Wikis, Blogs and Prediction Markets: Oh My!

Professor Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School recently wrote on the value wikis, blogs, social networking, and prediction markets can bring to organizations and what differentiates them.  In particular, he analyzed their use based on how they can bring people with different levels of “ties” together. 

The idea of “ties” is that for each employee in an organization all other employees can be grouped by how closely they work together.  The smallest group is the close collaborators with which they have “strong” professional ties.  Beyond that group are people whom they have worked with in the past, interact with periodically, or know only by introduction.  These are people with “weak” ties.

Moving out from the weak ties is a yet larger group of people for whom the employee has “potential” ties.  These are co-workers who could be very valuable if they knew about them.  This group includes employees who could answer pressing questions, find needed resources, or are working on a similar problem. 

The largest group of people have “no” ties to the employee.  They work in unrelated areas thus are beyond even the realm of potential ties.

McAfee argues that the value of tools such as wikis, a blogosphere, social networking, and prediction markets are to facilitate work between the members of the various groups.  Each tool, however, is targeted at different group levels. 

I think this is a good distinction and a good way to differentiate between the various tools.  I have often seen confusion on the difference between wikis and blogs especially.  If you analyze them on their use in bringing employee knowledge together, however, you see a clear distinction.

Wikis are best for a core of strongly tied workers who are collaborating closely together on a particular deliverable. Interaction with weak ties, however, is best suited for social networking tools which are designed to allow workers to easily stay in touch with a large network of colleagues, both by seeing what they are working on and by being able to ask your network questions.  The goal isn’t necessarily to make weak ties into strong ties, but to make weak tie interaction more efficient.

McAfee lists blogs and a blogosphere in particular as the best tool for bringing together potential ties.  If everyone in a company blogged regularly and they were searchable or aggregated by topic, employees would be notified whenever anyone posted an item that related to them, even if you did not know of the blogger.  The difference between wikis and blogs, therefore, is that wikis are designed for people who are currently working together while a blogosphere is designed to find unknown ties.  He points out that blogging is currently one of the least popular technologies among CIOs, most likely because blogging often feels like you are “shouting into a void”.  If you view blogs as a way to convert potential ties to actual ties (strong or weak), however, the value quickly becomes clear.

His final group contains employees with “no” ties.  While connecting these may seem both impossible and unneeded this is not true.  The diverse knowledge and experience contained in this largest pool of employees is becoming recognized a powerful source of information and prediction markets as work great for productively interconnect these people and to extract information and answers from them.

These four tools, and others like them, are not as overlapping as many people believe and all are important and valuable ways to harness your corporate knowledge.