Brian Solis writes about some of the resistance to blogging that he encounters from companies, and much of this applies to to wikis and enterprise 2.0 tools in general. For example, one questions he was asked is, “How would you recommend clients use blogging as part of their PR strategy?” The easy answer is I would love them to start…” The same is true with wikis in the enterprise (for a wide range of things, not just PR – keep in mind Brian’s blog is primarily about PR and Marketing). The key is starting – as I wrote earlier: You can’t win if you don’t play.

Another argument has to do with measuring return on investment: “The challenge initially is to justify and measure the investment against a legitimate and proven ROI model. It just doesn’t stack up or compare to anything most companies do today, so it’s an incredibly difficult first step.” Same with wikis. One bright light is this comment by Stan Gibson about wiki use at Motorola: “As at many enterprises that have seen wiki proliferation, Redshaw and Singh performed no cost/benefit analysis ahead of time and have not tracked return on investment. That’s because the investment in wiki technology is so low as to be negligible and the payback is intuitively understood, yet difficult to quantify.”

Brian ends the post with this quote: “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and it looks like hard work” – Thomas Edison. This is true, but it goes even further than looking like hard work to start. Blogs, wikis, and social media are difficult to measure using the traditional means, and change the existing power structure in organizations. This scares some people because it means they might lose a certain level of power they’ve enjoyed, but trying to delay adoption of the new tools will only work temporarily, since others who see their value and will directly benefit from them are already bringing them in under the radar.