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CUSTOMERS.COM® RESEARCH
FROM THE PATRICIA SEYBOLD GROUP
BUILDING A CUSTOMER COMMUNITY WITH WETPAINT
How a Wetpaint Wiki Can Support Your Customer Community
By Matthew D. Lees, March 6, 2008
NETTING IT OUT
Wikis were developed initially to help manage
collaborative projects (think Wikipedia). Because they can make it easy for
anyone—at least, anyone
with appropriate permissions—to create and edit Web pages on the fly,
without needing to know HTML or other Web languages, wikis have found traction
in all sorts of collaborative efforts.
The main knock on wikis as an online community
platform has been that they aren’t good at supporting discussions. They’re good at helping
people manage collective information—crucial for supporting group projects,
for example—but not for enabling conversations, the lifeblood of
the online community experience.
Enter Wetpaint, the name of both the company and its on-demand, Web-based product.
The Wetpaint wiki was designed, from its launch in 2006, as a wiki to be
used as a community platform. Combining the Web-page editability of a wiki
with threaded discussion lists and other community and social-networking
elements, it has become a cost-effective option for individuals and organizations
that want to create an online space for, and connect with, others who share
the same interests and needs.
Wetpaint is not ideal at supporting all types
of communities—it is geared
more toward affinity communities (fan and enthusiast sites, promotional B2C
sites, etc.) than ones focused on peer-to-peer service and support—but
its ease of use, variety of pricing options (starting with the ad-supported
free version), and integrated Wetpaint Network make it an appealing option
for many small- to medium-sized communities.
INTRODUCTION
Wetpaint in a Nutshell
Launched in June 2006, Wetpaint is a hosted
wiki platform available to consumers and businesses. It currently claims
to host over 750,000 free user-created
wikis and close to 100 “partner” (i.e., paid for) sites. The
name “Wetpaint” runs parallel to the concept of perpetual beta;
the company explains that it “…got its name from the fact that
Wetpaint sites are never really done—the content is always changing
as a passionate community guides it, evolves it, and helps it grow.”
Wetpaint’s philosophy is to give people easy-to-use tools for creating
and sharing their own content. Based on this approach, Wetpaint’s two
main attractions are its ease of use and the traffic it can generate through
the Wetpaint Network (see below).
Overall, Wetpaint is better suited to supporting affinity communities (fan/enthusiast
sites, promotional B2C sites) than enterprise collaboration among workgroups.
But, that said, because of its user friendly WYSIWYG editor, logical navigational
elements, and ability to support private, invitation-only wikis, Wetpaint
is also finding some traction as a collaboration (or intranet) platform with
small businesses and academic institutions.
Illustration 1 shows the home page of Hewlett-Packards’ Small & Medium
Printing wiki/community.
Hewlett-Packard’s Wetpaint Community – Small & Medium
Business Printing
© 2008 Hewlett-Packard Development
Company, L.P.
Illustration 1. HP leverages Wetpaint’s white-label service to support
its Small & Medium Business Printing community.
Highlights
Wetpaint was named by Time Magazine as one of the 50 best Web sites of 2007.
It excels in the following areas:
EASE OF USE COMBINED WITH AMPLE FUNCTIONALITY. All
wikis are touted as being “easy
to use,” but most fall short. Wikis are often confusing to use and administer.
Wetpaint is about as easy a wiki to use as we’ve seen, and it includes
a reasonable breadth of user and administrator functionality (discussed below).
WETPAINT NETWORK. All Wetpaint
wikis are, by default, part of the Wetpaint Network. When you register at
Wetpaint, you create a single Wetpaint identity/profile
that spans its Network, allowing you to join particular Wetpaint wikis
with a single click. Because the Wetpaint home page features its wikis, it’s
easy for people to find (and join, if you’re so inclined) wikis of
interest. This is a benefit to users. The benefit to companies and other
wiki owners is that this also generates traffic to wikis throughout the
Network, some of which might not otherwise find visitors.
COST OPTIONS. The standard
version of Wetpaint is free to everyone, whether you are an individual or
an organization. The free version, though, comes
with Google ads (although Wetpaint is running a limited trial of ad-free
wikis for $19.95 per month). For a completely branded, customized, and
ad-free environment, Wetpaint offers a turnkey white-label service for businesses, “Just
Add Wetpaint.” It also offers a free—and ad-free—version
to educational organizations.
PUBLIC OR PRIVATE. Wikis owners can make their wikis open to the public or
accessible only to those specifically invited. This latter method is commonly
used for private collaboration within small working groups, while wikis that
are looking to build a large following (such as fan sites) benefit from being
accessible to everyone.
OVERVIEW OF WETPAINT
Based in Seattle, WA, Wetpaint, the company, was founded in October 2005, with
Wetpaint, the product, launching in June of the following year. To date,
Wetpaint has raised nearly $15 million in private investment from Accel Partners,
Trinity Ventures, and Frazier Technology Ventures.
CEO Ben Elowitz brings brick-and-mortar, consulting,
and dotcom experience to the company. He has worked at fitness equipment
company Precor USA, consulting
firm Bain & Company, and online bookstore Fatbrain.com (acquired in
2000 by Barnes and Noble). Before co-founding Wetpaint with several other
partners,
Elowitz was Vice President of the online jewelry retailer Blue Nile, which
he also co-founded.
Customers
The company claims that over 750,000 Wetpaint wikis have been built by individuals
and organizations. Like most wikis, Wetpaint can be used for a variety of
purposes, typically based around some type of shared topic of interest. Most
seem to be created and managed by individuals around their own personal interests
and activities. Many are temporal in nature, built for one-time events and
short-term projects, while many others have no time constraint and are maintained
on an ongoing basis.
Wetpaint has close to 100 partner sites in a variety of industries such as
Media (television and publishing), Hi-Tech, and Telecommunications. (See
Table A for a selected list with brief descriptions.)
Select Wetpaint Customers
(Please download the formatted PDF to see the table at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/pp03-06-08cc.)
Table A. A selection of Wetpaint’s nearly 100 white-label customers.
Pricing and Services
The standard version of Wetpaint is free to
anyone, whether an individual, business, or not-for-profit organization.
Pages on free Wetpaint wikis, which
make up the large majority of them, are sprinkled with context-sensitive
Google ads. (Illustration 2 shows Better Homes and Garden’s Wetpaint-powered
Better Recipes.com, non-white-label wiki.)
Better Recipes.com Wiki
© 2007 Meredith Corporation
Illustration 2. The Wetpaint-powered BetterRecipes.com
wiki is Better Homes and Garden’s non-white-label wiki. Note
the two locations for Google ads, one of which tends to be more of
a disruption than the other.
In late 2007, Wetpaint rolled out its white-label service, “Just Add
Wetpaint.” For a cost of about $10,000, it includes the complete hosted
Wetpaint platform as well as custom design and development, content development,
support, content-monitoring and moderation services, search engine optimization
(SEO), and Wetpaint promotions of your wiki. Additional monthly charges are
based on traffic (such as page views), although the company does have a number
of agreements with some business customers who share advertising revenue
in lieu of paying a flat monthly hosting and service fee.
As mentioned earlier, Wetpaint is currently conducting
a limited-basis test of an ad-free version for $19.95/month. This price
point wouldn’t include
any of the “Just Add Wetpaint” services, but it would give companies
(and individuals, too) another Wetpaint option, and one that will be appealing
to those who find that the Google ads dilute their brand. We’d therefore
expect this ad-free version to generate reasonable adoption, although it
will likely cannibalize some potential “Just Add Wetpaint” partners.
Qualifying education-related wikis are both free (dollar
wise) and ad free. The qualifications—middle school, high school, and university classrooms;
group projects given by teachers; dissertations and school work-related portfolios;
and educators connecting with parents—seem quite reasonable.
Competition
In the pure wiki space, Wetpaint competes with SeedWiki,
Wikia, PBwiki, MediaWiki (open source, but not hosted), Socialtext (more
for enterprise collaboration),
Google Sites (Google’s recently launched resurrection of the JotSpot
wiki, which it purchased in 2006), and many others. It’s competition
as an open-to-the-public, on-demand community platform, includes Ning,
Gather, and CollectiveX Groupsites.
This report continues...
To read the full report: http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/pp03-06-08cc
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