How to Create a Company Wiki
This podcast audio served as the source for the blog post “Create a Company Wiki.”
The transcript was rewritten to produce the blog post, which is the cornerstone of the Shortcut Content system.
Shayla: You are listening today to the Shortcut Content Podcast and I’m talking today with Dave Young who is the founder of Shortcut Content. And, Dave tell me, you mentioned company wiki. What is that and what can you tell me about it?
Dave: A company wiki. One of the things that you can use Shortcut Content for is to record a company wiki. Now this idea just occurred to us after we’d been recording for several years with some of our company founders that use Shortcut Content and what we found is that a lot of the stories that they share about how the company started about some of the problems they’ve solved for customers, really make good training material for the entire company. So what they’re doing is not just putting it on their website, but think of Wikipedia, a wiki is just a place where you store a bunch of knowledge, years ago people called it a knowledge base. We’d have a company knowledge base and what we’d try to do is put policies and procedures and to me some of the most important things you can put in a company wiki or a knowledge base are some of those origin stories, some of those stories that only the founder, only the earliest members of the company know about. In some cases, in some companies, there are legends created about this.
I remember when I worked back in college, I worked for IBM briefly, and there was this story about, I don’t even remember if it was Thomas Watson, it was a story about somebody getting fired, and this was back in the days when you could do something like this, they actually took the guy’s desk out while he was out at lunch, took his desk and everything that was in it, moved it out into the parking lot and set it all on fire. And when the guy came back to the office, there was his desk and everything on fire. So that was some kind of legend that happened. It was either inside IBM or inside National Cash Register, one of their big competitors.
But that might be a great example of the kind of stories that you want to keep for your company, but every company has these moments, these legendary events where somebody saved the day by helping a customer in an unusual and creative way or it was some really cool thing that an employee did, but those kinds of things, those kinds of stories.
Now in the case of one of my clients, they tell a lot of stories about how they’ve helped customers, and when it’s the company founder that’s actually telling the stories in his voice and using the words that he or she would have used in that customer interaction, not only are you sharing the stories, but you’re helping your employees pick on the phrasing and the mannerisms that you would use to actually solve that problem for a customer, and, guess what? We model those things. As you read, so you will write. That’s one of the golden rules of writing. If you want to write like Hemingway, read a bunch of Hemingway and then start writing.
So if you let your company founders or the experts in your company tell those stories in a way that makes them accessible to not only today’s employees, but future employees. You’re saving the history of the company and you’re putting it a place that everyone’s going to have access to in the future. And in a big way, it’s actually a way for a company founder to leave their legacy.
Shayla: And tell me about if someone wants to start making company wiki, as you put it, how do they do that with Shortcut Content?
Dave: Well, with Shortcut Content, making a company wiki is really no different a process than recording blog posts and podcasts. In fact, you can really think of it as kind of the same thing. You may have some stories, you may have some topics that you want to record and keep inside the company that you don’t want to share with outsiders, but again, at Shortcut Content, we’re not the ones that are sharing it. We’ll help you produce and, typically, our role is handing you back the files. So you’ll get the mp3s back as fully produced audio that people can listen to. You’ll get the transcription rewritten as good, readable content and that could go on a company wiki page. And, of course, if you opt for the video option that we do, we can actually produce live action video and preserve those in a company wiki, as well. The wiki is really just where you’re putting the content and it’s as simple as that. You can put it publicly facing on a blog, or you can put it privately facing in a company wiki or knowledge base.
Shayla: Alright, if you have questions about anything Dave has talked today just go to shortcutcontent.com. Thanks, Dave.
Dave: Thank you.