Collaborating through wikis

How will it help my business?
Think of a wiki as a shared work space, a big user-friendly filing cabinet that contains the collective wisdom, captured in digital format, of your coworkers and, if you choose, your customers. You can use your wiki to ask questions, offer help, correct and add information to documents and presentations, brainstorm and scheme, and keep everyone on track and in touch about a particular project.

"I start a wiki for each project I take on," said Alan Mansfeld, who runs a small literary agency in Los Angeles. "The writer and I use it to store drafts, e-mails, proposals, contracts, contacts, and anything else to do with the project. It's a way to keep everything in one place, a place that's accessible to both of us from anywhere we have access to the Internet. I estimate wikis have cut the time I need to spend on development and promotion by at least 25 percent per project. Wikis are as valuable to me as my cell phone."

Private vs. public wikis
Like Mansfeld, you might want to set up a private, in-house wiki to document the development of a specific project. All communications can go into the wiki, neatly organized and available for team members to access as needed. No more sifting through dozens of e-mail messages to find a critical message or worrying whether you have the latest version of a PowerPoint proposal. It's all stored on the wiki.

But you may also decide to start a public wiki and invite customers to contribute. For example, an independent bookstore could use a wiki to host an online book club. A gourmet shop could host a wiki where customers share recipes. It's a good way to foster customer loyalty and draw new customers to your business.

Rex Hammock, who owns Hammock Publishing, a custom publishing firm with 25 employees in Nashville, Tennessee, launched the Small Business Wiki last summer as an adjunct to Smallbusiness.com, a resource he created for small-business owners. Hammock sees the Wiki as a place where entrepreneurs can ask questions and share what they know about successfully running a business. It's also a potential new revenue source for his company, since he's planning to sell ads and sponsorships on the site.

"People like sharing what they know if they get credited for their expertise," Hammock says. That's the motivation for most people who share on a wiki."

How do I set one up?
You can either host a wiki yourself or pay someone to host it for you. If you're technically adept enough to host a wiki on your own server, you can choose between more than a dozen free, downloadable wiki software programs.

To compare their features, browse the WikiMatrix, a Web site that reviews wiki applications. Kwiki and TWiki are among the most popular on the site.

Paying for a hosted service
If you'd rather not host your wiki, paid services are another option. They're easy to use: if you can create a document in a word processing program, you can use a hosted wiki.

SocialText offers a small-business plan for $495 per year for five users, $10 additional per user per month. SocialText is the easiest of the hosted wiki services to use--you'll be up and running in five minutes. It also integrates nicely with e-mail, instant-messaging applications, and portable devices.

Another hosted option is JotSpot. Small-business pricing starts at $9 per month for 20 users. JotSpot lets you customize your wiki with a library of templates, such as an event calendar, a company directory, and a personnel recruitment manager. You can easily integrate your created copy with content from the Web--add a map from MapBlast or news headlines from your favorite Web sites right into your wiki.

Both SocialText and JotSpot offer free trials of their services.

How do I manage content on a wiki?
Wikis were intended to be free-for-alls, places where anyone could contribute or change content. Most managers have discovered that it's best to impose as little control as possible over information posted and edited by employees. Hosted wikis typically include rollback features that allow you to restore edited text to an earlier version, if you're not keen on the changes that were made. And you do have control over which employees can work on which wiki.

Opening a wiki to the public is another issue entirely. You will want to have a blurb on top of the wiki explaining that the content reflects the views of its creators and not your company. You need to post a "terms of service" agreement outlining what is acceptable behavior on the wiki. And you'll need to check the content daily and prune it for potentially troublesome issues, such as defamatory comments, advertising for other sites, and anything that you feel doesn't support the community you're trying to create.

Hammock, who runs the Small Business Wiki, allows practically anyone to contribute to his site as long as they play by the rules. "At this point, we are policing only for spammers and those who are posting for purposes other than to share knowledge," he says.

Hammock posts disclaimers on every page warning visitors to the site that all of the content is contributed by the public rather than by paid writers. He says that if abuse were to become a problem, he would consider having people register before contributing to the site. So far that hasn't been necessary. "I'm not averse to stepping in when people abuse the site," he says. "However, my experience with being an active blogger for the past five years has given me a level of comfort and trust with user-generated content."