May 4, 2008

Wiki your workshop! (But don’t say wiki)

Posted by Kevin | Print This Article

A quick and easy way to experiment with “user-generated content” is to use a basic wiki page to solicit ideas from members for a specific conference workshop or other kind of seminar. Last spring, we asked our members to add their best ideas for “customer retention” to a page and we used their submissions to help create a breakout at our annual meeting. Here’s how it worked:

• We created a page at writeboard.com
• We started the page off with some basic instructions on how to add ideas
• We solicited about 8 or 9 “seed” ideas from some of our “go-to” members and added them
• We sent an email out to our members and asked them for their best ideas with the link and password to the page, along with a deadline for submissions
• Before the deadline we sent a couple more reminders out

We wound up getting a pretty good response — about 40 or 50 submitted ideas (some people did choose to email me their ideas rather than post them to the wiki), of which around 30 we thought were really interesting. We added about 20 other ideas from other sources, and got one of our members, who happens to be a fairly dynamic presenter and organizer, to pull everything into a fast-paced 75-minute workshop we called “50 Ways to Leave Your Customers Wanting More.” We promoted the breakout as “the session created by our members!” at our conference earlier this year.

It wound up being one of our highest-attended and highest-rated workshops (though of course, a lot of this depends on picking the right person to organize it and deliver it). We’ll be using the content again, as an audio seminar or series of articles. And we will be using the same model to help develop other content since it worked out so well.

You could just as easily solicit ideas for something like this via email. I feel that the value of using a wiki is that the participants get to see the other ideas that have been submitted in “real time” which allows them to build on them, refrain from submitting something that has already been posted, and maybe get a quick idea they can put to use right away without having to wait for the workshop.

Depending on your audience, you may want to avoid using the word “wiki” when doing this. People know what a webpage is, they know how to login to a site, they know how to type and cut and paste, but they don’t necessarily know what a “wiki” is and using a strange term like that can erect a barrier. Give them the instructions they need in clear language that everyone understands.

And, I strongly recommend that you “seed” the page with content to avoid blank page syndrome.

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