Wikinomics – A Must Read

Did anyone read a (paperback)  book called Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams?

I found this book while in Malaysia recently and I have to say if you’re into online marketing – in fact if you’re any kind of entrepreneur – you gotta check this thing out…

It’s about the way that content creation, and value delivery in business culture is making a move (according to these guys) from being centralized and internalized at a company, to being decentralized and externalized and it’s resulting in enormous gains for the companies doing it properly.

What I mean is this:

Think about Encyclopedia Britannica vs Wikipedia.

Britannica pays a group of researchers and writers to produce their content. They publish it in a solid book, and repeat the process for future editions.

Wikipedia pays no one, but gets to tap the knowledge of potentially anyone and EVERYONE who is ALREADY knowledgeable about any given subject, and utilize THEIR content for it’s own gain.

Sure people still don’t quite see Wikipedia as as reputable a source of content – but because wikipedia’s content gets changed and improved every day, who’s going to come out on top?

They shared some crazy statistics like the fact that any given error in Wikipedia is changed X amount of time faster than one in Britannica – and it was MUCH faster.

The principle is that by accessing the talent of people OUTSIDE of your organization, you can produce higher quality output, get more done for less money, and generally dominate competition that’s not as switched on to this global revolution.

It’s vital for us in this industry to recognize the potential here in areas like open source, and in our outsourcing efforts.

Is there any project you have that could be added to by allowing a project wiki (freely available at somewhere like wetpaint.com or wikidot.com) where you could gain tips and advice, even contribution to the workload from your peers or customers?

The authors put forth a compelling argument that if you can’t go with this new flow of transparency, mass collaboration, and decentralized value creation, you’ll soon be beaten out by someone who can.

I got a stack of new ideas from reading this book and I think it’s compulsory for anyone who calls themselves an entrepreneur

Wikinomics, head over to amazon and pick it up.