So first I’m really happy that other vendors in this space are advocating different approaches. Otherwise we would all have exactly the same products ^^

Yet I’d like to point out that I am not against wikis at all. We even have a wiki at Yoolink, which we use as a technical collaborative tool. I know some great Wiki providers who have both a vision and a great product – here in France or in the US. So my point was not whether wikis are useful or not in an SME. If I had to give my personal ideal opinion it would be #4 that implies that both services can benefit from one another.

So what was my point? And where did it come from?

In the recent months we met many, many, many people. Potential customers (our typical customer is a 20-30 people digital agency or consulting company), people using other 2.0 services, frustrated employees, SME CEO, 2.0 sceptical people, etc. Back at our office, when we tried to make the difference between signal and noise we kept the following things:

- Employees in general – and of course there are always a couple of hard-core users in each company that are exceptions – don’t have much time for social software. The key to adoption is to be efficient and easily understandable. If users have the feeling you’re wasting their time, you’re dead.
- Therefore most executives don’t want to pile up services. They want to pick A solution that’s going to answer their problem on a particular field. The question “How” does not really matter for them, only the question “What” matters for them. They have to focus on their Business-as-usual the rest is only details.
- Social services add up to the normal IT infrastructure so it can’t be too expensive.

For most SME – and by SME I mean less than 50 people in the company in our case – wikis or micro-sharing are alternatives to a single question: “How do I make people share information and knowledge to drive up productivity”. It may not be the way we, people from the industry, see it, but I believe it is the way some potential users do.

I don’t think they can afford – time wise and price wise – to adopt both. The training cost and maintaining-cost would be way to high for the benefit they would get.

I met customers on many occasions that had troubles maintaining a wiki. They were all working in the same room, exchanged a couple of .doc best practices when it was needed, but did not have the urge (need) to have something more solid to fix internal knowledge. Yet they needed something to share, discuss and capitalize on all the scripts/market studies/articles they were finding on-line.

That’s why I said that I think micro-sharing is probably a better fit for such companies – because of those constraints. Micro-sharing is about bringing back to your team some information and knowledge you found on the Internet – and we all know there are plenty. Micro-sharing helps companies to adapt to a business world that has changed. A Business world where Internet is the first knowledge base of most companies.

I hope I made my point a little clearer: I personally love wiki and I am strongly convinced that as Michael said “hundreds of companies, large and small, derive tremendous value from wikis”. But for SME that mostly can’t afford several solutions time-wise and money-wise, micro-sharing would probably bring more for less investment…

It is of course an open debate and there are as many answers as customers. Yet I thought it was worth sharing our views and experience on the topic!