I’d Rather Be Writing – Tom Johnson

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Duration: 43 min.

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In this podcast, I talk with Alan Porter, vice president of Operations at WebWorks, about the Web 2.0 technologies they’re using to reach out to their customer base. In addition to using blogs, wikis, and social networks to connect with customers, WebWorks also uses wikis to facilitate communication and collaboration within their company.

Alan says they consider themselves a “wiki-driven company” because the wiki drives the way they do business. WebWorks has an internal wiki (which replaced their old intranet), a projects wiki (used to communicate with their customers on project work), an external wiki for their help center (where customers can interact directly with developers and support), and a wiki for organizing their upcoming user conference.

Podcast topics include:

• WebWorks’ use of social media — blogs, wikis, and social networks
• Internal versus external wikis
• Allowing your customers to contribute content
• Encouraging a culture of wiki participation
• Controlling the chaos of wikis
• Balancing moderated and freeform content expansion
• Keeping people updated about the most recent changes on the wiki
• Measuring the impact of a wiki on company culture
• Encouraging corporate cultures in which wikis flourish
• Letting wikis grow naturally and organically
• Replacing your company intranet with a wiki
• Round-tripping content from DITA to wiki and wiki to DITA
• Investigating Wiki publishing
• The most effective forms of social media for different purposes
• Challenges and lessons learned with wikis
• Tips for moving your company into social media
• Determining whether you should have corporate blogging policies
• WebWorks on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Ning
• Leveraging social network profiles to understand customer feature requests

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast:

• WebWorks home page
• WebWorks Blogs
• Alan Porter’s WebWorks blog
• WebWorks Help Center Wiki
• WebWorks RoundUp Conference Wiki
• Moin moin wiki software
• ProjectTrack wiki software
• WebWorks ePublisher
• Q Man Tackles DITA
• WebWorks on Facebook
• Presentation about WebWorks’ wiki adaptation (internal and external)
• Anne Gentle’s post about Alan’s presentation on wikis
• WebWorks Group on LinkedIn
• WebWorks Group on The Content Wrangler
• DITA Publishing White Paper

To contact Alan, send an email to aporter@webworks.com.

Tags: DITA, social networks, WebWorks

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