Have Your Seen These Wiki, Wiki Ways?

A wiki is a collection of collaboratively written and edited content, usually more sophisticated than message boards or online forums. The wiki branches from topic to topic rather than following a linear pattern of writing. Authors may add pages to share their expertise by simply adding a link to a new page and then authoring that page.

From the Small Business wiki:

Why merely read SmallBusiness when you could contribute some of your own knowledge and experience? Here, anyone can write or edit entries-its quick and easy!

Wikis exist to facilitate all types of projects:

• The Fedora Project is sponsored by Red Hat but supported by the Linux community as an open source project.
  
  
• The MozillaWiki serves multiple purposes and provides support for users of the Mozilla software.
  
  
• MediaWiki is the free software wiki that was used to develop Wikipedia, the most well known wiki in all wikidom.
  

According to ComScore, Wikipedia is the sixth hottest web property in the world! With 165 million unique visitors in December, Wikipedia followed heavy hitters like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Time Warner and eBay.

Wiki Marketing by Modern Marketing makes a good argument for the use of wikis for customer engagement.

The answer is that open systems, like wikis, that allow collaboration between a company and its clients are a powerful way to bring customers into a company culture and, in doing so, create a valuable community of advocates for a brand, product or commercial issue.

EBay uses wikis customer written support FAQs, the Dallas Mavericks basketball team offers a fan-driven wiki for every game, and T-Mobile just launched a Sidekick wiki.

According to Mr. Sam Bell, senior manager-marketing for T-Mobile:

T-Mobile created a wiki to provide support for Sidekick fans, who are extremely social, tech-savvy and often fiercely independent. . . We wanted to create an official community where fans could connect and freely share information.

I believe there may be an opportunity in wiki marketing. Stay tuned as I learn something new. LOL

Tags: wiki, online collaboration, user generated content, community-supported wiki marketing