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I had drafted the below yesterday evening, and as I was about to hit the publish button, I saw that Steve Rubel had opened up the wiki. Still, it's probably worth publishing, just to record my thoughts on the matter, and also my opposition to invite-only wikis in these sorts of situations.
Steve Rubel posted a entry exhorting the PR community to master the 25% of social media it didn't already have under its belt. I need to draw out one sentence from Steve's very first call to action:[The marketing community] conceptually get [social media's] importance, how it evolves marketing from a monologue into a dialogue and the importance of listening.Sounds good - dialogue and listening - all essential in our new world of broadcast conversation. Then, in more recent post, Steve reiterates the importance of PR agencies getting the new world, and proposes thatthe senior leadership of the top US PR firms to participate in a transparent dialogue on "the last 25%" over on The New PR WikiAnd here my understanding and support runs into a brick wall of baffled miscomprehension - the only way this conversation could be more old-world is if it were written using quills and transmitted via carrier pigeons (as an aside - see RFC 1149). Yes that's an exaggeration - but I just do not understand why one would use a wiki, and then restrict the editing privs to a certain select few. Most of the invitees seem to have accepted, on the basis that participating is probably better than not participating - but I'm not so sure about that - I think it sends out a message of control and cliqueishness that we must move away from. Most of the innovation in the field of social media is not coming from big companies - and excluding people from direct participation is just wrong (especially when using an arbitrary 15 person company cutoff). I'm not even going to get into any Wisdom of the Crowds stuff about aggregated opinions. All that being said - I do think the actual idea is a good one, and the only thing that needs to change is to make the wiki open to all persons interested in participating in the dialogue Some links
- Original call to action post from Steve Rubel
- Second call to action post from Steve Rubel
- The wiki page - from New PR Wiki
- Mike Manuel posting about the call to action, and why he accepted
- Constantin Basturea doesn't like the exclusivity, and sets up an alternative wiki page,
- Niall Cook - Can't we all find a way to get along?
Anu,
You say: "Most of the invitees seem to have accepted, on the basis that participating is probably better than not participating - but I'm not so sure about that - I think it sends out a message of control and cliqueishness that we must move away from."
On reflection, I'm inclined to agree.
Niall - thanks for that.
I'm still surprised that Steve Rubel initially chose that particular route - it seems so jarring and inconsistent with the wider messages and attitudes of whatever we're calling our brave new world.
But I also saw your comment over on Trevor Cook's post, about seeeing the original intent as being to get large company social media skills up to scratch, and can certainly see why that's a good idea (although with the stuff that you guys are doing, I'd say that you are innovators and ahead of the pack)
Still - the best thing is that it got resolved, without too much vitriol, and we can just get on with it now !
I am all for the little guys. However, it's the big guys that can motiviate thousands to get on the Cluetrain. So, I didn't want to exclude. I wanted to get the right people in the room. If we have to make the room bigger, that's cool - so we did.