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25 Tips for a Better Wiki Deployment + 1 Tip on How to NOT Use Presentations

Posted on December 18, 2007 ·

Thanks to Stewart Mader I found this presentation on 25 Tips for a Better Wiki Deployment. As someone deeply interested in wikis and their use in business, I attempted to read through, but grew increasingly frustrated. Not because of the content, which is good, but the format. Why on earth have they (who?) delivered this in a presentation format?

All slides in this deck are divided in two half, one textual, the other graphical. Consequently they all show signs of the two cardinal sins of “committing” presentations.

1. – There’s way too much text. If you want me to read a story, you might as well type it up, use paragraphs, title fonts, bullet-points…etc, but don’t pretend it’s a presentation.

2. – Visuals are supposed to illustrate your point, capture my attention, shocking me, entertain me – whatever, just do something! This slide deck uses identical (rather boring, but that’s beyond the point) graphics on all 25 slides, which is just as good as no graphics at all.

In summary, the textual half of each slide is way too busy, the graphical half is a missed opportunity: this is NOT a presentation.

What’s a good presentation like? Enjoy the winners of the World’s Best Presentation Contest on Slideshare (hat tip: Guy Kawasaki)

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity · Tagged: , , , , , ,
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Beating Social Media’s 90:9:1 Rule in the Enterprise

Posted on October 23, 2007 ·

The 80/20 rule is out (so last century), 90:9:1 is in: the rule of participation in public communities, social networks, wikis:

  • 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
  • 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
  • 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.

90:9:1 is a pretty good fit for most public wikis, starting with Wikipedia. Ben Gardner observed very different numbers: 50:25:x (he does not specify “x”). The interesting number here is 25, or it’s relationship to 50, meaning:

When the same question was asked about our corporate wiki ~50% of those present had used it but about ~50% of those had edited it.

Active participation in a corporate environment is much higher than in the public domain – this is not really a surprise, since the corporate wiki is used by people of real identities and reputations, and most importantly, shared objectives. This is also why Prof. Andrew McAfee hasn’t seen vandalism – a plague of public wikis – in the corporate world at all.

I suspect that 25% can go a lot higher, depending on the purpose of the wiki. When after the initial “grassroots movement” management fully embraces the wiki not as an optional, after-the-fact knowledge-sharing tool, but the primary facility to conduct work, it becomes the fabric of everyday business, where people create, collaborate, and in the process capture information. When the wiki is the primary work / collaboration platform, participation is no longer optional. Not when the answer to almost any question is “it’s on the wiki.” smile_wink

My earlier posts on this subject:

(hat tip: Stewart Mader)

Filed Under: Collaboration, Social Networking · Tagged: , , , , , , , ,