Lee and Sachi Lefever of Common Craft are it again. This time on the broad topic of Social Media:

Social Media in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

Speaking of social media, my fellow association professional, blogger and good friend Jeff DeCagna of Principled Innovation LLC has launched the first-ever survey designed to capture information on the state of social technology adoption in the association community. He is are conducting this survey with the financial support of Omnipress, one of the association community’s leading producers of meeting materials in print and digital media. You can learn more about Omnipress at www.omnipress.com. The purpose of the survey is to gain a better understanding of how associations are using social technologies today, and how they plan to use them going forward. The survey will be open for responses until 11:59 pm PDT on June 30, 2008 and they are seeking only one response per association. It is worth noting that the survey is quite comprehensive (read long) however in return for your time and participating each participating association will receive a copy of the survey report which will be available in the September/October time frame. Additionally, All completed surveys will be entered in a drawing for five $100 Amazon.com gift certificates. The drawing will take place in early July.

While the incentives are really generous, do it more for the betterment of the association community. This is something that you can do to give something back and in return help provide a better understanding of the state of social media in associations today. If you are interested in participating, please check it out here at http://www.socialtechsurvey.org.

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As many of us know explaining exactly what social media, community and online collaboration is and how/why it’s different from what existed previously is sometimes challenging and more often than not frustrating. I just learned about this video, of Clay Shirky at this years Web 2.0 expo where he really breaks it down and makes sense of it all. One of the key takeaways is that media (both current and future) is not uni-directional but rather bi-directional. It’s no longer about simply consuming it, it’s really about consuming, creating and sharing. Another is: “Where is the mouse”. If you don’t know what that means, take a look at the video or at the very least read the transcript of Clay’s speech, I think you will get it.

My thanks to Jack McKee for posting about this video on his blog which brought it to my attention.

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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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