Wikis: The black sheep of social media

I'm listening in to Nora Ganim Barnes University of Massachusetts Dartmouth talk about a survey of Inc. 500 and social media. The survey results, shown at the Society for New Communications Research Symposium today in Cambridge, Mass., show big gains in use of social media. Satisfaction with every type of social media increased except for one: wikis.

In Barnes' 2007 survey, 95% of respondents said they were very satisfied with wikis. This year the number dropped to 77%. "Wikis have always been kind of a black sheep," Barnes says.

Why would that be? For one thing, the study, to which 42% of the Inc. 500 responded, went to marketing people. They are driving the use of social media in their organizations (and IT, which in many cases initiated social media experiments, is moving out of the picture).

Because of who they are, they are very much focused on public-facing social media. But Barnes contends that wikis are mostly used for internal-facing projects. "It's more internal than external...so there wasn't the same kind of passion you see with blogs and podcasts. People aren't really wrapping their arms around the technology."

Barnes acknowledges that wikis are a powerful collaborative tool, whether used by internal teams or with external facing customers. "The people who are using them love them. But externally they don't have the glamour or glitz that some of the other channels do."

Perhaps wikis just haven't found their niche yet. I would think that wiki technology would be a powerful tool to empower customers and business partners to help shape everything from policies to product designs.

They have the potential to engage the customer a collaborator. Perhaps the world isn't ready for that yet?