Going with the flow

This morning I was irritated to discover that my preteen daughter had borrowed my car keys last night to open the trunk, and then proceeded to lose said keys in a large mountain of snow where she was sledding. By the time I realized the keys were missing, a lot more snow had been added to the snow mountain, and any chance of finding the keys was gone until the spring thaw. I had to call a locksmith: $200 and several hours later, I had new keys. No chance of heading into the office, so I had to work from home.

It look some time for me to calm down, and I began to see that working from home wasn't so bad. I just needed to be a little more flexible in my thinking.

Social media is all about flexibility, an understanding that the landscape now won't be what it will be in 6-12 months. As a "disruptive" technology, social media is constantly challenging all of us with new ways to connect, to build brands and to develop communities where sharing and transparency rule. We're all going to lose our keys a few times as we try to figure it all out -- and that's okay.

Focusing on your goals

When I do wiki training, I compare the wiki to Times Square in New York City. There's a whole heck of a lot going on, and it's really scary, quite frankly, for new users. There's a discussion over here, a blog post over here, and on and on. Lots of little tidbits of content in your face.

I think of this when I hear that about 8 million adults in the U.S. have ADHD. As we think about wiki design (and redesign), how can widgets or gadgets give these users -- really all users -- exposure to the bits of the wiki they need to accomplish a specific task, while not blitzing them with the 'Time Square' treatment whenever the log in? Sometimes going off on a wiki tangent is a good thing, but a lot of times it isn't, especially during the work week.

I wonder if some new business desktop widgets coming on the market might help modulate the flow of information hitting users' eyeballs?

What's your experience been? How can we help wiki users stay on task?

Deep users wanted

I think Ted's absolutely right that our wiki is reaching critical mass. I see it in the lists of folks who register for training, in the folks who email me from a far-flung corner of the company telling me they want wiki access. I see (and hear) it especially poignantly in the emails and coffee machine conversations with those who, like little kids, proudly announce to me that they just made their first wiki post. Then there's my new title around the office: Wiki Man.

You get the picture.

Amazingly, I've encountered remarkably little resistance to the wiki. Sure, some folks have told me it will take time to learn, and they have questions on the best way to use it, but I can count on one hand those who've said the wiki will just be...wait for it...more work. Maybe it's because I tend to work with the Web 2.0 generation, but I think there's more to it than that.

Less than a quarter of our registered wiki users are regular wiki users, and we need that percentage to grow. We need more deep users to create a groundswell of sharing and transparency that leaps out of cyberspace and into our workspaces to make them more conducive to the kind of cross-department and cross-company exchange and collaboration that will separate the Losers from the Winners in the business world of the 21st century. Sharing is just good business.

We're not there yet, and there's lots of work left to do, but the progress is encouraging.

Ready for the Next Big Wiki Steps

I both love and hate the term "critical mass." It's a great way to describe that point at which a concept becomes viable, and all new or changed things need to reach it or else they fail. Yet, like "a perfect storm," it's so over-used that I'm not sure it's really being used meaningfully anymore.

Anyway, I've had the sense for a while now that we're approaching a new phase in our social media evolution here. We have nearly 3000 people signed up! My original rollout projections did not have us hitting that number until April 2009, so the ramp up has been much faster than expected.

It's like we've all been racing up a hill and suddenly we've crested the summit. There's excitement all around, and then we see that we're not really at the top... there's another peak and it's much higher. "OK," everyone says, "Let's climb that one, too!" Except the path to get there isn't so clear now.

Getting people into the wiki and showing them the potential has been relatively easy (not that it isn't taking hard work to make it look so easy). But climbing the rest of the way, to make the wiki an essential part of how we do business... that's a much bigger challenge and we're going to have to blaze our own trails as we find the best routes to success.

Good thing I like challenges! Hope everyone else does, too!

The power of empowerment

It's terrific when social media tools like wikis bring people different departments together. It reaffirms my faith in the power of empowerment. Whereas in the past different departments within an organization might not even speak to one another, social media tools are breaking down barriers and reasserting the power of the individual to make a difference.

I got a taste of that in a small way today. I do some of the training for the wiki, and today I had a few sales reps on the call. One of the sales reps -- we'll call her Jane -- was more than a little skeptical of our wiki initiative, pointing out that another online attempt at sharing information several years ago was an abject failure. Her probing questions about the wiki kept me on my toes for the full hour I set aside for the training session.

But the real story here is how the hour ended. Rather than going back to her cubicle grumbling about having "more work" piled on her plate, she did something very simple, something I asked her to do: She posted her feedback on the wiki. I saw those comments, and not long after a senior marketing person at the company responded to Jane's comments and validated them. In a word, she was heard.

Rather than breeding resentment, the wiki has within itself a mechanism for transforming constructive criticism into tangible improvement. It's the power of empowerment at work.

When push comes to shove

On our weekly wiki steering committee call yesterday, one of the members made an offhand comment that really struck me. "Sometimes you just have to make things mandatory," he said, or something to that effect. We were talking about the best way to push out news updates to all our wiki users, and we ended up mandating that users subscribe to certain pages.

He made a good point. As we drive wiki and social media adoption, we have to understand that some pieces of our rollout plans will have to be mandatory, even as we encourage creative freedom as far as possible. Indeed, I think that having good structures/frameworks in place gives creativity room to roam in a way most conducive to our larger business goals and objectives.

Even with social media, we have to know when to lead with the carrot and when to lead with the stick. This is where good management sense comes into play.

Have you had a similar experience? Please feel free to share a comment or two.

Fewer Technology Issues = More Time

I realized recently that I have not spent anywhere near as much time chasing down bugs and other technology issues lately. Not surprisingly, this is one reason I don't feel as stressed and overwhelmed as I had been, fortunately. Instead of feeling like a full-time system administrator, I am being a community manager, actively managing our fledgling online communities.

Another reason I have more time is that others are picking up big chunks of the work now. We have many community managers in place who are getting their feet under them, gaining confidence, and really taking on responsibility for managing their communties. I'm really part of a team now, and that's made a tremendous difference.

Speaking of teams, we had our first enterprise-wide Wiki Advisory Board meeting today. The Advisory Board is made up of representatives from each of our Local Wiki Steering Committees (for more on our oversight structure, see Ramping Up Our Wiki and Setting Up the Infrastructure). I think we established the right tone for the group and I'm looking forward to working with this body as we all figure out together how to take our next steps.

Teach your employees well

I was on a call today with Ted and some other wiki thought leaders across the company, and the subject of mentoring came up. Our internal wiki has a certain cool mojo going for it, but at the end of the day those of us who are passionate about implementing a 'wiki culture' have to become teachers. We can't assume that folks in the trenches of the company will connect the dots and intuitively 'get' what the wiki can do for them. We need to be in the show-and-tell business.

So the word for today is mentoring. It's sort of like training, but at a more personal level. It goes back to what I've written about before: we have to answer the "what's in it for me?" question if we want folks to really get on board the wiki express.