From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

I’m a big believer in the value of social media, enough to have written two books on the subject.  In the spirit of practicing what I preach, I posted the draft of the first book on my blog 18 months ago with good results.  Several thousand visitors read the chapters and several dozen contributed meaningful feedback.

So when I was writing the second book this spring, I thought I would go one better. I posted the entire draft on a Wiki and used my newsletter, blog and personal contacts to invite people to contribute to the finished product.

Few did.  In fact, over the course of six weeks only nine people joined the wiki and only three or four made meaningful changes. It turned out that a blog, with its limited capacity for collaboration, was far more effective in achieving my collaborative goal.

This got me thinking about the paradox of group collaboration. There’s no question that wikis can make teams more productive. Yet they are probably the greatest disappointment of the suite of Web 2.0 tools.

I’m involved in three or four organizations that use wikis to coordinate people’s activities. Not once have I seen them used to their potential. Of the few people who actually contribute to the wikis, most send a duplicate copy of the content by e-mail to make sure everyone is in the loop. Many public wikis survive only because a small number of members maintain them. Few have many active contributors.

Yet there are some phenomenally successful examples of wiki technology.  The most famous is Wikipedia, with its 10 million articles in 253 languages. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales recently started Wikia, a library of 2,500 special-interest wikis in 66 languages that allows people to create reference materials from the perspectives that are important to them.

There’s also evidence that Wikis are enjoying good success behind the firewall.  IBM has said that wikis are its number one social media tool, making it possible for a widely dispersed workforce to collaborate.

Why are wikis such a disappointment when they have so much potential? I think the reason is that productivity has nothing to do with it.

Wikis succeed when the interest of every member is served by participation. Projects that mainly benefit individuals or organization offer few compelling reasons for others to get involved.  It turns out that people are more than happy to comment upon another’s work, but getting them to actively contribute requires an extra measure of self-interest.  People were happy to comment upon my book, but the incentives to get them to actively contribute to someone else’s work were insufficient.  On the other hand, people who are passionate about coin collecting have an incentive to make the numismatics section of Wikipedia an accurate public record.

Productivity is often held out as an incentive for people to use new technology, but I believe that’s only a minor factor.  People continue to use spreadsheets when databases would do a better job.  They fumble along with e-mail, despite its many limitations, because that’s what they know.  The most successful new technologies have been those that enable people to transform their work or their way of life. Incremental improvements are never enough to sustain meaningful behavior change.