Just about every business on the planet wants to find more effective ways to provide continuing education for their people. In the past if your business was small this wasn’t much of an issue. You could get people together in a room once a week and exchange knowledge. Now more than ever, it’s likely that your small company employs people who are spread out across regions, nations and maybe even continents. All of a sudden the weekly learning meeting is much more difficult to accomplish than it was before.

Another problem that companies have involves delivering content that is relevant for each member of the audience. After all, someone who has been with a company or in a particular industry for a long time, will have different learning needs than a person who is new. And to be effective in your educational goals you need to deliver the right knowedge to the right person. Thankfully, a great social media tool called a Wiki exists. Wikis are web based documents that can be edited by anyone through a web browser.

You can use wiki technology to create a killer knowledge base for your company. Treat the effort like any other internal project. Create a list of goals. Develop an outline for the key areas of education. Then assign the most knowledgable people in your organization with the task of adding what they know to your knowledge base. Once you’ve got a certain amount of knowledge present in your base you can open it up to those that can use the knowledge most. Wiki software typically includes good search features that make it easy for your people to find relevant information.

Another important point to make is the fact that Wikis work well as living documents. As people in your organization become more knowledgeable, they can add and update information as necessary. Just think about the difference between having your knowledge spread out between dozens (and maybe hundreds) of documents or presentations and having that same information included in a very searchable and easily reachable Wiki.

The decision to use Wiki technology to power your company’s knowledge base won’t necessarily yield results overnight. Like all the tools of social media, Wiki’s provide the most value only after you’ve made a committment or time and effort to the project. But you’ll also find that going the way of the Wiki will provide you with a much more economical and a more effective solution than traditional knowledge management solutions.

[tags]Social Media, Wikis, Business Ideas[/tags]