Learn how to:

Create folders - group pages and organize your wiki
Control access to folders and pages - allow individuals to view or edit specific pages
Create individual logins - know exactly who is on your wiki

Here at PBwiki we have a few great ideas on how to set up a wiki and get your users on board. We have PDFs, PowerPoints and a whole bunch of material that helps you create a wiki. But there is one problem - this material is created by US for YOU - and we could be dead wrong.

I have started an experiment. I’ve put some of our materials on a wiki and I’m asking you to edit it. At the end of one month, I’m going to save that wiki page as a PDF and brand it as an official PBwiki document. (Of course - all of the contributors will be credited.)

So edit away - delete, upload, and add your thoughts on How to set up your wiki for the first time.

Don’t add a comment on this post - EDIT THE WIKI!

We’ve heard from a lot of teachers that it can be frustrating to work with on one PBwiki with many students at one time. PBwiki doesn’t allow more than one editor on the page at one time - and the page that is being edited is ‘locked’ to other users.

(This is because if a wiki allowed two people to edit the same page simultaneously, the edits might conflict.)

You don’t want to waste valuable time in the computer lab but what should your other students do while the page is being edited?

Create lots of Pages
Our suggestion is to create lots of pages: Create a page for each lesson, for each project, even for each student. When your students have more pages to choose from, there is less of a chance that they will have to ‘Steal the Lock’. Here are two ideas on how engage many students on one wiki.

Book Review:
Assign a book review project to your class. Have each student create their own page, write a short review on a chapter and populate it with links to articles about the author, the book and other articles. Then ask each student to visit the wiki page to the person on their right. Ask them to review their partners links, edit the review or comment on the page.

Collaborative Research Papers:
Group the students into teams of three or four and have each group divide the project between themselves. During computer lab ask your students to begin researching the topic, have them paste links and jot ideas down on individual pages. When ready to write the paper, have each student work on their own page and allow the group to edit each others pages. Paste the completed project into one wiki page.

How do you use one wiki with many students? Join the discussion here

That’s geek code for “PBwiki loves South by Southwest!” One of the advantages of a tool that’s simple to get set up and running with like PBwiki is that you can use it to make quick, ad-hoc workgroups at conferences like South by Southwest. If you’re looking to post your own itinerary or put together a spontaneous birds-of-a-feather session, come set up a new wiki with us and email david+sxsw@pbwiki.com with the address and I’ll add it to the official PBwiki SXSW page.

Cheers,
David Weekly
Founder & CEO

Last week I received a desperate email in my inbox…

“I have a problem and I am wondering if you can fix it for me. I am a senior at Randolph high school and am a peer teacher for Ms. Eberheart a biology teacher. She is very big in to using PBwiki. She is so into it that she got a t-shirt from you.

As a fun thing Ms. E has her students take it around when they go to special places and then have them write a blog about it. The reason I write to you is because she gave me the shirt to take to the giants parade and it was stolen from me. I gave it to a player to sign and when they threw it back another person picked it up and walked away with it I went to look for it but I could not find it. Could you help me out and maybe send Ms. Eberheart another shirt so she can continue her project with the shirt.

Mrs. E receives two snaps from the PBwiki team. She thought of a creative way to engage her students in biology, new technology AND creative writing. You can see her blog here. What interesting ways have you found to introduce technology into your classroom?

Are you a software sales professional?  PBwiki is looking for salespeople that want to work for one of the fastest growing software companies in the world.  We are looking for proven, quota-carrying sales professionals.

We have positions open in both our San Mateo, CA and Nashua, NH offices (so if you’ve always wanted to work for PBwiki, but couldn’t bear to leave your beloved Red Sox behind, now you can live the dream!).

Read more about the position and send in your application.

 

For this week’s marketing post, I’m going to delve into the world of politics again, which holds some interesting lessons for the business world. 

One of the major advantages that Barack Obama currently holds over Hillary Clinton in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination here in the United States lies in how his campaign has managed the media.

Clinton’s campaign has complained that the media coverage is more sympathetic to Obama (which is pretty evident to anyone who watches CNN or MSNBC), but a bigger issue is simply the volume of coverage.

In political contests, pundits often refer to the “air war” and the “ground war.”  The air war consists of media exposure (either paid advertising or press coverage)  to drive awareness, while the ground war consists of the door-to-door organization to get out the vote.

In many ways, this division resembles the classic divide between Marketing (air war) and Sales (ground war) in business.

When it comes to the air war, the key is to drive awareness.  As I’m fond of saying, your most potent competitor is generally ignorance.

Because Barack Obama has become a magnet for free press coverage, he has a significant advantage over Hillary Clinton in the air war.  Every time he holds a 15,000-person rally at a sports arena, with thousands more spilling out into the streets, it’s a newsworthy story that can draw national coverage, and perhaps even more importantly, local news coverage in both print and TV.

It’s possible to substitute money for coverage by blanketing the airwaves with paid advertising, but as Mitt Romney has demonstrated, pound for pound, paid ads are less valuable than free coverage.

The advantage that free coverage brings can be seen in the relative fortunes of the Obama and Clinton campaigns.  While both have raised roughly the same amount of money since 2006, Obama’s press advantage also allowed his campaign to spend more on the ground game than Clinton, while still maintaining a larger warchest.

The same principle applies in business.  If you can get the press to do your job for you, why spend money buying ads?  What’s more valuable, a 1-page ad in Fortune, or a glowing article?  And don’t forget, that article didn’t cost you $25,000.

The key question then is, how do you get that press coverage?

You can spend a ton of money ($20,000+ per month) on high-priced PR agencies, but as the example of Hillary Clinton shows, the best spin machine in the world can’t help much if you don’t have a story people want to write about.

Barack Obama has been successful during the nomination battle not because of his spinmeisters, but because he successfully embodies a story that people want to hear and retell.  What American doesn’t want to believe that anybody (including an African-American with a Muslim name and father, raised by a single mother) can grow up to be president?  And if people want change and a break with the past, there is no way for Hillary Clinton to argue that she is best positioned to deliver it.

Great marketing isn’t about selling your story.  It’s about being the story.

The same applies to the business world.  Google famously refuses to spend any money on advertising.  Guess what?  They don’t have to, because they are the story.

Microsoft can spend far more money than Apple on ads (and it does).  But Apple always wins the air war (at least during the iPod era) because it is the story.

To sell your story, be the story.

One of the skills every marketer (if not every person) needs to master is the art of managing expectations.

Managing expectations is a “Goldilocks” task–too high, and they’ll be impossible to meet; too low, and they’ll detract from your accomplishments; just right, and you’ll be a hero.  Of the potential pitfalls, high expectations are perhaps the most dangerous.

High expectations are seductive.  It feels good to have everyone saying good things about you.  “The Next Bill Gates” is a favorite chestnut that the business press dusts off whenever a hot new company with a photogenic founder appears on the scene (see Andreesen, Marc; Abrams, Jonathan; and Rose, Kevin).  But no matter how good it feels to ride the wave of hype, sooner or later, you’ll have to deliver the goods.  Too-high expectations carry a double-whammy: When they prove to be wrong, not only is the result a downer, it kills your credibility.

Take the impact of expectations on the current U.S. presidential race.  Senator Hillary Clinton began as the prohibitive favorite.  As recently as November, the Iowa Futures Market (the best predictor of presidential politics, since real money is at stake)  showed that her chances of earning the Democratic nomination were 75%.  That’s what made her third place finish in Iowa so shocking.  And as a result, in the immediate aftermath of the loss, she plummeted to a projected 25% chance of winning the nomination.

 

After that, however, the expectations game shifted.  Now the high expectations shifted to Senator Barack Obama, as a tidal wave of coverage (helped along by his own strength at inspirational oratory) sent his poll numbers skyrocketing.

But while the excitement helped Obama’s campaign in many ways, allowing expectations to get ahead of reality came back to haunt him.

Clinton had held a 17-point lead in New Hampshire, but it seemingly crumbled overnight as poll after poll showed Obama leading in the state.  On election night, Clinton squeaked out a 3-point win.  So who actually won?  Was it Obama, for making up 14 points in less than a week, only to fall short at the end?  Or was it Clinton, who held off her challenger when all expected her to lose.

The race was close enough for either explanation to take hold, but it was the latter narrative of Clinton’s resurgence (despite being a frontrunner who had lost 14 points off her lead) that ended up holding sway.

We saw a near replay on Super Tuesday this week.  After the South Carolina election (an unexpectedly large victory for Obama), Hillary and Bill Clinton indicated that they expected an overall victory once they took their message to the broader public.

Once again an Obama surge in the polls dropped the expectations for Clinton; I often thought that the national media was openly rooting for Obama to land a knockout blow.  Here in California, poll after poll indicated that Obama had closed a 20-point lead, and had even pulled ahead of Clinton.

When the dust settled, an objective analysis showed a near-perfect tie.  Obama won more states, but Clinton won the bigger prizes in New York and California.  Obama won the critical swing state of Missouri, but Clinton overcame a tidal wave of endorsements to win Massachusetts.  Obama came out with slightly more delegates, but it was statistically insignificant.

So who did win?  Nobody.  But both campaigns tried to frame the results as a win for their side–Obama by pointing out that he had overcome a big deficit in the earlier polls, Clinton, by arguing that she had done better than projected in the most recent polls.

Just politics?  Perhaps, but just ask the folks at Joost, who went from being the future of television (Sequoia had to beg Joost to take their money), to the walking dead in less than 9 months.

Great expectations require even greater execution.  ‘Tis better to set and exceed realistic goals than it is to ride the wave of hype…right into the trash heap.

We’ve come a long way since the early days of Salesforce.com, when Marc Benioff was blazing a trail with his “No Software” campaign.  Back then, the big question was whether or not corporate IT departments would ever accept on-demand software, as opposed to the traditional approach of on-premise hosting.

Here’s what Sun had to say:

At an event Sun hosted recently, one room was filled with CTOs from some of the world’s largest on-line companies; the room next door was filled with CIOs — from a broad spectrum of companies from China, Japan, Europe and North America. As Mr. Schwartz spoke with attendees from each room, he noticed that not a single company in the CTO room paid for software. They were interested in open source or software-as-a-service (SaaS) alternatives. In contrast, not a single company in the CIO room allowed free software without a commercial support contract. Not one.

There are two clear implications for ISVs. First, the time to move to the SaaS business model is yesterday. Your customers are asking for it; your competitors are offering it; it gives you a way to grow subscription revenue and move your service offering to the SMB market at the same time. Second, the cost of downtime is an overarching concern for customers. If you can deliver your software as a service, on demand, with extremely high levels of availability, you can win over both the CIO and the CTO.

That’s music to our ears.  Here at PBwiki, we have one simple business principle: give ‘em what they want.  We’re convinced that offering a reliable, easy-to-use service is the best way to serve our users and customers.  That’s why we’re the #1 SaaS wiki for business collaboration.

How has SaaS made a difference in your organization?

This Monday Monday, February 4th, we (the PBwiki co-founders) will be speaking at an SDforum event on PBwiki and entrepreneurship. We’ll talk about how we grew, what the technical/organizational challenges were, and how we spread the word about PBwiki.

If you want us to speak about anything in particular, just leave a comment here and we’ll definitely cover it. But we’d love to see you there!

“At an all-night SuperHappyDevHouse event in May 2005, David Weekly spent 7 hours coding a simple hosted wiki service from concept to production-available. Within 48 hours of launching, PBwiki was adopted by over a thousand groups as news of the service spread on blogs like LifeHacker and BoingBoing. PBwiki is used by the SDForum Startup SIG, and is extremely easy to use: its name suggests it’s as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich.

Fast-forward 2.5 years and PBwiki:

• Runs 300,000 wikis for millions of montly users.
• Supports 20,000 businesses, including AT&T, Wal-Mart, and 1/3 of the Fortune 500.
• Has 11+ fulltime employees and several part-timers and contractors.
• Has received $2.5 million funding from Ron Conway, Seraph Group and Mohr Davidow.

We’re delighted to host PBwiki’s founders, David Weekly, Ramit Sethi, and Nathan Schmidt.”

SDforum charges $15 if you’re not a member (see their event calendar here).

Get the full details here.