"My wiki is my textbook"

Although they may have suffered initially with the stigma of consumer-facing social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook aimed at teenagers and college students, Web 2.0 technologies are working their way into business and education. And, perhaps more importantly, they are starting to show results.

As Computerworld reported this week in, "IT Execs Seek New Ways To Justify Web 2.0," some companies are so convinced that social networking, corporate blogging or RSS will pay highly in areas like customer satisfaction and employee productivity, they are opting to measure ROI and TCO differently for these tools that for other IT investments.

But behind the scenes many of the companies have already found that Web 2.0 can result in concrete benefits.

For example, the story briefly touched on TradeKing, an online brokerage firm that set up social networking features on its Web site last August to enable users to discuss investment strategies and stock trades.

Don Montanaro, the company's president and CEO, likes to say that social networking "has grown up" at TradeKing because the company can link increased trades to those customers who use the social network.

Almost 10 % of the company's customers interact with one another online -- creating profiles, blogging about strategies and publishing the trades they make. In July, when the market experienced some volatility, TradeKing found that its social networking community members actually traded more than during times with more stability, "indicating perhaps an added comfort-factor social networking provides during times of fluctuation," according to Montanaro.

In a July survey of 3,000 of its clients, more than one-third of TradeKing options traders and 24 % of its equity traders noted that they read blogs daily or weekly to obtain information. In addition, 25 % of options traders and 17 % of equity traders noted that they listen to podcasts daily or weekly, according to the TradeKing survey.

And then there's Boston College IS professor Gerald Kane, who has opted to replace textbooks in his computer management courses for undergraduates and graduates with a wiki.

"My wiki is my textbook," he likes to note.
 
Kane allows students to post papers on the wiki to get peer review feedback from other students before handing them into him. His analysis has shown that students who opt to revise their papers after getting feedback on the wiki typically a slight higher grade than those who do not -- a bump from a B + to an A -, for example. He also allows students to post suggested exam questions -- and proposed answers -- which he uses for exams.

"When you post the exam questions, how can you guarantee that the answers up there are good?" Kane said. "The students better learn how to tell the good stuff from the crap."

Finally, Tim Eisenhauer, senior vice president and CTO of Listopica, a company that operates e-commerce Web sites, noted that his company's use of a wiki for discussion and project management has allowed the company to complete projects in 25 % of the time is used to take before putting the wiki in place.

"With us, the way we measure it is that it takes us from a foggy idea that we might have for a business product or feature, and it allows us to put that idea out there," he said. "It allows people to give feedback."

What about Web 2.0 tools in your company? Are they proving to be worth the money and time it takes to put them in place?  Send me your thoughts at heather_havenstein@computerworld.com