Uber-blogger Henry Abbott of TrueHoop (now part of ESPN) is heading to the NBA All-Star Game, and he’s taking PBwiki with him.

Henry has asked TrueHoop’s tens of thousands of readers to join with him in creating a wiki for the All-Star Game which will include articles, posts, videos, and other original content.  And he’s chosen PBwiki.  Here’s what Henry had to say:

Let’s use that wiki to assemble, starting now and running all weekend, all of the best articles, blog posts, video, and original anecdotes about what’s happening all over the city. Not just the stuff that’s in press releases, but what’s really happening on the ground.

If you’re from New Orleans, and have a story to tell about having the All-Star game in your city, please share it here. If you find a great article or video about New Orleans, this is the place for it.

Basically, I am hoping that with your help this can become a go-to resource of the best real New Orleans information as All-Star Weekend rolls on. It’ll take a lot of you pitching in with thougtful contributions. But if you do, this’ll really be something.

Also, I’ll be honest, in the past I have found wikis kind of hard to operate. Not this one. It’s really simple. Try it. (emphasis added) Here’s the link again. Thanks.

Credit the assist to David Cohn of DigiDave fame for setting up the wiki.  Big thanks to both Henry and Dave for introducing PBwiki to such a broad audience.

If you want to visit the wiki, just go to http://truehoop.pbwiki.com.

One of the strongest pieces of feedback we’ve gotten is to improve our editor.

Good news — PBwiki 2.0 includes a new editor that makes using your wiki far easier. I’ve been using it internally and it’s fantastic.

Click to enlarge

What does the new editor include?

• Better handling of bullet points and numbered lists.

• Better handling of line spacing and fonts.
• “Much more WYSIWYG-ness.” (That’s straight from our Director of Engineering.) Edit mode will look much more like the final version.

When we launched our Point-and-Click editor a year ago, we noticed a quick upsurge in our usage. The easier it is to edit, the more people use PBwiki. So among our other new features, We’re very excited to show you the new editor.

Golden Tickets: Get beta access to PBwiki 2.0
We have a limited amount of Golden Tickets to try out PBwiki 2.0 as a beta user. If you’re interested in trying out PBwiki 2.0 and giving us feedback, sign up for PBwiki 2.0 beta access.

[See our past Previews of PBwiki 2.0: Folders, Page-level access and an Overview of PBwiki 2.0.]

Fortune Small Business just wrote a nice article about how Lee Rosen of Rosen Law used his creativity to drive adoption of his PBwiki.

Rosen offered a $1,000 cash prize to his 32 employees–for every page they created on the wiki, they earned a possible combination to the company safe (which contained the aforementioned $1,000).  At the end of three months, the prize went to Ben Sutton (pictured below).

But Lee had the last laugh–by switching his people over to PBwiki, he saved $25,000 per year that he had been spending on running a Lotus Notes server.  And money wasn’t the only benefit:

“The biggest reason that we’re switching is that the wiki is easier to use,” says Rosen. “If employees see a better way to organize or present information, they can just go ahead and do it with a wiki. With Lotus Notes, it required a programmer.”

Maybe you don’t have $1,000 to spare to drive adoption of your wiki, but maybe you can modify Rosen’s technique to fit your organization.  How about giving your top user tickets to the game, or a night out on the town?

If you get your entire company using PBwiki, the benefits will far outweigh the cost.

Click here to read the Fortune Small Business article.

Improved customer service experience can be approached from two angles – business process changes or technology choices (or some combination of the two). I’d like to share some key trends shaping the business processes related to customer service today:

• Take an “outside-in” approach: a growing number of businesses are realizing the importance of having a greater explicit customer interaction when designing new service processes. Service executives need to be asking themselves: “What is the customer’s experience as they consume the service?”
• Traditional customer service tools have been “field based” or even “task based” – service executives need to move to more “intent driven” systems for customer service agents to use. Agents need to be empowered with a system that shows them a customer’s real context – their last interaction with your company, overall background, current sales deals, customer satisfaction. Give your agents a 360 degree view of the customer and things will inevitably improve.
• Home service workers are a great way to improve response times, attain localized support teams for your global products or services and reduce operating costs. Although this does raise some unique challenges, it is definitely worth exploring.
• Fear of taking responsibility: for customers, for change, for measurements. Few organizations want to empower a single person to change processes – especially with so many other variables in play. On the other hand, few service executives want to “stick their neck out” for fear of getting it cut off by upper management. Customer service executives need to take responsibility and ensure that their customer’s expectations are fully met.

Don’t forget: the customer’s experience needs to match your brand’s promise. If you’re in a competitive market (aren’t we all), customer service can be the differentiator between you and your competition.

We’re big fans of spicy food here at PBwiki and so today we set up a contest at the office to see who can take down the spiciest hot sauce within a set period of time.

The rules:

• We used the following hot sauces (generously provided by TK):
  • Round 1: Dave’s hurtin’ Jalapeno
  • Round 2: Great White Shark Predator Sauce
  • Round 3: Dave’s Insanity sauce
• There was a one minute waiting period between rounds – as measured by David
• Absolutely no drinks were permitted
• Each round consisted of one level teaspoon

The participants:

Ramit: <I’m super impressed that Kristine actually competed>

Kristine: <This is what happens when you work with a bunch of men – you end up chugging hot sauce. This time Ramit is going down – way down >

The first taste:

Second thoughts after the second round – Paul has the defibrillator handy:

David acted as the judge and jury:

This is why you should come work with us at PBwiki.

One of the skills every marketer (if not every person) needs to master is the art of managing expectations.

Managing expectations is a “Goldilocks” task–too high, and they’ll be impossible to meet; too low, and they’ll detract from your accomplishments; just right, and you’ll be a hero.  Of the potential pitfalls, high expectations are perhaps the most dangerous.

High expectations are seductive.  It feels good to have everyone saying good things about you.  “The Next Bill Gates” is a favorite chestnut that the business press dusts off whenever a hot new company with a photogenic founder appears on the scene (see Andreesen, Marc; Abrams, Jonathan; and Rose, Kevin).  But no matter how good it feels to ride the wave of hype, sooner or later, you’ll have to deliver the goods.  Too-high expectations carry a double-whammy: When they prove to be wrong, not only is the result a downer, it kills your credibility.

Take the impact of expectations on the current U.S. presidential race.  Senator Hillary Clinton began as the prohibitive favorite.  As recently as November, the Iowa Futures Market (the best predictor of presidential politics, since real money is at stake)  showed that her chances of earning the Democratic nomination were 75%.  That’s what made her third place finish in Iowa so shocking.  And as a result, in the immediate aftermath of the loss, she plummeted to a projected 25% chance of winning the nomination.

 

After that, however, the expectations game shifted.  Now the high expectations shifted to Senator Barack Obama, as a tidal wave of coverage (helped along by his own strength at inspirational oratory) sent his poll numbers skyrocketing.

But while the excitement helped Obama’s campaign in many ways, allowing expectations to get ahead of reality came back to haunt him.

Clinton had held a 17-point lead in New Hampshire, but it seemingly crumbled overnight as poll after poll showed Obama leading in the state.  On election night, Clinton squeaked out a 3-point win.  So who actually won?  Was it Obama, for making up 14 points in less than a week, only to fall short at the end?  Or was it Clinton, who held off her challenger when all expected her to lose.

The race was close enough for either explanation to take hold, but it was the latter narrative of Clinton’s resurgence (despite being a frontrunner who had lost 14 points off her lead) that ended up holding sway.

We saw a near replay on Super Tuesday this week.  After the South Carolina election (an unexpectedly large victory for Obama), Hillary and Bill Clinton indicated that they expected an overall victory once they took their message to the broader public.

Once again an Obama surge in the polls dropped the expectations for Clinton; I often thought that the national media was openly rooting for Obama to land a knockout blow.  Here in California, poll after poll indicated that Obama had closed a 20-point lead, and had even pulled ahead of Clinton.

When the dust settled, an objective analysis showed a near-perfect tie.  Obama won more states, but Clinton won the bigger prizes in New York and California.  Obama won the critical swing state of Missouri, but Clinton overcame a tidal wave of endorsements to win Massachusetts.  Obama came out with slightly more delegates, but it was statistically insignificant.

So who did win?  Nobody.  But both campaigns tried to frame the results as a win for their side–Obama by pointing out that he had overcome a big deficit in the earlier polls, Clinton, by arguing that she had done better than projected in the most recent polls.

Just politics?  Perhaps, but just ask the folks at Joost, who went from being the future of television (Sequoia had to beg Joost to take their money), to the walking dead in less than 9 months.

Great expectations require even greater execution.  ‘Tis better to set and exceed realistic goals than it is to ride the wave of hype…right into the trash heap.

We’ve come a long way since the early days of Salesforce.com, when Marc Benioff was blazing a trail with his “No Software” campaign.  Back then, the big question was whether or not corporate IT departments would ever accept on-demand software, as opposed to the traditional approach of on-premise hosting.

Here’s what Sun had to say:

At an event Sun hosted recently, one room was filled with CTOs from some of the world’s largest on-line companies; the room next door was filled with CIOs — from a broad spectrum of companies from China, Japan, Europe and North America. As Mr. Schwartz spoke with attendees from each room, he noticed that not a single company in the CTO room paid for software. They were interested in open source or software-as-a-service (SaaS) alternatives. In contrast, not a single company in the CIO room allowed free software without a commercial support contract. Not one.

There are two clear implications for ISVs. First, the time to move to the SaaS business model is yesterday. Your customers are asking for it; your competitors are offering it; it gives you a way to grow subscription revenue and move your service offering to the SMB market at the same time. Second, the cost of downtime is an overarching concern for customers. If you can deliver your software as a service, on demand, with extremely high levels of availability, you can win over both the CIO and the CTO.

That’s music to our ears.  Here at PBwiki, we have one simple business principle: give ‘em what they want.  We’re convinced that offering a reliable, easy-to-use service is the best way to serve our users and customers.  That’s why we’re the #1 SaaS wiki for business collaboration.

How has SaaS made a difference in your organization?