Nick Cifuentes

When it comes to growing communities in an online environment, collaboration is the key.

How often do you see people, young and old, carry on multiple conversations on Facebook? Younger people seem to have the instinct to know how to pool their resources – sharing information as easy as pressing ‘enter’. Approaching this concept on a business level, can be a bit different – collaboration is the common goal, and it take all parts involved to create this partnership.

However, if you think you know where I am going with this, I am not going to talk about in-house collaboration; that is for another discussion. I want to talk about external collaboration – aka ‘Wikis’.

Sharing information is what today’s ‘Web 2.0’ world is about. Allowing others to take part in your community, be it a blog, forum, website – a Wiki goes one step further. It allows ‘personalized’ information to take the forefront and become the spoken word for your brand. Creating a Wiki that might allow others to supply information, fill-in-the-blanks, and create viable documentation at the same time – is the best of both worlds.

Now, you may not have a brand that is suited for this, that is fine – but you may be surprised how many brands can build out external wikis and make them successful.

Evaluation

What do you do? Let’s think about what your brand does for you. Who is your demographic? What type of information do they read? – questions like this will open up discussions for the possibilities of creating an external wiki.

What don’t you do? This is even a better question to pose to your team. What about your brand is missing? What do you want to see improve, in terms of ‘collaboration’, amongst your brand?

How will a wiki improve my brand? This could be the end all question, and might make sense for you not to implement such a branding tool into your website(s). Even though the conversation might end here – just re-think for a moment ‘why’ this might be effective for you, and more importantly ‘why not’?

Benefits of a Wiki

Highly Targeted Traffic. A wiki produces this, plain and simple. If you create a wiki that is area-concentrated, and maybe, let’s use this for example only, in the surfing industry; after you produce enough content on the pages – you will begin to see your keyword searches improve for particular events that relate to your industry. Simply put, the web loves content, and because a wiki is 99 percent content, wiki pages end up ranking very high in search engines. NOTE: Pay attention to all SEO devices, don’t expect just by putting information on a wiki page for your websites to go right to the top of search engine results…we all wish that could happen – but it doesn’t. Play it Straight!

Branding. As far as branding and marketing strategy – a wiki can act as an authority for your industry if you develop the concept properly. If you want to be seen as an authority in the ‘surfing’ industry, for example – why not develop a wiki and build out a branding page of surfing, the best spots, wave lengths, daily tides, how to do it, etc, etc…I only use this as an off the cuff example – but you see my point.

The End Result.
A wiki can become a highly personalized attribute to your website, but one thing to expect NOT to do is monetize your site directly from such an Internet tactic. A wiki produces credibility and helps increase customer and visitor trust at the same time. This might end up leading to repeat visits, bookmarking, and a larger audience base. One thing you don’t want to do is say - ‘how about we put ads on our page?’

Don’t do that! Unless your brand could pull something off like that - you can’t ‘double-dip’ - what would it look like if you put a business on the wiki, and at the same time, there banner ad is at the top of one of your pages…it’s a No-No.

A wiki page is also ‘highly targeted’ – meaning a visitor arrives through a keyword search onto your wiki page and they’ll willingly engage in clicking through to your ‘base’ website. A wiki page should be seen as a long-term monetization strategy, and should be considered when building upon your in-house traffic building or marketing campaigns.

Build on This
There are some great example wikis out there, here is a couple:

WikiInvest. A wiki site started by everyday investors who were sick of the level of information on the major financial portals. This site explains the deeper story behind a company, giving investors the context they need to understand what they are betting on when they purchase a particular stock or invest in a specific sector.

So, through the power of investing, WikiInvest opened up the door for everyone to take part in the building of investor information. They have almost 1,300 contributors that take part in the community.

Collegewikis. Information for students, by students. This interesting project allows students, teachers, etc…to take part in the campus community for a given school. So, you go to NYU, want to know where the best bars are – this website would allow you to fill in that blank, and take part in the campus community.

Where Do I Start?
Wikis are great because they require very basic programming skills, and are easy to maintain. There are many free and paid software(s) out there, but the ‘god’ of wiki software would have to be MediaWiki – the same software that powers Wikipedia.

NOTE: In the two example website above, those were built around a software like this, but customization was far more advanced then ‘basic programming skills’.

Take a look here for a comparison of three of the best Wiki softwares.

For more information on this topic, and if you need help with any other social media or online marketing consulting – feel free to contact me at nicholas.cifuentes@gmail.com