Last night Joseph Thornley and crew hosted another edition of Third Tuesday which is the meet up for PR professionals (but a few of us non-PR
types snuck in). Guest speaker last night was co-author of “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything”, Anothony D. Williams who shared some highlights from the research conducted in their efforts to write the book.
What is all this Wiki stuff all about?
According to Wikipedia, a wiki is website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change available content, typically without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring. The term wiki also can refer to the collaborative software itself (wiki engine) that facilitates the operation of such a Web site, or to certain specific wiki sites, including the computer science site (the original wiki) WikiWikiWeb and on-line encyclopedias such as Wikipedia.
What companies are making collaboration work for them?
Anthony talked about how these new social media tools will allow for corporations, if they are smart to empower their customers to be involved with the product and service development process. This of course will impact every type of business, from governments, education and corporations. IBM is an example of a company who understood this changing paradigm very early when they embraced operating system Linux. Linux continues to be a competitive operating system to companies such as Microsoft due to the fact that it is open source which means there is an entire community of developers and user who constantly help to make the product better. One of the attendees asked the questions “do companies no run the risk of giving up control?”, which Anthony responded by saying that you don’t’ give up control you share it. The model must be working since IBM earns billions a year from services and hardware related to embracing the Linux operating system.
Another example he shared was that of Second Life which attributes approximately 99% of it grow or virtual worlds to the users of Second Life. Across Canada another example of a company who has leverage the power of their customers is Fresh Books who continue to reap the rewards to simply asking their customers “what can we do to make the solution better for you?”
About the Author
Great book! I am reading it now. Look out the World is Flat!