1) Who gets to play? Who will have access to the wiki? Who will find the contents useful? Is this a wiki that’s strictly for internal use, or one that’s primarily customer-focused? Are you hoping to bring your employees and customers together so both can contribute in some way? Define the parameters of your desired community. Most of all, what’s the purpose of the wiki? Knowledge-sharing? Collaboration? Define your business goal.

2) How will it get built? Create a strategic plan for the wiki that includes:

- a statement of purpose or charter, explaining who/what/why

- a communications plan showing how you propose to get the wiki populated

- metrics that will help you determine whether or not you’re reaching the goals you defined earlier.

3) Who’s on the team? You will need IT, some legal guidance to get rules-of-the-road established and (most important) an enthusiastic cadre of people who are willing to create content on topics for which they have a reasonable claim to expertise.

4) What about the details? Budget? Infrastructure needs? What software are you going to use to build it? Who will do the technical maintenance? What about the ‘gardening’ of the wiki, or content management?

5) Can we take a second look at that strategic plan? Go back and include details from #4.

Now, you’re ready to build the wiki. Get the technical project plan written, and implement. Muster your initial contributor group, start adding topics and you’re off and running.

Like any other system, your wiki initially will have hiccups and rough spots. Have a pilot phase with a willing group of users; this one step will save you lots of apologies later on, and (more importantly) will help you develop a better, more easily navigable wiki that will keep users coming back for more.

If you’re looking for inspiration, check out a few of these successful wikis:

- World of Warcraft has a justly famous wiki that is a deep resource for the game’s passionate and community-oriented players.

- SAP has a wiki for users and developers, the SAP Community Network.

- Oracle’s developer-oriented wiki

- The Disney wiki is largely fan-written and is quite comprehensive, covering everything from Disney history to the company’s films and theme parks.

So, your company decided to try out Chatter, or maybe you built a wiki. And naturally you want to measure your ROI. There are lots of great analytics tools out there, right?

Not so fast. What do you want to measure?

A successful social media ‘campaign’ within an enterprise can have outcomes quite dissimilar from those resulting from a successful external social media campaign. There are tools out there that do a great job of measuring transactions, sure. There are even good tools for measuring some subtler stuff, like reach and influence. But if you’re using social media tools inside an enterprise, you probably want to measure their effect on culture and performance. That means collecting and analyzing a different data set that the one you’d seek if you were, say, trying to figure out how many more widgets your Facebook page helped sell…or even, how much your brand awareness increased as a result of your Twitbookspace campaign.

What if you want to measure how your new tool or platform is doing driving internal collaboration? Or knowledge-sharing?

You can measure knowledge by quizzing participants on topics. But what if they’re sharing knowledge on topics you haven’t already identified? And how do you track increases in collaboration?

There’s a ton of room in this field, dear reader – are you entrepreneurial programmers listening? Sure, Jive bought Radian6, clearly someone is already thinking about these issues. But as far as I can see, there’s still plenty of opportunity out there to develop tools to do this kind of analysis. Because, as Rick Ridder likes to say, “If you can’t count it, it didn’t happen.” (I used to work for Rick. He’s forgotten more about research than I will probably ever know.)

So, get on it, IT people…we need more ways to figure out what kind of difference we’re making with these cool new toys.

What I like about this particular collection of tools: you can do all the really important stuff, and it’s a good basic list for a lot of different kinds of Twitter users, from corporate communications people to small business owners.

HootSuite is a great place to start.

and their logo is the cutest!

HootSuite comes with built-in analytics (basics are free, upgrades are low-cost.) It allows you to schedule and publish messages to multiple social networks (including Twitter), monitor results and efficiently participate in conversations. Their mobile app is unbeatable, and you can quickly check your direct messages and learn about your followers.

Buffer

Buffer – Sure, HootSuite lets you schedule your tweets, but…one at a time. Buffer helpfully sets up a schedule for you and sends your ‘buffered’ tweets out on that schedule. Perfect for someone who wants to set up a Tweet queue and then ignore it for the rest of the day. Plus, Twitter users are much more likely to unfollow someone with multiple tweets in an hour, so make yourself more effective and spread ‘em out.

TweetEffect – A neat tool that shows you exactly how loveable (or unloveable) each of your tweets were, based on the number of follows/unfollows you racked up right after sending them. Proof that your followers really ARE irritated by seeing you post a breathless comment and a link…to your own press release.

Tweepi – A big ball of Twitter-management goodness, all in one place. See who you’re following who isn’t following you, and ‘flush’ the non-followers. Use lists compiled by other relevant Twitter users to build a better following for your company.

PeerIndex – More than Twitter, but you can orient it toward Twitter-data. PeerIndex offers a pretty sophisticated look at how your overall web 2.0 influence stacks up by analyzing your impact across a number of channels, including Twitter, your blog(s), Facebook ,LinkedIn, and Quora. Choose your Twitter peers for comparison to focus this tool on Tw-impact. A little hiccupy – for example, it never reflects my Quora activity – but still good.

What are your ‘must-have’ Twitter tools?

I can’t really get too worked up about scalping, myself. It seems to me that if the scalpers are willing to go to the trouble of standing on line all night to get their hands on the devices before they run out, they should be able to profit from it. Yes, it’s a drag to pay more, but did you really want to spend the entire night camped out in front of the Apple store? The scalpers actually added value. Pay up.

Part of the beauty of social media is that it makes it so easy to collaborate – on a wiki, on a document, even a co-authored blog. Enterprises that are trying to leverage Web 2.0 business tools need to figure out how to handle the ‘added value’ issue. Traditional companies are used to giving one department, or employee, or a well-defined set of participants, the ‘credit’ for a finished work product. But in an age when they are launching tools that lean towards crowdsourcing, better ways to allocate ‘credit’ have to be established.

People won’t want to add value if they’re seen as ‘scalpers’, just profiting off someone else’s work. So are you going to adapt your culture to a more collaborative model, where ‘credit’ is not as important as being engaged? Or are you going to build widgets into your social business suite that will track engagement and participation, so that credit can be spread equitably among all those who contribute to an outcome?

Jive does this brilliantly, and delivers the results in a way that ‘credit’ is given quite democratically. Search for a topic within Jive, and the search engine will return names (and profile photos!) of individuals within your organization that have contributed productively on that topic in the past.

What other good widgets are out there that allocate credit for collaboration?

Think about who the early adopters were: small businesses. New businesses. Entrepreneurs, consultants, agencies, non-profits, self-published authors, gamers. All these folks were out there experimenting with Twitter, building Facebook pages, blogging away, tinkering with all the new tools that popped up.

Meanwhile, corporate policymakers (yes, that’s YOU, IT and HR and corporate communications and C-suite!) were busy blocking access to social media or setting up their systems to tell internal users accessing those sites that their activity would be monitored.

Big Brother is watching you.

So of course the wise and ambitious stayed away from all that stuff at work. When they went off the clock, they mostly got interested in social media as a toy.

Cut your team some slack, and give them some extra time in their day to experiment, and to investigate the potentially useless as well as the obviously useful. Then remember the social media gap the next time you  think about setting up an annoying, small-minded policy.

For those of you less likely to flip through 128 slides (which you can do in about 10 minutes), here are some highlights, followed by observations and a couple big questions:

1. The concepts emphasize an operational dynamic that emphasizes rewarding high-performers with above-market salaries (letting the employee deploy towards health care, philanthropic donation, stock options, etc.), but fires moderate performers (with good severance packages).
2. The concept eschews most process (accepting a few absolute frameworks), due to its crippling impact on creativity, innovation and flexibility, and leans on continuing to hire high quality people and maintain the most simple product, service and organization possible.
3. The concept positions flexibility as more important in the long run than efficiency.
4. This leads to a culture of freedom and responsibility.
5. A culture of freedom and responsibility supports rapid innovation, and excellent execution (still hate that word: why are they killing people?), which often exist in a dynamic tension in traditional organizations.

All of these (and the details that lay behind them) seem to have helped Netflix achieve some audacious goals, having displaced Blockbuster as the go-to place to get movies, both physical as well as streaming. In the process (perhaps as an unintended consequence?), they have reduced the carbon footprint of fetching a flick. But does the company provide us with a model for sustainable organizational development?  Is the focus on having only high performers on a team aligned with the social responsibility to which many sustainable ventures aspire?  It’s easy enough to see individual firms adopt this strategy as a competitive edge, but what about the entire field?  How do we think about this in the developing world?

As someone wrestling with the challenges of recruiting and retaining an excellent team to an extraordinary goal, I’m regularly torn between the  elitist view presented by Netflix (elitist is not a negative word for me), and a more inclusive philosophy that considers the needs and demands of a system full of thousands (nee billions) of people.  As always, your thoughts are welcome in the comments.

Perhaps you’re sick of the topic — it sure can be hard to take any given day.  But if you’re open to a rational discussion of the evolution of our species, this may be one channel to which you ought to stay tuned.

The work is a collaboration between Daniel Pink, renown author and authority on modern workstyle, and RSAnimate, a division of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), a multidisciplinary cradle of enlightenment thinking and a force for social progress in the UK.

Progressives, social entrepreneurs, free-lancers, creatives and anyone else mindful of cultural transformation will find the video a great investment of 10 minutes (and if you haven’t seen the RSAnimate’s unique style, you’re in for a double treat).

Triple Pundit reported on a different angle of this intersection at SXSWi, and called it the “Big Green Disconnect” between tech and sustainability communities, saying “the few green related panels were under attended and often rudimentary,” suggesting that each community is talking a different language.  Our friend and advisor Bill Shutkin had a similar, less politic rant over dinner a few weeks back, along the lines of “do we really need another Twitter app while our energy and financial systems are in crisis?.” Both comparisons were predated by Silicon Valley tech guru Tim O’Reilly’s call in 2008 to “work on something that matters,” where he beat a drum of “create more value than you extract.”

So, now the meme has been released, and some cool kids in technology (largely a comfortable-if-not-affluent crowd from a global perspective) think social entrepreneurship is the next big thing.  Mostly, this is good.  Right?

Well… a great piece in the NY Times on March 14th reported a story that pointed to an important trend — when inundated with snow, the Washington Post was not using Twitter, YouTube or Foursquare, but rather Ushahidi, an IT platform built in Kenya, to map road blockages and resource availability during the disruptive storm.

The article points out, “Ushahidi comes from another world [than Silicon Valley], in which entrepreneurship is born of hardship and innovators focus on doing more with less, rather than on selling you new and improved stuff.  Because Ushahidi originated in crisis, no one tried to patent and monopolize it.  Because Kenya is poor, with computer systems out of the reach of many, Ushahidi made its system work on cellphones.  Because Ushahidi had no venture-capital backing, it used open-source software and was thus free to let others remix its tool for new projects.”

The Washington Post serves an important lesson to the Austin-Boulder-SF-Cambridge crowd of digi-do-gooders and green lemmings at SXSW.  Even thought an important tide is tipping in the consciousness of the web-tools crowd, practical results still seem far off.  And in the (currently somewhat less) well-financed hubs all trying to “the next Silicon Valley,” e-mails about new conferences, magazines and other gathering points for this new intersection are traveling the web today.  The space will surely evolve, but today, the bottom line remains pretty much single in the tech community.

As Triple Pundit points out, much of the progressive IT community is still pretty slow to get even the second layer of complexity in the massive puzzle of global human sustainability, even as they drink the free green beer at a SXSW party called “Good Capitalist.”  In the meantime, the ability to actually get things done is created by people who have a pressing, immediate need for the transformation of data and information into the knowledge and understanding that can affect practical decision-making.  As the back-to-back DC blizzards (a climate anomaly, at least) pressed the city into micro-catastrophe, tools borne out of crisis trumped tools born out of opportunity.

Even though sustainability thinkers like Shutkin debate the value of “sky is falling” framing for the presentation of a new social innovation, we think there’s more Nairobi (necessity is the mother of invention) and less Sunnyvale, CA (wouldn’t if be cool if…) in creating social-purpose IT.  The consciousness shift will be complete when technological innovators realize that the balance is not between making profits and serving people, but between earth’s resources serving 3 billion people or 9 billion.  Until that shift happens, we’ll still be chipping ice off the icebergs for our drinks at the next party.