How our wiki can break the 90-9-1 rule

Received wisdom has it that 90% of users simply read blogs and wikis, 9% make occasional contributions and 1% make regular contributions. I'll go out on a limb here and say that if that pattern holds for our internal wiki, we've failed our users. Big time. A wiki is not a spectator sport. It can't be.

How can we head off this problem? To date we've been selling our wiki to users mainly as a tool to help users receive and share information, which is fine insofar as it goes, but that's how every Web 2.0 tool markets itself. And we still have the 90-9-1 pattern.

What else can we do? I wonder if we should also be talking about the benefit to the individual for organizing his or her work day/life? Not that we haven't ever mentioned this to users, but I wonder if it deserves more emphasis?

I got thinking about this as I spoke to a high-placed sales manager yesterday about the wiki. She mentioned several times that she's so busy -- and her team is so busy -- that she wondered aloud how often she (or they) would be able to use it. She clearly wants to use the wiki, but wondered if she and her team could find the time to do so, given everything else they needed to do on a daily basis. Left to her own devices, she'd fall into the 90% or, if we're lucky, the 9%.

In my experience users will always find clever ways to circumvent (or, more scary, under-use) technology they see as a hindrance instead of a help. Often expedience (aka putting out the immediate fire) rules all. We have to break that cycle, to teach new habits of thinking, where the wiki becomes the new fire hose.

In reply, I told her that a benefit of the wiki is not merely finding and contributing information, but centralizing information. And I showed her a few ways she could do that. Old-fashioned time and project management. She laughed, and I knew I'd made a connection. (Whether I made a convert remains to be seen.)

I think all of us in the enterprise wiki business should be careful about positioning our wikis as merely communication and knowledge-sharing tools. In reality, they also offer powerful ways to help busy users (managers included) better manage their time and resources. Getting that message across to internal stakeholders could be the difference between falling into the 90-9-1 pothole and driving right around it.

What do you think? How are you trying to avoid the 90-9-1 pothole?