Would a Wiki By Any Other Name Smell As Sweet?
By leelefever on July 25, 2007 - 1:24pm.
Did you know that in a recent survey by Harris Interactive that only 16% of the online public know what a wiki is? For some, this will seem surprising. Others will say "what's a wiki?"
I had coffee today with my friend Kevin Flaherty of Wet Paint, the Seattle-based wiki company. He told me that they were perplexed that "wiki" was deemed one the 10 most annoying words on the web, so they ask Harris Interactive to do the survey comparing "wiki" to the terms social network, blog and online forum. Here's what they found (full results here):
16% of the US online population is familiar with what a wiki is. Even if you just look at the online trendsetters (18-34 year olds), only 27% of those online users are familiar with wikis.
Blogs, which have universal awareness among nearly anyone reading this post, are only familiar to 35% of online users. And familiarity with social networks as a category still ranks below that of online forums at 28% and 35% respectfully.
For context, consider that 76% of the same population know of search engines and 97% of toilet paper.
What does this mean? It means that we're making assumptions about what people understand about our online world. There is more misunderstanding than understanding and more confusion than solution.
What really gets me about this is that wikis, RSS, social networks and blogs are all accessible and potentially useful for the general public - but they're not being adopted as quickly as we'd imagine. The culprit, from my perspective, is the language we use to describe and promote them. It's too easy to forget that we're in the minority.
My advice to promote more awareness is to stop talking like a brochure and tell a story. Don't talk about what your product is or does - tell people why they should give a damn. Use real world examples and show how a problem gets solved. Look at every word you use and consider the simpler options.
You might not earn the respect of programmers, but you might just turn your Mom onto something that will save her time - and we all need more time.
I completely agree, Lee,
I completely agree, Lee, that terminology gets in the way. My 15 year old uses Facebook every day, but had no clue what an RSS feed was until I explained what it did and she said "Oh, it's like the News Feed in Facebook." Exactly.
Not only do we have to figure out how to describe what these tools do and how they help, I also think we need to find some sticky metaphors that help people "get" the idea. My daughter "got" RSS because she uses Facebook and I was able to link it to something familiar. We need to find other ways to do this with people--which is one of the reasons I'm a big fan of your videos. They do more in a few minutes than I could do in an hour by showing people what the tools are in very concrete ways. We just need to be able to do that more often in conversation.
We run into this everyday
We run into this everyday and I think the focus has to be on how we use our knowledge of the technology as a tool set to solve problems or enable a conversation vs the geeky reflex to ask if they want to super-size their RSS feed.
Toilet paper?
What is this "toilet paper" you speak of? Could you point me in the direction of a good blog or wiki on the subject? Thanks.
LOL
No, seriously, this made me laugh out loud.
TP research continues...
I found some pictures on Flickr of toilet paper in trees. Currently waiting to see if any of my social networks can shed more light on this topic. ;)
youtube video show the reality
I can help you find out more. Youtube has excellent informational videos on how to use tp to decorate, and there is a feed to keep on the cutting edge of the subject.
Forums?
(hard to compete with the TP comments... :-)
We just launched a member-only wiki site today for one of our clients, and never once have we got into mentioning the word "wiki" with them. It's been perfectly sufficient to talk about the "member only site that they can edit themselves," and the whole "wiki" idea just hasn't come up much.
Interestingly, the original RFP for this project requested "member only discussion forums," but when got into asking what they needed / meant by this description, they almost perfectly described the major features of a wiki, rather than the features of a bulletin board / forum.
With the previous wiki we did for clients, we did present the word to them and they found it a quite fun word--so I don't find it as an annoying a word as "feed," for comparison.
Yeah its not about the
Yeah its not about the technology. It's about the brand that's using the technology or how the technology is changing someone's life.
I wonder how many of those same people would know what Wikipedia was. I bet a whole lot more than 16%.
Maybe the survey is deficient?
Who are these people that are online but don't know what a search engine is, nor toilet paper? This suggests to me that maybe there's something wrong with the survey. If people know how to search with Google or Yahoo, but don't know that they're called "search engines" (similar to the wiki example in Jay's comment), then we've got people who know about and use the technology but failed a test about jargon.
The toilet paper result is a tip off that the survey is possibly not a reliable tool for measuring whatever it is they tried to measure.
Hmmmmmm
I would love to meet the 3 % of people who do not know what Toilet Paper is, I am sure there is a high correlation for these people not knowing what Bran is :-)
Lee, your words are once again spot on. I tend to forget living in Northern California near the valley that my view of the world is totally skewed.
An aside, I was recently conducting a focus group with teens and the topic of RSS came up, none of the six teens knew what it was. I was really surprised. I then showed them your video and they all got it!
I have found in my travels and conversations with teens and twenty something's that most of them are not as technically knowledgeable as I thought they would be.
semantics
Hey Robert,
Good point about the kteens and young adults. My bet is that some may know what the technologies do and why they matter, but haven't matched up the name "rss" to the meaning. Just a thought.
Post new comment