Wikipedia
Microsoft recently got in trouble for trying to pay people to edit the Microsoft Wikipedia page, to remove items they did not like. This backfired on the company horribly, with the story being released and the comments remaining on the site anyway.
Of the many great tools available online for messaging, Wikipedia creates the best possibilities for businesses. Despite whatever champions of the site would tell you about their Utopian ideals - high volume traffic is still high potential income.
Wikipedia gets a vast amount of traffic that rivaled Amazon.com and MySpace in 2006. Since it invites visitors to contribute to the creation of its content, it is not only possible to build entries for your clients, it is, in a sense, invited - if you do it properly.
Wikipedia recently changed their pages by including a “nofollow” tag that precludes search engine spiders indexing them. This was done because a vast number of Wikipedia pages and entries were being created by “black hat” search engine marketers as link spam. Since Wikipedia was used as an element of Google’s own search algorithm, if one had a link from Wikipedia it would dramatically effect Google search rankings as well. With the nofollow link in place, hopefully, these people have abandoned Wikipedia for other link building practices.
In the meantime, Wikipedia is still a great opportunity for marketers to promote clients, IF you are able to objectively describe your client. The greatest challenge people find when trying to use Wikipedia for marketing purposes is decidedly not using promotional language, which tips readers off that the information isn’t objective, and therefore cannot necessarily be trusted as fact.
Consider going to Wikipedia to look up the Bhopal disaster of 1984. If the text of this entry included descriptions of Union Carbide as an otherwise very careful and responsible company that just had this one little accident and you can hardly blame them… how long would you believe any of the rest of the text? How much work would you have to put into deciding what is spin and what is fact?
Wikipedia users are not interested in how great a company is, or how effective a product is, or how your client is thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. All Wikipedia wants is objective, verifiable fact. If you can make a statement about your client, and back it up with a link from another web site, you can be in business with Wikipedia.
Here are samples of pages I’ve worked on either as author or co-author, in order of their creation.
Look through the tabs marked, “edit this page.” These show the earlier drafts, how they were changed, and usually the reason for the change. In the early attempts, pages were very long and read like copy. These were easily sniffed out by other Wikipedia editors, and the pages were nominated for deletion. Only once the pages were pared down did they survive peer review.
Still, there are opportunities in Wikipedia for public relations, if you can find them. Look at the references cited for The Little Gym. These are two articles cited to verify what is said in the article. At the same time, these sources have names like, “The Future of Children’s Fitness,” and “40 new locations since 2004, Tops 200 mark.” Sure, the Wikipedia page is impartial - is it my fault that the sources I cited have such glowing appellation?
Bear in mind that these pages are also open to other users to modify. It is a good idea to periodically check your Wiki entry in case someone tries to hijack it, or makes edits you feel just aren’t right. Your page can also be nominated for deletion at any time - this will lead to a tedious voting period, where other editors will decide the merit of including the page on Wikipedia. Therefore, you’ll want to pay attention in case you have to put up a fight for your entry.
Don’t be fooled - writing an entry for Wikipedia is a lot of work, not so much in deciding what to write, but in negotiating the wants and needs of the Wikipedia community. If you learn their ropes, however, and maintain good citizenship, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to promote your noteworthy company in the annals of the most widely read online encyclopedia.
