This blog post is part of my course Social Media Strategist at Social Media Academy which I previously blogged about here.

Once again, I am having some troubles doing this exercise with my company as a subject. As we are a strict consultant company and don’t sell any products there is no support function at all today, so the question on enhancing the support function gets weird. Instead, as before, I will focus on Wikimedia Sverige and Wikipedia. Wikimedia is initself a support organisation to Wikipedia, which makes this an important function.

So firstly, finding engaged users. Luckily there is a list of mentors who have agreed to answer questions, Already a collection of online voluntary support users! Luckily I know a few of them and that they really are power users and that getting them influential would be of great importance. Secondly I would start following their user pages, to be able to chip in with my 2 öre and show them that we care enough to help them too.

There is also the facebook group, but unfortunatly it seems that I am the most active person there, and that I have not had that many possibilities to answer questions.

But there is also some other places to get support right now; questions about Wikipedia, questions about facts and questions about images. And it is very easy to find out who has been most active there (Wikipedia, facts, images).

Splendid! We now have a list of the people who is really helping out on the support side. So what can our strategy be to empower them and what would our strategy be?

Firstly, be active at the places and spaces where the discussion is. Secondly, personally give them credit when credit is due and help them out in the qickest way possible. These are quite obvious. But there is also a point trying to monitor what is said about Wikipedia in Swedish and be bold and answers these questions as soon as possible, or at least point the persons in the right direction. Still this is not so much of a strategy, but more of fixing what is broken today. What would be really helpfull would be a tool, in which a person who wants to know something more could ask for it, without even having to leave Wikipedia or search hard for it.

This is nothing that is technically possible today, but since it is of strategic importance, developers should be put to look into the issue. This is great! We have just found a flaw in our system and also have an idea what would make it better. Even if we sort of knew this already, we had not rationalized about it.

Is there something else that you think we could do better?