Chatterbox : wikis

An Intro to Social Media

Lindsey Robbins — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:52:00 GMT

We talk about social media, just a little bit , on our Blackbaud blogs. But maybe you're wondering why you should care or you know what it is but need to know more. Where do you go to find more information? I had a friend/professional peer ask me that very question this morning. Where do you begin? Specifically she wanted to know..."if I'm looking for basic, very basic information on social media do you know of any good sites to start with?"

Here's how I responded:

Hmmm... I'm not really sure. Most of social media education is just immersing yourself in the different types of social media/networking websites. I would recommend dabbling on different websites like - Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Delicious, StumbeUpon, feed aggregators like Google Reader, Plaxo, a wiki site like one from Wetpaint, Hulu, Flixster, Last.fm, LinkedIn, and Digg. To learn social media is to observe how different mediums online encourage community participation. How does bringing the community into the content development process change websites, media, etc? And honestly, the best sites for reading about emerging social media right now are blogs.
Here's a couple good ones to get started with -
Chris Brogan http://www.chrisbrogan.com/ (you can spend a long time on his site, he's a prolific blogger)
Beth Kanter (she does social media for nonprofits) http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/

And like I told my friend, I hope this helps! Good luck getting started and like my friend, feel free to ask questions (of me) and of those you find to observe on social media websites. I find immersion in the practice of social media the best way to learn!

Work / Life Balance in Social Networking

Lindsey Robbins — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:30:00 GMT

How do you decide which social media to use for personal use and which to use for business use?

All the fun ways to connect with people means it can often make it difficult to separate our business lives from our personal lives. For example, I have several different blogs I write and even one personal one. However, I don’t like to mingle them. I rarely if ever talk about work in my personal blog because my family (who I write it for) would be bored to tears. They don’t quite get why I love technology and geeky stuff so much.

Then, I have the three corporate blogs I contribute to:

Chatterbox (this one) – my personal work blog
From the Doc Side – Documentation Team blog
The Book Bag – Education Edge blog.

Aside from blogs, I use Twitter for professional things and mostly because I don’t think people would ever care about the mundane things of my every day life. Once and a while I slip but I earnestly try to use it for professional networking, learning, and sharing what my team is doing.

Social networks. I am on a lot of them. I usually sign up and then see if I want to use it. I do have the obligatory Facebook and MySpace accounts but I don’t use them for professional reasons. I just like to stay connected with people.

However, if I was running an organization I would consider using Facebook to connect with my target market. Whether you’re selling a product people love (like Apple’s iPhone, Starbucks Coffee, Zoot Sports triathlon gear) or you’re promoting your school, cause, or political candidate, Facebook is an excellent opportunity to bring people in and keep them up to date. In this sense, I do become the follower in this social network and not a leader like the blog forces me to be. I’ll try to do a follow-up post soon on some ways I recommend people to use facebook since the ways to connect are becoming more creative every day.

Other social networks I use regularly (more professionally) are Plaxo and LinkedIn. Okay, so I don’t update my profile as often as I should and I’m not sure what benefits there are…yet. It is something I’m on and trying to learn more about. Sometimes social networks take time to figure out the real benefit. Don’t dismiss a way to connect too quickly; you never know how it might benefit you in the long run.

Now here is where it gets tricky when it comes to social mediums, how do you decide which medium you get more benefit out of personally or professionally -

Delicious
Digg
Google Docs and Spreadsheets
Jumpcut, YouTube, Viddler, etc.
Slideshare
Aggregators like FriendFeed and Google Reader
Wikis
and the gazillion new sites that appear every minute of every day...

I guess the other option is to create two separate accounts to keep your work work and personal interests private. If you can do that, please let me know how because I wonder where you’d find the time and the ability to keep all your social media straight.

The more I’m thinking about it the more I think I might need a neatly organized chart to keep track of everything. Otherwise, I think the time suck of web 2.0 is going to grab a hold of me and never let go. There goes work productivity and possibly my job if I don’t watch out! Lol

How do you manage the balance between work and personal on the ever intertwining social media?

Wikis Need Some Love (and best practices)

Lindsey Robbins — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 13:00:00 GMT

(Originally appeared on From the Doc Side)

Since June of 2006 I’ve been moderating wikis as a part-time job for a company in Seattle. And then soon after at Blackbaud, we’ve explored and researched the use of a wiki as a help file. Since then, I’ve been focusing my efforts on creating an internal documentation wiki as a team development tool. Through my experiences, I’ve learned a few things about how to encourage best practices in wiki use.

Before you implement a wiki, spend time populating it with common topics and a basic set of information. Don’t just hand out a blank one to your team and expect them to figure out what to do with it. By establishing content already in the wiki, people are more comfortable following an example.
Before and during implementation, you need to spend time on the organization. Pages will be added, moved, and deleted. You need to keep the pages organized so that users don’t freak out when they see a mess of pages. People like boundaries, rules, organization – it provides a comfortable structure for them to contribute towards.
People need prompts and templates. Thinking about style and creating easy to use templates always encourages people to contribute more. But don’t expect them to use these things perfectly, clean up will need to be done. And prompts are always good to help guide people towards the behavior you want them to exhibit.
Be an active member yourself. People like strong leadership in a wiki especially where so few will become active participants.
Don’t underestimate providing multiple modes of navigation. Search, most recently updated pages tool, traditional table of contents hierarchy, and tag clouds are just some examples. I’ve also had a lot of success changing up links on the main page to continually bring new content and pages to users’ attention.
Peer to Peer messaging works. People can easily forget what they were doing two minutes ago so I don’t expect them to think of the wiki all the time. Instead, it’s extremely helpful to send P2P messages to users with a combination of prompts and links.
Users really like recognition, polls, and comments. If you can include these three things, you’ll be doing well. Recognition for contributions may be only a pat on the back but it means a lot to community members. Polls are great for opinions and everyone has one. And comments, well that’s a way for community members to connect, ask questions, and in general feel safe from the pressure of actually editing a page. Chances are if you can get them commenting, you’ll eventually get them editing.
WYSIWYG is a given. But going above that, see if you can provide a way to make adding pictures, video, widgets, and more easier. This will not only make the wiki more dynamic but people aren’t always lovers of long pages of static text.
If pages are getting longer and scrolling gives you hand cramps, do your wiki users a favor and break up the content into sub-pages. You can then use the main page as a starting point and create links. Wikis aren’t meant to be books or just content storage. It’s interactive, ever evolving, and (shockingly) fun!
Don’t underestimate the importance of a good moderator/editor. Life in wiki land can easily get out of control if you don’t have someone watching, loving, and caring for your wiki. Or, it can get all dusty and desert like if no one provides some attention to growth whether it’s encouraging participation, providing opportunities to contribute, or keeping pages clean and organized. It will also help if this moderator/editor is an expert in the wiki topics because then they can verify the content as they supervise it. As we all know, wikis can bring the best out of our collective knowledge or the worst and when it comes to work wikis, we all want the best.

Those are just my top ten tips for wiki use but I’ll continue to post on wikis if anything new develops, if you seem excited about wikis, or if I learn something geeky cool that I just have to share with y’all.

And please, if you have questions about my experiences or if you have a problem and want to troubleshoot, just send me an email or add a comment below. I definitely would love to share my passion for wikis with others. I don’t know why it is, but something about community created content gets me all tingly inside.

Where's the download button

Lindsey Robbins — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 12:00:00 GMT

(Originally appeared on From the Doc Side)

Google posted on their blog today that Google Sites is now open to everyone. Curious as I am, I checked out what this new Google Sites feature was. After all, I knew they had acquired Jotspot a while back and now we get to see how they reconfigured it.

It appears to be a combination website/wiki creator. You can control who can edit the pages, view content, etc without having to know html. I love WYSIWYG more than I probably should but even that love will probably not make me an earlier adopter of this option for professional reasons.

The one major flaw in all these websites that make creating websites and wikis customizable and personal is the inherent flaw that instead of you controlling access to the information by having it on your own network, they are all hosted online. And if by some chance there is an option to host it yourself on your own network, well that’s where the fees kick in.

Even though this is a particularly sensitive issue for someone like me who works for a public company, I think it’s an important issue for every organization – private or nonprofit – to consider. I love the value of having software hosted but only if it’s done within the scope of a contract and ensuring your data is protected like we do here.

However, as massive as Google is and as smart as they have been with their apps in the past, I still don’t trust keeping our information on a hosted website. Too vulnerable.

This is something I’ll continue to follow because I have this ongoing dream to have an internal documentation wiki for the Documentation team. We have a lot of information that needs to be managed in order to successfully share with each other and pass on to future technical writers. I’ve been downloading and testing as many free apps as I can find with no luck yet. You need to have more programming knowledge than I have to install. I really think if they can make hosted versions online easy for consumers, why can’t they make installable versions easy too?

In the meantime, I guess it’s back to figuring out the good and the bad about Microsoft’s SharePoint wiki features. Yikes!