Global PR Blog Week 2.0

By Dan Forbush, ProfNet, PR Newswire | Media Insider

It’s said by those who are knowledgeable about these things that, if you plan to launch a wiki, be sure its purpose is clearly and narrowly focused.

This is the same as saying that a wiki is good for performing a single content-aggregation task, whether it’s supporting a free global encyclopedia in a dozen different languages, enabling day-to-day communications among board members of a non-profit organization, or scripting a family history.

Having launched a half-dozen wikis in the last year, the aspect of focus is the first I’d mention to anyone who’s thinking about going the wiki route.

I would say, “There are four questions you first must askâ€?:

• “Who are the people you aim to enlist in this interaction?”
• “What do you aim to achieve there?”
• “What kind of content do you hope they’ll be motivated to submit?”
• “Who do you hope it will be read by?”

Wikis are designed in a way that virtually requires you to narrow your focus.

For example, in many or most wikis, you have an index that enables visitors to your site to view an alphabetical list of all page titles. If pages created in your wiki group bear little or no apparent relationship to one another, the index serves little or no purpose. Visitors have no coherent expectation of what they might find and so, therefore, won’t use it.

The same is true of the wiki’s search function. Visitors must have some reasonable expection of the type of content a search will yield; otherwise, they’ll have no idea what terms might be worth searching.

The same also can be said of whatever navigation logic or hierarchy you adopt. The mere creation of a menu of topics and sub-topics requires you to think through a logical branching tree, starting with a title that defines the scope of your resource.

The necessity of a logical hierarchy was driven home for me in wake of Hurricane Katrina, when we at ProfNet rededicated an existing wiki — www.collaborativepr.com– to enable college and university ProfNet subscribers to share with reporters (1) fast-breaking announcements regarding their efforts to assist students displaced by the flooding, and (2) leads on academic experts who could discuss any aspect of the storm.

It soon became evident that we were dealing with two different kinds of information, each with its own branching logic, and that one of them would have to go. When we saw that several higher education associations were gearing their Web sites to aggregate institutional announcements concerning student assistance, we opted to stick with our core mission and created a new wiki called KatrinaExperts at www.katrinaexperts.com.

The wiki technology with which I’m most familiar is that offered by EditMe (www.editme.com) for as little as $4.95 per month - or $9.95 per month if you want the ability to attach to your site any URL of your choosing. It offers two related features I find especially powerful:

1. the ability to interact with visitors to your site as belonging to any of three groups: “public,” “registered users,” and “administrators.”
2. the ability to attach privacy specifications to particular pages, enabling you to designate one page as fully available to the public, another as available only to registered users or administrators, and another as available only to administrators.

If you possess the ability to designate certain pages as accessible only to a small group, and other pages as accessible to a larger group or to the public, you may find that you can stretch the purpose of your wiki.

As a modest example, the wiki you’ll find at http://liac.editme.com is capable of serving both as a general information site for Unitarian Universalists living on Long Island and as a restricted members-only site where members of the board of this small non-profit organization can conduct potentially sensitive board business. That’s because the EditMe wiki enables us to designate any page as “public” or available only to “administrators” with restricted page access.

About the author

Dan Forbush, founder and president of ProfNet, PR Newswire’s expert resource for journalists, has launched several wikis in the last year, including most recently, KatrinaExperts, at www.katrinaexperts.com.

{tags: prblogweek, pr, public+relations, wiki, wikis, business+wiki}