Wonderful Wikis

In my last posting, I talked about social media. Several months have passed now, and I can say with a bit more experience under my belt that I still don’t have the time, energy or interest to blog or read other’s blogs; but wikis are wonderful… within limits.

What’s a wiki, you ask? According to Wikipedia, “A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute to or modify content.”  Wikipedia is an excellent example of a wiki site. It is an online encyclopedia that is growing massively, both in content and popularity. If you haven’t used it, I highly recommend giving it a try. Think of some term or concept that you want to learn more about. Let’s use “Bellingham” as an example. Did you know that there is a town called Bellingham in Tasmania, two in England, and three in the US? Bellingham, Minnesota has a population of 191. And Governor Bellingham is a fictional character in The Scarlet Letter. Where did all of this material come from? How accurate is it? How does editing get controlled? These are all excellent questions, and the answers are on Wikipedia, but the short answer is that the content comes from you and me, there are built-in processes for improving the accuracy of information and the control processes seem to work well. But I am not writing this to sell you on Wikipedia, but to introduce a powerful set of tools that are based on the wiki concepts.

As you may know from my past posts, I am active in The Mankind Project, an international organization to help men become more conscious. I am leading an effort to create a new version of a facilitator’s guide for one of our important trainings, and I needed to elicit the cooperation and support of a team of men from all over the world. After my last ODNT posting, I looked at several tools that allow collaborative document sharing and settled on settled on Google Sites (http://sites.google.com).

In about five minutes, I was able to create a basic web site. Over a single weekend, I took a manual that was over 130 pages long, broke it into about 100 individual topics and created web pages for each. I then entered the email addresses of the men on the team and gave each man rights to update the site by changing the content of any page, adding new pages, adding comments to pages and even attaching documents to pages. This whole process took me only a few hours.

One powerful feature of Google Sites is the capability to have the site notify me whenever a page is updated. I can monitor specific pages or the entire site. Whenever anybody updates a page, I get an email moments later. I can easily tell who is working on what and even see what changes they made. If necessary, I can even roll back a page to a previous version of that page.

That site now contains 165 pages and updates are made on a regular basis by men all over the world.

It didn’t take long before I started thinking of other ways to use Google Sites. I created a site for community leaders to capture and record meeting minutes and governance documents. I created another for our elder community to capture our history, and another for my own company to use internally to capture business policies and procedures. Creating each of these sites took only a few minutes, and populating them is amazingly easy. And did I mention that it is all free! Each Google site can use up to 100MB of storage. My largest site, the one with 165 pages uses only 17% of this allocation.

So what’s the downside? Google Sites has lots of strengths, but it also has some problems.  I would like to see a more flexible security model and a better HTML text editor, but these are not the kinds of issues that will stop me from using Google Sites. Google Sites are not the best tool for creating a marketing site or one that interacts with a database engine, but they are an excellent tool for collaborative development of information.

If this topic interests you, I invite you to participate in an experiment. I have created a public wiki that is dedicated to capturing information about Bellingham. The address is:

http://sites.google.com/site/bellinghamwiki/

Right now, the site has only skeletal content. If you want to add content to this site, simply email me (bob@socgrp.com) and I will grant you update rights. I will moderate the site to make sure that no content is posted that might be offensive to the public taste, but other than that, anything goes… at least for the moment.

Social Media

I was skeptical last week on my way to the Social Media Northwest conference at Whatcom Community College. The term “social media” sounded to me as if it were made up by a randomized buzzword generator. I knew that it had something to do with blogging and that Tom Dorr of the Small Business Development Center had pitched me personally to get me to come, but I had (and still have) lots of questions. What is “social media” and why should I care? By the end of the two day conference, I realized with both excitement and fear that this old dog had better learn some new tricks.

So what is social media? One way to think about it is as a collection of emerging technologies that includes social networks, directories, video sharing sites, blogs and Wikis that all have the notion of community collaboration in common. Wikipedia, an on-line collaborative encycloperia is a good example. In the past few years, Wikipedia use has been growing by over 20% per year. On the other hand, Microsoft Encarta, has been dropping in popularity. The difference is that Wikipedia is maintained and updated by a world-wide community of people, while Encarta is maintained by a single, centralized organization. This notion of community is at the heart of the term “social media.”

Mike Rich from ComScore tracks the digital landscape. At the conference, he presented one slide that showed social media technologies as the fastest growing segment of all Internet technologies at over 60% growth per year. So clearly something is happening here, but what it is, ain’t exactly clear… at least to me.

Throughout the conference, one speaker after another talked about viral marketing, blogging, social networking and social referral sites. At the end of the conference, Matthew Dunn interviewed Bob Pritchett (Logos), Brett Allsop, (president of Allsop Inc and co-founder of Yapta) and Chris Galvin (Wizards of the Coast). All three told compelling stories of how blogging and other social media tools have helped grow their businesses.

I left the conference intrigued and puzzled. I understand the concept of “viral marketing,” but the trick is in finding a viral message. Perhaps the best example is the “Will It Blend” videos on YouTube. This fellow in a white lab jacket holds up an object like a golf ball or an iPod and asks, “Will it blend?” as he drops it into a blender. Moments later the object is reduced to dust. The videos are so weird and funny that many people can’t resist telling their friends about it. When you watch the video, do you find yourself thinking, “That is one bad-assed blender” and maybe clicking through to the blender maker’s site? That’s viral marketing.

It was also pretty clear to me how blogging helps companies that serve an international market; but how would it help local businesses that serve other local businesses? Did I expect local business owners to start reading blogs? Not really, but I realized that if I want to help local business owners grow their businesses using information technologies, I had better get up to speed on the pros and cons of these social media technologies.

I went back to my office and created a Facebook account. Within a few minutes, I had a site working and I began collecting “friends”. I set a rule for myself that I would only add people who I know and appreciate having in my life… or were in my extended family. Within a couple days, the list had grown to over 40. It was pretty cool reconnecting with people I had almost lost track of and learning what they are up to now; however, I am still not clear on how Facebook will help my business.

I can clearly see how social networking tools can build my list of relationships and help me stay in touch with people, but unless this has a direct feed to my business, its value to me is less clear.

But what about blogs and blogging? This question has several related questions:

 

• Who is my audience?
• What do I have to say of value to that audience?
• How will my audience even know that I am blogging?

In order to dig more deeply into these questions, I decided to conduct an experiment and start a blog. My trusty intern from Western, Andy Jaeger, got a blogging site set up and operational in about an hour using WordPress. He populated the blog with several of the prior issues of this column and I wrote some new blogs under the category of “Growing a small business.” Our blog site is at socratesgroup.wordpress.com. Check it out. I would be interested to hear any feedback you have.

I suspect that blogging makes lots of sense for some businesses and little sense for others. What is your experience? What are your questions and thoughts on Social Media? Please email me and let me know. In the next month I will sort this out and get back to you. In the meantime, this old dog is learning lots of new tricks.

Branding 101

My first challenge was the business name. Our old name was DeWaard & Jones Company. We picked this because I thought that Dick DeWaard (my old partner) would have lots of name recognition in Bellingham, especially since his dad and his uncle started DeWaard & Bode, “The Appliance Giants” many years ago. The net outcome was that we occasionally got calls from people looking for a refrigerator and that the ampersand in our name confused lots of web sites.

I engaged a local graphics artist, Rowan Moore-Seifred and a couple of my friends to help me find a new name. We went through lots of possibilities like ZybByz, Code Divers and Bob Jones and Company before going back to my roots and picking the name, “The Socrates Group.” I used to own a business by this name that my wife and I ran out of our house. I sold the business to a dot com when I joined them as a co-founder, but they let the name lapse, so I could get it back. This process of picking a business name took me the better part of two months, but I had to decide between a name that branded me more deeply as “The Computer Guy” or one that made me the brand. Ultimately, I picked a name that emphasizes wisdom and collegiality, and a name that I simply like.

Next came the real challenge: picking a logo. Rowan made lots of attempts before we zeroed in on the notion of a spiral. To me, this signifies iteration, process and growth. I didn’t have the money to do a market survey and figure out what it means to others, but if you feel like giving me some feedback, click the comment button below.

By now, I was several months into this process and had only a name and a logo. In the next few months, we put together business cards and a new web site. Then we started looking at the real challenges: how do we communicate with our market place and help them see the value we offer?

In The Beginning…

OK, OK, OK… I’ll do it. I will start blogging (sounds slightly obscene) and see how it works. Does that make me a lemming? Perhaps, but unless I dive in and try out this rapidly growing technology, I am just a couch potato on the sidelines. So here goes…

What to blog about? First lesson is that it has to be something of interest to a specific audience. My focus is owners of small businesses who are trying to grow their business. And what do I have to offer? Other than many years of experience in the trenches, I’ll leave that question up to you.

I am going to start this blog with a specific event that happened just over a year ago and write a series of posts that will bring us up to the present. My focus will be on the challenges I faced and the lessons I learned along the way. As this gets going, I will ask other people in my company to chime in with their thoughts and experiences.

Just over a year ago, I purchased my partner’s shares in our jointly owned business. Even though I have done several startups before, I was always part of a team. For the first time, I was now responsible for the entire business. The giddy “I’m the boss” period lasted for a month or so before the realities of the real challenges I faced started to set in.

On the face of it, I have a pretty simple business. We sell consulting time to local businesses to help empower them to use information systems and technologies more effectively. We can help a client find and implement a packaged software solution or we can build them a custom solution. All I need is talented consultants, an office to house them and clients who need them. And there lies the challenge.

If I tell you that I am a doctor or a baker or a plumber, you will most likely have some idea of what I do and where I may fit into your life. On the other hand, if I tell you that, “We empower local businesses to use information solutions more effectively,” the most common connection most people make is, “Oh, you’re the Computer Guy.” I hate that and it frustrates the heck out of me; but there is no single word in our vocabulary that describes what we do in terms that most people will understand.

In my coming posts, I will share with you the process I have gone through thus far to deal with this challenge. I invite your comments, feedback and wisdom. I can use all the help I can get.