Wikis In Plain English

Came across this again. Still a joy to watch. Surprised I haven’t blogged it before. Check it out.

Social Media Tools In Business

Notes from Lee Bryant’s presentation from Headshift:

• “Networking productivity trumps personal productivity” (I never caught who Lee was quoting).
• Companies are good at managing documents.
• Companies are not good at managing pre-documents. Wikis are.
• People take rough’n'ready more seriously than polished docs cos  they have more authenticity.
• Digital natives = the facebook and post-FB generation.
• eLearning is great for a McJob.
• Wikis and blogs are great for personal development.

Web 2.0 vs. Risk

As Euan Semple says “risk is the last bastion of IT”. It’s easier for risk to say no than it is to get them to do a bit of neck-putting-on-line and this is understandable. Today I was at the conference organised by David Gurteen called Web 2.0 and Beyond: Applying social and collaborative tools to business where I asked Headshift‘s Lee Bryant for ideas on how to get large organisations to adopt RSS and wikis more fully into their clunky-by-nature IT and business structures particularly around Risk. Lee advised to get board management onto the idea. The idea is not to get around Risk but to get the rules changed. Keep everyone happy. It makes for an easier life. (That was me talking at the end and not Lee).

Web 2.0: Tips On Getting Firms To Use Social Tools

• Run pilots.
• Create small.
• Limit the invites to create mistique. (Think of how gmail is rolled out).
• Better to give these tools and then deal with the risk afterwards.

Web 2.0: Tips On How To Get Management Staff On Board

Speak to the ones that are using Blackberrys and explain that wikis & RSS can do better and faster.

Wikis explained

With wikis everyone can have equal editorial rights to a document…

Pretend there is a meeting with Jack, Jill and Joan.

• Jack sends out the meeting invite and posts the agenda on the wiki. 
• Jill and Joan can then go in and ask for elaboration on the agenda.

That means that when the meeting takes place everyone is better versed to what the meeting is about and has a better sense of inclusion before it has begun.After the meeting Jack then types up the minutes and draws up an action list with deadlines but he is a bit confused about one or two areas that were discussed in the meeting. Instead of loads of emails being sent about the place Jill and Joan go into the wiki and elaborate in that one page of the wiki. This saves time and increases both productivity and efficiency.

Now what don’t you understand?