MWW Group required rich collaboration tools for managing projects, tracking status & collecting relevant competitive intelligence into a searchable knowledgebase; Socialtext wikis provided easy-to-use platform that users could get comfortable using in minutes, plus integrated with traditional tools like email, RSS feeds & search.
MWW Group is headquartered in New Jersey and employs 250 communications professionals throughout eleven offices servicing clients worldwide. MWW Group is one of the nation's top ten public relations (PR) agencies and is known for its results-driven approach to public relations. The agency is nationally recognized for its work in consumer marketing, corporate communications, financial communications, public affairs and government relations, healthcare and technology. MWW Group represents national and multinational companies, including Sun Microsystems; Samsung; McDonald's; Nikon; Bally Total Fitness; Sara Lee; Volkswagen of America, Inc.; Amazon.com; FreshDirect; Trans World Entertainment; Scottish Enterprise; Verizon; Oxford Health Plans; Roche; The Mills Corporation; Los Angeles Community College District; The Palm Restaurants and many Fortune 1000 clients in the consumer, professional services and industrial sectors.
Advertising and PR firms, like MWW Group, increasingly depend on web-based tools to better manage projects, track real-time news and other information updates, as well as facilitate communications with clients. Furthermore, these firms increasingly need to differentiate themselves from competitive agencies with innovative technology solutions that enable them to provide better client service and ultimately more effective PR. Especially when it comes to blogs and wikis, both clients and PR agencies are realizing that Web2.0 technologies provide significant benefits for PR outreach and account management, as well as general vendor-client communications and collaboration.
Chartered with evaluating new technologies and determining their fit for internal employees and clients, MWW Group’s New Media team had explored a number of wikis. This included open-source options like PmWiki and commercial-grade solutions like Jotspot and Socialtext. It was clear to MWW Group that wikis could provide significant value to their business, so a decision was made to purchase a wiki solution for company-wide deployment. Socialtext was selected based on its superior enterprise-class features, proven ability to scale to handle many users concurrently accessing the wiki, as well as intuitive web interface that took only a few minutes for users to get comfortable using. MWW Group also liked the fact that Socialtext offered a turnkey appliance that was easy to deploy and could be installed on MWW Group’s network securely located behind their corporate firewall.
In August 2006, MWW Group deployed Socialtext and immediately the entire New Media team started using the wiki for communicating on projects, tracking media outreach and integrating new media initiatives specifically around blogging and podcasting. The New Media team quickly found a significant benefit of the wiki was that it reduced their time spent on email, especially handling large attachments like Microsoft Office and PDF files. Like the New Media team, the broader employees at MWW Group quickly adopted the wiki as a tool for project management, as well as broader team collaboration. Part of the rapid adoption of the Socialtext wiki was due to its very easy-to-use, web-based interface that typically only took a new user a few minutes of training before they were publishing, editing, commenting and viewing wiki content.
For the internal employees, the most common use of the wiki today is still around managing projects, tracking status and keeping schedules for critical PR activities. For example, it has become common practice for the MWW Group account executives to use the wiki to manage key elements of a PR launch, from the date of the launch, through key deliverables and milestones for launch materials, to links for the finalized press release and target media contacts. Some of the MWW Group staff also found the wiki provided an ideal environment for collaborating in real-time on documents and a number of teams started using the wiki to draft press releases, PR pitching documents and briefing materials. In other cases, the teams within MWW Group found the wiki was valuable for creating a knowledgebase of competitive and market intelligence data. Compared to the old approach of burying this content in memos or email messages, the wiki provided a centralized location to store all of this content, plus provided more immediate, searchable access for MWW staff. Much like the early experiences of the New Media team, the Socialtext wiki helped MWW Group reduce email traffic significantly across the company, in turn taking load off the Microsoft Exchange email server and improving its responsiveness.
Today, all of the MWW Group employees have access to the Socialtext wiki while roughly half of the company is actively using the wiki on a regular basis. In addition to the internal application of wikis, MWW Group also extends wiki access to their clients. For the individual client teams, MWW Group creates a unique, branded wiki workspace that the client is invited into via email. The client can then access real-time information updates from MWW Group’s account teams, track project status, as well as use the wiki to collect comments and contribute feedback on PR strategy. One of the most interesting findings for MWW Group was that by marketing their use of wikis and other Web2.0 technologies in approaching new business opportunities, they were able to increase their win-rate and sign up more clients. In the future, MWW Group plans to continue driving adoption of the Socialtext wikis both internally and with their clients. They are also interested in how to integrate the wiki more closely with their other IT infrastructure, such as their Microsoft Active Directory for authentication services and SharePoint for portal services.
One of the key reasons the Socialtext wiki appliance was selected by MWW Group was its usability was far superior to competitive offerings. New users of the wiki, both employees and clients, could become productive using the wiki in as little as 15 minutes, which was found to spur adoption and reduce training and support costs for MWW Group’s IT staff. Not only did the ease-of-use provided with the Socialtext wiki prove be a significant advantage, MWW Group also found that due to the turnkey design of the Socialtext appliance, they were able to deploy Socialtext quickly and immediately have users begin defining wiki workspaces and publishing wiki pages. Since upgrades to the Socialtext appliance can be performed over the network through an automated procedure, MWW Group also found the time and energy required to upgrade and maintain the Socialtext solution was minimal. Another key advantage of the Socialtext wiki was the fact that it provided a true collaboration platform that addressed the needs around wiki-based collaboration, but also integrated with traditional and emerging tools, like email, blogs, RSS feeds and search.
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Case study authored by Jeff Brainard, Director of Marketing at Socialtext, based on interview with MWW Group
Case study submitted by Socialtext, a wiki vendor
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Page Last Updated: Jul 25 12:23pm by dave burke