Are wikis useful for planning events?

Posted by admin | Marketing events by micro-blogging »

We have already discussed the benefits of building relationships with your customers through social media marketing. Here are some quick steps that you can follow to see how you can leverage wikis in planning and managing your events.

Is your event something in which multiple stakeholders can get together to do any of the following:
1- Planning the details of the event collaboratively: e.g. a one dish party, a group camp etc
2- Sharing knowledge, facts or any other information related to the event: e.g. mountain gearing tips before a mountain hike

If so, then wikis are a great platform where your community can discuss and share ideas. You will notice that when people believe in something, they start to take ownership of their work. In active communities, wiki pages evolve beautifully and have a self-balancing system. If someone puts in junk content, someone from the community will automatically remove or correct it.

Interactive planning helps great for coming up with good ideas instead of feeling like you are just bouncing ideas off a wall. The great thing about human communication is that one thought/opinion leads to another to another, as a planner, always learn to value these thoughts as early hints and signs of how to go about your project.

You can not just force people to use a wiki when there isn’t a clear need for it. I would suggest that you sit down and map out the event planning and marketing process on a sheet of paper, and then identify areas and nodes that can benefit from having a wiki. The objective of the wiki itself should be very clear to you as a planner and to the community as contributors. If you are planning the first community driven marathon race, then the input of the community in the planning stages becomes important. Similarly, you should already know what kind of information or knowledge will benefit the marathon as an end product of the wiki. Of-course, the wiki can then be used as an after-launch tool for sharing photos, details on the winners, feedback etc. Your wiki will become successful once everyone involved understands the purpose of using it well.

It is important for the community to feel that they collaboratively own the wiki. People become imaginative and creative only when they know that they have some level of control in building up the wikis or coming with interesting ideas. So, make sure you make it as neutral as possible.

Although wikis grow organically, you can build some basic structure initially so that the rest of the community can follow suit. In this way, you can make sure that it is organized so that you can keep getting valuable information out of it. Also, you can ensure that it is easy to navigate for new-comers and not techy people. There a number of free and paid wikis that you can search from to get started.

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