to avoid problems later

As the collaborative environment is being established, people are looking for cues for how to interact. Establishing appropriate cues early sets the tone for interactions to follow. It is much easier to start on the right foot than to correct problems later.

3. Recognize people for what they contribute

Web 2.0 tools provide the opportunity to identify extremely valuable knowledge held by the “crowd.” When members of the crowd do contribute valuable knowledge or insight, reward them for it.

4. Harness peer power

Allow colleagues to evaluate one another’s contributions, even relying on them to distribute many of the rewards mentioned previously. Peers are often in the best position to evaluate a contribution and the work that went into it.

5. Find something that works and stick with it

Effective use of Web 2.0 tools for collaboration depends on both the tools and the community that uses them. New Web 2.0 capabilities are being introduced daily, and it can be difficult for even a tech-savvy community to learn to use them all effectively. In most companies, the goal is effective collaboration, not developing the most cutting-edge IT platform.

6. Look for the diamonds in the rough

Don’t be discouraged if 90 percent of what the collaborative environment produces is not valuable to you or your business. The goal is to find the 10 percent that is truly valuable and that you wouldn’t have found any other way. These are the ideas that are worth the time, trouble and effort of learning the new tools.

7. Find at least one wiki champion

The wiki champion(s) will be responsible for creating awareness of the wiki and reminding others how easy it is to use. See BMart’s post on Acronym for how you can find your Social Media Superstars.

8. Cost does not equal guaranteed success

For most organizations implementing a wiki is a big deal, but it doesn’t have to cost a lot. There are a lot of low-cost packages available for use that are easy to implement and use. Success is never guaranteed and failure can be an inexpensive option.

9. Use the right tools for the right job

Capture information in wiki pages and send URLs by email instead of trying to collaborate with email. Too much great information gets lost or trapped by not using the right tools for the job.

10. Keep it simple.

An rigid structure makes it difficult and intimidating to add new content.

11. Provide a variety of ways to participate.

Remember what it is like to be an outsider and how challenging/frustrating it is to learn something that is completely new to you. Provide users with a variety of ways to participate. A user who only feels comfortable commenting on content at first may evolve into one of your most prolific contributors.

12. Make keeping up easy to do.

Provide tools for users to subscribe to the RSS feed of the wiki. Nothing encourages participation like visible activity.

Stay tuned for part 2 of this series where I share a bakers dozen of additional tips.

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A few days ago I did a pretty lengthy write up about Mozeo and why I believed it was a suitable replacement for TXTMob at least with regard to using it to stay connected at the various events I (we) attend. A perfect test of Mozeo was the upcoming ASAE Great Ideas Conference on December 8th and 9th in Orlando at the Disney Yacht and Beach Club Resort.

Shortly after I posted, Maddie sent a shout out to the Blogoclump asking if we were going to try to do group texting at the event and I offered to set up a Mozeo group to facilitate the Backchannel for the event, which the group concurred that it was worth trying. I immediately went to the site to set the group up and immediately ran into problems. Setting up an individual account was easy enough and even creating the group was pretty simple but from there the challenges started to mount.

First, when I went to send a test text message to the group my message failed telling me that I wasn’t a member of the group. It took me a few hours of experimenting to figure out that even as the group administrator I still had to “join” the group to send messages which is pretty counterintuitive. Next, as I was working through the issues, I thought I would send a note to their support email address which on the site is proudly listed as 24/7, but over 24 hours later I still haven’t received a response. After 12 hours I knew there was little likelihood that I’d hear anything so I knew that Mozeo wasn’t all it appeared to be.

I managed to experiment my way through the system and did eventually get it working, but I can’t say that I am completely pleased with the results. First, what I initially thought was an inclusive service appears to be a bit limited to the big four carriers: Verizon, ATT/Cingular, T-Mobile, and Sprint/Nextel. Not a show stopper as the majority of people in the U.S. are on one of these networks. However, it still could cause issues. Second, there was no way to easily distinguish who the messages were coming from (a big problem that we had with TXTmob) either on the device or on the web. Again, if we wanted status quo we could simply stay with TXTmob, but my goal in doing all of this was improvement and inclusion. Third, the lack of support, is concerning. I would venture that if this was a service that had a bright future they would take support seriously. Finally, the supposedly intuitive and robust web interface, after using it a while wasn’t what I had hoped it would be.

All said, Mozeo appears to be all flash and no dash. It had a lot of great features and looked like it could have been a real player in this vertical but obviously it was something that has either been abandoned or has a very small staff that simply can’t handle support, development and growing the business. Obviously, I feel like I have a bit of egg on my face but I also see it as a pretty powerful lesson that can be shared in this age of start-ups and niche providers. Due diligence is a business imperative, especially if you are planning on implementing something across an organization or enterprise.

Because I love a good challenge I immediately renewed my search for another viable replacement solution. I started with the list of contenders listed in my posting and found a few that looked promising. Remembering that my key criteria were:

• Cost (it had to be free), accessibility (it had to be widely accessible across numerous platforms and service providers)
• Richness of features (being able to support sending individual and group messages, the creation of groups and possibly integrate with other services - other social networks, IM, etc.)
• Ease of use (it should do what it proports and do it well with a minimal learning curve)
• Simple join process (in this day and age there is no reason why anyone should have to go through a multi-step join process simply to participate)

Those guidelines made it easy to run through the list and identify those services that met the criteria. None of them met every requirement exactly two of them did meet most and appeared to be well supported: 3Jam and Kiboze. I liked the look of both of them and all things being equal their functionality was quite similar, but something made Kiboze seem infinitely easier to use.

Launched in 2006, Kiboze extends your instant messaging experience with group text messaging.
Kiboze has built patent-pending technology that integrates text messaging with the major IM networks like AOL, MSN, Yahoo! and GTalk creating unique functionality that allows Kiboze users to use their existing “buddylists” as a phone book for “group send” text messaging.

It works by either importing an existing buddy list from one of the aforementioned IM networks or through their portal, either way it’s a pretty simple process. Minutes after I signed-up and confirmed my phone number I was able to use my phone to create a group.

This process was simple to do (just txt the command: create, group name, and the password to secure the group to Kiboze. To create the Great Ideas Conference group I texted the command: create GIC07 pwd123 to 35350. Flawless. It worked on the first try without leaving me guessing and quickly. I received immediate confirmation that the group was created. So far so good!

With regard to joining the group, all users have to do is text the command connect, group name, and password to Kiboze. So to join the Great Ideas Conference chat, you would simply text: connect GIC07 pwd123 to 35350. This was a painpoint with Mozeo so I was pleased to find out that I didn’t have to do anything additional as the group admin as I was already part of the group.

The other actions you can take are well documented on their website. Here is a quick overview, but some explanation is necessary so take a look at the details:

Group create - create group name pwd
Group connect - connect group name pwd
Group shout - shout group name
Block - block specific number
Logon - logon
Logoff - logoff

I am anxious to experiment with this service. Based on doing some additional research on some other blogs and meta-news sites, it looks to deliver exactly what it promises.

If you want to join the Association Backchannel for the 2007 Great Ideas Conference pull out your cell phone and send the following message to 35350: connect GIC07 pwd123. And if you want to unleash the full power of Kiboze, head to their site after joining the group and register.

If you have questions or problems let me know in the comments.

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