On occasion, while we are helping a new customer roll out their new BrainKeeper Enterprise Wiki, one of our client's employees will ask the question, "What's in it for me?".  It might not be asked quite this directly, but ultimately, this is the question that they are asking.

The initial response is always the same:  It depends on what you put into it.

Since wikis are social in nature, those who actively participate in creating, editing and improving the content are the ones who get the most reward.  Ultimately, you will be seen as an expert in the subject areas where you contribute most, allowing other team members to develop trust and a reliance on your expertise.  This also has the added benefit of raising your perceived (and actual) value within the organization, since everyone is able to clearly identify what you are knowledgeable about- and you are willing to share that knowledge with everyone in the company.

In addition to these social and professional rewards, there are also personal rewards that go along with actively participating in a Wiki.  For example, satisfying your natural instinct to make things better when you contribute to existing knowledge or the satisfaction of creating and maintaining information that you really care about will give you a sense of personal satisfaction.  These natural tendencies are part of the reason why Wikipedia thrives, and will play a part in the success of the Wiki within your organization.

This is not to say that passive users, those who simply use the wiki to answer questions or find information, get nothing.  In fact, they get a great deal out of the Wiki too.  For example: getting answers to questions without having to wait for an emailed response, or the ability to determine who is an expert on specific subjects, are both great ways for information consumers to get value out of your Wiki. 

So, instead of asking what you are going to get out of it, simply make a conscious effort to help others through the wiki- and they will help you.

We got some interesting insights from one of our subscribers that we thought would be valuable to help your Wiki gain momentum. Our subscriber found that some people were reluctant to add new wiki pages if they didn't have a "complete" page- meaning that they didn't have all of the information that others would need. This line of thinking was preventing valuable insights from getting into the wiki. The solution is easy enough to identify: users should be encouraged to create new pages even if they will be incomplete. It is usually easy to convince people to understand that once information is in your Wiki, other users will improve upon it.

You could actually make the case that it is more important to know what topics, documents, and ideas should be captured in the wiki- and less important to have them completely outlined when you first submit them to the wiki. People, because of human nature, are much more likely to improve what is already there than they are to start something from scratch. When you think about this, this really does make sense. If you come across something that you know is inaccurate, not quite right or lacking some details, it is almost a natural instinct to improve upon it.

So, the next time you think something needs to be put in your Wiki but you don't know 100% of what needs to be there, just put in what you know and allow others to improve upon it. If you know there are certain people who can make it better, let them know and ask them to take a look. Starting this evolution process and bringing other people into the mix on a regular basis will dramatically improve both the amount and quality of the information in your Wiki.

Quite often, we work with potential and existing clients who have recognized that they need a better way to collaborate- and have chosen an enterprise wiki as the solution.  We obviously believe that implementing an enterprise wiki is a key factor in improving collaboration for organizations, but the full answer is more than just deciding to subscribe.

Wikis are indeed becoming more mainstream, but too many people consider a wiki to be a system that sustains itself immediately after it is rolled out.  The "if you build it, they will come" mentality can work (and actually has worked for a few of our subscribers, believe it or not), but this is the exception- not the rule.  It is more likely that you will need a strategy for how to use your wiki- and to make sure that strategy is communicated and reinforced in as many ways as possible.  Here are five keys to executing your wiki collaboration strategy:

1.  Make Sure a Wiki is the Right Tool

Before you get too far, make sure that the need you have can be completely addressed with a wiki.  This is where a month-to-month subscription can be very beneficial.  Try it out for 30 days with a small group of people who will take the time to use the wiki and give you honest information about whether it will work for you or not.  Also, don't be afraid to use your enterprise wiki support and sales staff.  If the are experts at the same level as the BrainKeeper Customer Support team, they will be able to give you a great deal of good information about how to use your wiki for a particular task.

2.  Find a Champion and / or Key Stakeholders

A sense of ownership is one of the most powerful motivating factors in the corporate world.  Give one person, or a small group, the responsibility to make sure that the wiki is being used- and used properly!  By having respected personnel buy into the wiki, you will have advocates that become mentors.  Also, make sure that you reward the heaviest contributors, which might mean adding them to the group that manages the wiki.

3.  Start Small

To ensure that everyone understands what the wiki should be used for, start off with a Workspace that contains content which many people can relate to.  Many people will quickly see the value of the wiki and understand how it will be used in your organization.  By starting small, you can manage it closely, you get a quick success story, and you have a great foundation to build from.

4.  Constant Feedback

Consistently ask about how things are going with the wiki.  If people like it, find out why so that you can spread the information to other people.  If people don't like it, find out why.  You, or a BrainKeeper Customer Support representative, may be able to solve it quickly.  Make sure to get feedback early and often!

5.  Learn From Experience and Adapt Your Strategy Accordingly

Not every aspect of every point from above will apply to everyone.  But this one does apply: whatever strategy you start with will change.  You need to be able to recognize when things aren't working, and modify how you use your wiki.  Your wiki will grow organically, so the policies that govern its use will have to do the same.  Preparing everyone for this ahead of time will be very helpful when it comes time to make those changes.

For more help on developing your wiki collaboration strategy, the experts who work with the BrainKeeper Enterprise Wiki are more than happy to talk to you.  Let us know if you are interested.

There are plenty of examples of individuals, teams, and entire organizations getting a wiki setup, but where the expected impact was simply not there.  This might be from expectations that were too high, less-than-stellar communication about what the wiki was for, or the lack of a champion that pushed adoption. However, the most common reason that a wiki initiative sputters out is that people don't see the value (or don't see enough value) to make it worth changing the way they work- even by the small amount that is required for good enterprise wikis.

Based on our experience, we have identified several things that you can do to revitalize your wiki:

1. Talk to Your Wiki Provider
We have seen hundreds of wiki implementations.  You can talk to us about why you got the wiki in the first place and discuss thoughts on why it hasn't worked as well as you would have liked.  In most cases, at the end of a 30 minute conversation, you will have several ideas to get people back into your wiki.

2. Simple = Success
People can sometimes bite off more than they can chew.  Expecting that you will be able to use a wiki to immediately address 10 - 20 issues that your organization has is not reasonable.  You will end up making progress on only a few of those issues- and not enough to solve any one of them.  By picking just one issue, or even one aspect of an issue (like communicating customer announcements to internal staff), you will be able to focus your team on a great use case for your wiki- and have a great example to build from.

3. Build on What Works
There may be a rare case in which you would start from scratch with your content, but most likely, there are portions of your wiki that serve a valuable function.  Interview people in your organization to find out what is useful, then archive what is not.  Now you can continue to build on the content that is valuable, and people will have a great resource for those topics.

4. Address the Problem AND the Perception
Create a wiki page where everyone can contribute their thoughts and issues with your wiki.  Most of the time there are only a couple major points from each person- and most of those will usually be the same concerns.  Once you have the issues out in the open, work with the people who contributed those ideas to find solutions.   By getting buy-in from some of the more vocal and respected people in your organization, you will get better use out of your wiki, and others will follow suit.  The people who helped create the poor perception of the wiki will then be advocates for it.

5. Create a Method of Feedback
Make sure that you don't stop this process after implementing some of the ideas above- or implementing any of your own ideas!  Other issues will emerge as your organization changes (growth, process changes, responsibilities shifting, etc.) and you need to have a method to capture the concerns that people have.  A wiki page can work quite well for this, but someone needs to be actively monitoring it.  It is essential to take action on people's concerns- and then to communicate the action that has been taken.  If people feel that their ideas are taken seriously, and they see progress being made, they will be very likely to continue giving you the feedback you need to make your wiki a great success.

Getting started with a wiki from scratch can be a daunting task- particularly if your organization has been sorely in need of a knowledge management and collaboration system for a long time.  A shared drive that has as much out of date and inaccurate content as it has valuable information will ultimately result in a failed attempt at knowledge sharing- since no one knows what is worth looking at.  Keeping everything in email can be even worse, as critical information is trapped on someone's PC, with no way for new employees or partners to access it.  You might have a home-grown solution, created by people who don't know the first thing about how to manage information.  You might have all or none of these, but when you realize that you need a better solution, and a wiki fits the bill, here are some tips on how to get your team started.

Communication
It is always a good idea to fully explain to everyone the benefits of a wiki, and how those benefits apply specifically to everyone.  If you can give people a reason to contribute- then they will at least give it a chance.  If you can convince them that their jobs will be easier, that they will ultimately be able to save time, or show exactly how they can work better with their co-workers, then you are almost assured that you will be able to build a solid foundation for your wiki.

Incentives
These can be as simple as incenting everyone on your team to add one new page and contribute to someone else's page each week.  Or throw a pizza party if your team reaches a content goal of a specified number of pages.  If all else fails and you are in management, you can also tie bonuses and performance evaluation scores to wiki contributions- though this is not something that we recommend.  The more that people feel like they own the content, the more organic growth you will get, which is the key ingredient to a successful wiki.

Initiatives / Projects
Take a topic, an idea, or a difficult problem and challenge your team to solve it purely though wiki collaboration.  This not only gets people familiar with the wiki, but it demonstrates the power of the tool, and you get a great resource at the end of the initiative.  If you work on projects within your wiki, create a meeting agenda item to review various pages that you can create for Issues / Problems, Lessons Learned, or Status Updates.  By bringing your laptop to the meeting and displaying the wiki for everyone to see, you get great participation and exposure.

Get Everyone Involved
There are always people in every team who are the recognized and respected leaders.  Get these people to contribute, and you will see others follow suit.  Also, if you can, get your Managers, Directors, and Executives to contribute.  Even a comment here or there will let people know that upper management is paying attention, and thereby validating the content in the wiki. 

There are a number of approaches for starting a wiki- and most are reasonable and will lead to success.  The keys are: getting people to understand what a wiki can do for them as individuals as well as the company, providing concrete examples that show the value of the wiki, and getting the right people involved.

There are numerous examples of successful open source wiki implementations throughout the internet. Wikipedia is the most well known of these, which is built on the MediaWiki open source software. Hoping to see the same type of viral adoption and enhanced collaboration in their organizations, more and more people are looking into wikis for a wide range of needs, and many of these people look at open source software as their first option. There are situations in which an open source wiki is right for an organization- but it also could be a big mistake.

There are several main reasons why open source software appeals to people (which tend to be more technical than the average employee). A large user community to help troubleshoot installation and configuration issues can be a big factor, as is having familiarity with the software if you are an active user of Wikipedia or other wiki-based sites. Most often, however, the biggest motivator is the fact that open source software is free- but is it really? Taking everything into consideration, could your open source wiki project actually end up costing you more money than subscribing to an online Wiki Software service?

Ultimately, you are interested in a wiki to centralize information, be it an intranet, a knowledge base, or a collaboration center- all with the goals of saving time to access information and answer critical questions. How much time would you spend to install, configure, backup, integrate, and maintain your own wiki? Add the cost of the hardware to run it and the extra strain on your infrastructure. Just compare the days of work and added costs of open source to the minutes it takes to get started with the BrainKeeper wiki- which has zero impact on your IT. We offer a 30-day free trial, so you can have a 60-day pilot for 10 people for only $35.

Something else to keep in mind with open source wikis is that if your wiki is a success, your entire company may want to have access to it. Will you have the time to teach everyone how to use wiki syntax? Will you be able to work around any quirks of the system until a new version comes out? Training, writing documentation, and developing workarounds all take even more time to keep your wiki running smoothly.

With an online enterprise wiki like the one offered by BrainKeeper, you get an ideal situation: you can try it out with very little risk, and if it becomes a success, you will have a provider that you can trust to deliver on your goals of knowledge sharing and enhanced collaboration.

See for yourself by signing up for a free trial: http://www.brainkeeper.com/free

The battle for Wikipedia's soul, an article published in a recent issue of The Economist, touches on the semi-political struggles within the Wikipedia "organization" between Inclusionists (those who think everything should be in Wikipedia) and Deletionists (those who feel fewer but more important/noteworthy articles should be included).  While the article does an outstanding job of laying out the differences between these two groups of Wikipedia users and the arguments behind each point of view, of greater interest to us is the larger concept of what should be included in a Wiki, specifically an internal Corporate Wiki. 

One concern we hear on occasion is if you include too much in your Wiki, you may run the risk of Users getting frustrated with having to wade through too much information to find what they are looking for, or simply being overwhelmed by the shear volume of information available.  However, we feel that if you use a Wiki with enhanced features such as content filtering, fine-grained searching and tagging, along with organizing your information appropriately and consistently, these concerns will be greatly minimized.  While you certainly do not want to include everything under the sun, such as outdated company forms or personal musings (use a personal blog for those), the "less is more" route should definitely be avoided.

When an organization severely restricts what goes into their Enterprise Wiki, they are in effect limiting its ability to grow naturally.  If there are doubts about what should go into your Wiki, then you risk losing the benefits of contributions by the more cautious people in your organization.  In contrast, if you do everything you can to encourage people to contribute anything they believe to be relevant, you will be amazed how much valuable information, enhanced collaboration, and great ideas will come out of using a Wiki.  By embracing a diverse but logically organized body of knowledge from the beginning, you will always help spur adoption and increase activity- which is the true measure of success for your Wiki.