by Judette Coward-Puglisi

SOCIAL MEDIA – I love all the new future communication tools that have quickly changed the way we communicate, but while it's easy to jump on the Facebook, Twitter or Blogspot bandwagon, it's much harder to pick a path of your own – one that forces you to look past the rhetoric and hype and consider these tools as what they ultimately are.

Six months ago I challenged one of our interns, who spent most of her spare time on the Web – I asked her to evaluate all the social media tools out there and find ways we could adopt and adapt them strategically to our business.

Months later, after getting us up and running with a blog, a facebook and in second life, we added two multinational companies to our slew of clients (they found us through our blog), I chatted with a friend on facebook after ten years of out of contact, and I've attended conferences at Harvard (through second life) from my offices in Trinidad.

But the number one social media tool that got me hooked like an addict to his fix is the wiki – a collaborative tool which allows multiple users to work literally off the same page – which, once you get past its funky name, can completely revolutionise the way you work for good.

Sounds to good to be true? Ask yourself these questions:

* Do you ever have to work on large projects and make so-o-o many changes to one email attachment that you're left wondering "which one is the latest?"

* Is the sheer volume of email in your inbox exhausting your capacity to effectively read and/or reply to important messages in a timely manner?

* Do you or members of your team depend on consistent access to info via inconsistent methods – email, IM, file servers and so on?

* Do you sometimes find it impossible to retrieve information because members of your team have the information siloed
in their heads?

If you answered yes, then chances are that wikis will do well in your workplace. At my firm, Mango Media Caribbean, all our media lists, client's speaking calendars, editorials, Press releases and speeches, and event management systems have undergone "wikification".

My staff no longer emails me their work for comment or approval, they post it on our wiki, and I make comments and edits in real time. If my senior project assistant leaves the office for a meeting I can go to our wiki and catch up on any project.

Our weekly status report was a great example of a real sore point that our wiki remedied almost immediately.

We were able to centralise all the edits in wiki, which ensured that the most current version was always on deck. It also automatically archived all our reports for future reference.

There are additional benefits, too: our team can capture notes from meetings, hyperlink to outside sources, and append related attachments.

While there are tons of wiki options out there, it's easy to source one that will work for you. The most common is the hosted services offered by providers such as Jotspot (bought by Google) and social text – all you need is a credit card and your wiki will be born.

The coolest thing about a wiki is that it is customisable to suit your team's work, because one size never fits all.