Daniel Mitchell's Blog

Wiki for Small Business - Collaboration in the Cloud

A Wiki is a managed set of web pages that can be collaborated on by a group of people. People still think of Wikis as public on-line encyclopaedias, Wikipedia being the most famous, but in fact a wiki can rapidly be implemented with no technical expertise as the next practical stage in document collaboration for a small business. There are a number of providers, such as PBWiki, that sell the product as true SaaS (Software as a Service) packages requiring no software or configuration to your own servers or PCs.

Businesses and individuals are already comfortable using Google Documents as an easy way to manage collaboration on documents, to centralise storage of these documents, and to provide some backup and security. A private Wiki for a company can be an even better alternative.

For little cost, a team can store large quantities of documents, which can be easily searched, rapidly amended from anywhere with an internet connection and automatically backed up, often with significantly more resilience than is normally within the scope of small businesses. A wiki will automatically track changes to these pages and allow you to compare or revert to an earlier version. At Lifeline IT, we use a PBWiki for our technical documentation and internal policies, but wikis are well suited to any situation where a business has several people contributing to sets of changing documents including project planning, building "how to" articles and for public or private knowledge bases.

Advertise, or not?

Advertising has always been a scary thing for small business. Costs can be high and resources are rarely as extensive as those of bigger organisations. My business has rarely advertised – even for staff. We do see it as an inferior alternative to word of mouth. As a small business ourselves, a big part is of course concerns of poor returns on valuable investment, perhaps it is also because we always feared that our larger competitors could advertise bigger.

Current technology and our financial climate puts an interesting twist on advertising.

• With companies cutting advertising and promotions budgets as a "non-essential" expense in times of financial difficulty, rates are good and competition may well be less visible.
• With the move away from traditional paper based media, things are different and changing rapidly for small business - now is the time to take advantage. Anyone advertising through Google, big or small, has the same ad appearance - there really is very level playing field.

• There is a great volume of free advice on marketing available to small business - on line communities are emerging around some of the world's greatest marketers who are encouraging and guiding their followers - with the agility of small businesses, they are uniquely positioned to benefit.

Gone are the days when adverts needed to have anything to do with the product they are selling. Iggy Pop is now advertising insurance for a company that won't even cover musicians! Entertaining and engaging is as important as showing the product - online discussions about the company and brand will eminate from an interesting advert.

Brand does remains important. We look at ways to get our brand reputation known, as on the surface our product is not unique (the delivery is). In line with our sponsorship of Graduate Fashion Week we placed a full page advert in Drapers and of course we promote our corporate website. Although I see that as more passive, it is still a resource for potential clients that we are about to see or have just seen. It's also important for us to work on getting referrals, which means advertising to existing clients for new business.