This PR firm does— and says when it comes to collaboration, it’s better
and faster than blogs
In March, Eastwick Communications became the first public relations agency to launch a wiki.
If you’re anything like us, you have no idea what that means. When we first heard the word “wiki,” we thought it was a corny label that a company had given its intranet. But oh no—apparently it’s a hot trend in technology. (And here we just finally got our hands around blogs.) And it’s not so new: The first wiki came in 1995.
According to the Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), a free online encyclopedia, a wiki (pronounced wee-kee) is a “Web application that allows users to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows anyone to edit the content.” It comes from the Hawaiian word wiki—which means quick or fast.
The Silicon Valley-based Eastwick fittingly created its wiki—cleverly dubbed “eastwiki” and powered by SocialText —shortly before it launched its new-media practice this spring.
Their goals: 1) to teach both agency employees and clients to use new-media tools in a safe, sandboxed environment and 2) to “prepare the agency for leadership in what we understood was the endgame for new media: collaboration,” says Giovanni Rodriguez, Eastwick executive vice president.
Indeed, the collaborative nature of the tool makes communication among employees (and between employees and their clients) in widespread locations quite a bit easier.
“One thing we quickly learned was that they are wonderful for collaborating on labor-intensive documents that usually require collaboration on e-mail across multiple offices,” Rodriguez says. “With a wiki—a Web-based document that anyone can edit—PR teams can ignore most of these e-mails, ‘occupational spam’ in wiki parlance, and focus on what they are hired to do.”
Currently, he says, four account teams at Eastwick are using the eastwiki, “and some people—myself included—are on it all day long,” he says.
Many at Eastwick are still skeptical, Rodriguez admits, explaining that “wikis only spread through practical, grassroots adoption, so we never forced them on anyone, except perhaps at the very beginning, when we didn’t know any better. But naturally, the eastwiki is taking over the agency.”
One reason the adoption of wikis is so high, he says, is that they are so easy to use. They can be public or—to protect from editing and tampering with content—password-protected.
Plus, “wikis never lose things and they never forget—every single version of a document is saved and easy to retrieve,” Rodriguez says. “I can think of countless times when the eastwiki was able to find information that we had written off as lost.”
If a wiki sounds sort of like a blog, it is. “Wikis, like blogs, are easier to set up, a lot more intuitive, and, let’s not forget, a lot cheaper,” Rodriguez says. “You don’t need to be an IT guy or gal.”
But whereas a blog reflects the opinions and voice of its author, a wiki, as someone put it (we can’t remember who), “is more like an open cocktail party” where you’re not trying to offend anyone, but create consensus.
At Eastwick, “we’re beginning to see how the wiki is making us smarter, faster and consistently excellent—a few of the things that make us marketable,” Rodriguez says.
Eastwick has also set up wikis for clients like Fujitsu Computer Systems, Ruckus Wireless and Level 5, to provide a central, collaborative workspace for communication regarding product launches, media tours, event planning and other projects. They’ve also helped clients use wikis to set up private online “rooms” for reporters and public topic-focused “rooms” for corporate as well as nonprofit projects.
Now Eastwick is advising clients on wikis for external collaboration—with customers, partners and influencers. “From our perspective, external collaboration is the next big thing in PR, and we are thankful for having the foresight to add collaborative tools into our toolkit,” Rodriguez says.
Thinking about setting up a wiki at your company? ‘Just do it,’” advises their biggest fan Rodriguez.
Rodriguez: 650.279.8415 or giovanni@eastwick.com |
