Collaboration Cast

Commcraft has done a great job in explaining Social Media in a simple and creative way in the above video. They compare social media to ice cream and how many people and companies can make their own ice cream and benefit from other’s creations. Their analogy describes popular social media technologies such as syndication, ratings, tagging, reviews, blogs, wikis, video, and podcasts.Their video already had been watched by over 61,000 people and can be purchases for distribution. Vendors trying to sell social media products or services can purchase this video and add their own logo or message to the video. Other social media related videos, published by Commcraft, include:

1. Podcasting in Plain English
2. Twitter in Plain English
3. Wikis in Plain English
4. Video: RSS in Plain English
5. Social Networking in Plain English
6. Online Photo Sharing in Plain English

If you are trying to explain social media to a colleague, boss, or customer these may be a very quick and media centric way of explaining social media and its features.

Recently I spoke to a large fortune 1000 customers who is planning on implementing forms into their enterprise wiki. The customer told me that even though they have an enterprise content management system, many departments have been using the wiki for adhoc content management. Now knowledge management wants to streamline the adhoc content publishing and add form capabilities to the wiki so that content owners can create similar wiki pages for specific content publishing projects.

An example would be a wiki page dedicated to product details. The wiki page should allow users to enter a product name, description, features, contact person, price, release date, latest version, etc…. These product wiki pages would get updated each time a product was released. The forms capability would provide consistency across products.

Adding form capabilities to the wiki brings a wiki one step closer to becoming a content management system. Next businesses will want workflow and improved media management capabilities. It will be interesting how content management vendors will react to wiki’s in the near future.  Could they be another disruptive technology for content management vendors? I think so.