Wikis as Corporate Online Collaboration Tools - Workology

Wikis as Corporate Online Collaboration Tools - Workology How to Use Wikis as Online Team Document Collaborations From time to time, I write foundational social media pieces as part of my mission to educate HR, Recruiting, and Corporate professionals on the uses and benefits of social media.  This is one of those pieces.  You can take a look at my  ToolBoxHR resource site  for more information to get you started.   How to Use Wikis as Online Team Document Collaborations A couple weeks ago I received a letter from a reader who had a question about a wiki, What is “wiki” and how can I use at my office?   Defining a Wiki A wiki is an evolving web page that users can modify or delete the online content.  When it comes to a wiki anyone can participate which is both fun and scary.  A wiki is different from a blog in that as the owner of this blog I control the content.  A blog post is a compilation of my thoughts and cannot be edited by anyone via the page directly.  One must have admin access to enter the WordPress site and make the necessary edits and changes to the post.  When it comes to a wiki anyone can edit or update post, phrase, or information contained within the wiki. Wikipedia Encyclopedia: the King of Online Collaborations One of the most well-known wikis is  Wikipedia.  Its essentially a crowd sourced and user-driven encyclopedia completely online with the responsibility of maintaining the site among a small group of mostly unpaid and volunteer individuals.  This is the new and improved version of  Encyclopedia  Britannica  of old except that anyone can be the expert. Company Wikis as Project Collaboration Tools Wikis are also a great way to share knowledge with a group of individuals in companies of organizations.  I use wikis as a project manager where my team and I can share, edit, and update information.  Wikis offer a solution instead of emailing a document multiple times via the dreaded email chain, you can invite your team to make proposed changes to a document as they see fit.  Once the changes are made, you can approve them or reject them, and even allow for group  consensus. Document Collaboration and Sharing Tools When it comes to internal social networks and company collaboration, having an internal social network or wiki can be helpful as employees as well as work team are working more from home and employees.  Often times wikis are a piece of an internal social networking platform where companies can chat, share files, use wikis, and post blogs using a platforms like SharePoint, LifeRay, or ThoughtFarmer.  (Speaking of ThoughtFarmer, they provided me a nice downloadable how to for corporate wikis.) As you can see, this collaboration tool allows for multiple users to edit and make changes to a single document or page quickly and easily.  Edited changes show on the wiki as yellow highlighted words.  Email inboxes can breathe a sigh of relief, and your employees do too because lets face it, who has time for email anyway?  Especially when according to an  infographic from Baydlin  we are averaging 127 emails in a single day and dedicating nearly 2 1/2 hours to the task of reading, deleting, and responding to all those messages. How Do You Wiki? How are you using wikis in your everyday work either for collaboration among co-workers, team members on a project, or in your private and personal life?  Id be interested in hearing more as wikis and social media collaboration as internal social networking platforms are topics we will be focusing on over the next several weeks.