Name power
Do you wiki, or collaborate?
In my company, we have used intranet/Web technology for many years. Since the day we formed, if I remember correctly. As the years rolled on, we have regularly upgraded our internal services but adoption has not been as big as some of us had hoped. Our internal Web site was run by me, and almost all the content was mine. The wiki was read by several, but fewer contributed (mainly us geeks), and pages generally had single ‘owners’. Nobody blogs. There are no mashes.
Recently we have embarked on a revision of our internal services, and the reaction from across the company is significantly positive. It’s still going to be wikis, blogs, tagging, mashups and so on, so why the sudden positive vibes? Even the non-geeks are excited.
The answer, I think, is nomenclature. Instead of a ‘wiki’, we will have a ‘collaboration service’. Instead of blogs, we’ll have journals and reviews. Instead of mashups, we’ll have integrated dashboards. And so on.
Names are powerful. The playful names given to technology by geeks just don’t attract the right kind of attention from certain sections of the business. Give that technology a ‘professional’ name and suddenly everyone wants a piece of the action.
So, I’m off now to evaluate our new internal collaboration space and update my journal on the latest service integration, then wait to be pinged with feedback. (Oops, I said ‘ping’.)
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