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Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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Marketing via Wikipedia

I’m sitting in an airline lounge at Dulles, having just finished a talk on new media to the annual gathering of US Army Public Affairs officers. During the talk, I showed the Wikipedia entry for the US Army and for the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, pointing out that the Army had an opportunity to ensure the content posted there was accurate. I also suggested that Army information not included on Wikipedia could be added.

Here at the airport, checking my feeds, I came upon an article by a PR blogger of whom I’d been unaware, Rohit Bhargava, who writes the “Influential Interactive Marketing” blog, “Reflections on creating compelling marketing, advertising & public relations online.” In the article, Bhargava reflects on a session he attended at the Search Engine Strategies conference at which one of the speakers told of introducing a Wikipedia entry dedicated to a proprietary platform and development environment for a visual programming language from National Instruments. The initial entry was 40 characters long.

Within 20 minutes, the post had been edited, and now has several pages of dense content on Wikipedia and appears highly on search results on Google for Labview.  It is a great example of how marketers can jump start the creation of third party content that ends up being a wonderful selling and marketing tool - assuming you are able to release control and let the greater community take over.

True enough, and I applaud Jeff Watts from National Semiconductor for the effort. It also raised a red flag, though. First, the powers that be at Wikipedia could identify such an entry as a blatant attempt at marketing and remove it. (The term “podfading”) was removed after someone tried to enter it, even though it has entered the podcasting lexicon.) It’s also easy to trace the IP address of somebody adding or entering an item. That’s what happened to “podfather” Adam Curry when he tried to revise the podcasting entry, making him the target of some unkind publicity.

While I have no doubt some smart PR people will use the idea of new entries in Wikipedia as a guerrilla marketing tactic, I also have no doubt that some clumsy, unprofessional, brainless dolts will apply the same techniques more brutishly, resulting in a backlash and (as so often happens in our business) wind up having the rest of us painted with their brush.

It’s a good idea, but tread carefully if you try it. Make sure your entry adds value to Wikipedia readers, not just to your client.

12/31/69 | 7 Comments | Marketing via Wikipedia

Comments

  • 1.I agree that marketers need to tread extremely lightly when it comes to entering/editing Wikipedia entries. There is some room, I think, for them to do so for the sake of completeness and accuracy. Raw data is a good thing for companies to provide on their products but marketing spin is something else and that's something they should avoid at all costs.

    To my mind creating an entry and providing the bare facts on something is acceptable behavior but anything beyond that should be left to the community.

    Chris Thilk | March 2006 | Chicago

  • 2.Rohit Bhargava sees a way for marketers to carefully become part of the Wikipedia community by making slight edits to articles in an effort to facilitate further discussion. The key, he says, is to let go once you've jumped in.

    http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/03/marketing_a | March 2006

  • 3.Wikipedia is becoming one of the most powerful pieces of media in the world. The time has come that it needs to be a routine part of research and monitoring for brand and corporate communicators at least, and rules

    http://open.typepad.com/open/2006/03/have_you_wiki | March 2006

  • 4.Thank you for raising this issue. Wikipedia is a community treasure, and I'm glad to see us have a discussion about our responsibilities to it.
    Kathy Hale

    Kathy Hale | March 2006

  • 5.Shel - thanks for the fair and insightful assessment of the issue from both sides. I definitely agree that it's a tactic which should be used carefully and there is a danger that overzealous marketers will use it improperly and a backlash against "wikispam" will emerge. In my opinion, it doesn't discount the point (as a commenter to my blog put it) that Wikipedia is beginning to hold the "sum of human knowledge." I think some corporate information has a legitimate place in that repository. And I am sure Wikipedia contributers will continue to determine which content does, and which doesn't.

    Rohit Bhargava | March 2006 | Washington DC

  • 6.Shel -

    At DePaul University we are considering how to update the university's wikipedia entry. There are some errors of fact in the Controversy section that should be straightforward to correct (I hope).

    Less simple is considering how and whether to amend the university's description. For example, DePaul was an early pioneer and current heavy proponent of experiential and service learning (ranked among top 25 by US News), yet this is not mentioned in the listing. The listing leaves out three of our eight colleges. Notable professors in one college are listed, but not from other colleges (including no mention of our Nobel Peace Prize nominee).

    I think that these facts would be useful to someone who wanted to know more about DePaul, but they also are part of our marketing arsenal, and I certainly have an agenda here. The listing does not have an author (or at least I could not identify one) with whom I could correspond. How would you suggest I approach modifying our entry?

    Kris Gallagher | April 2006 | Chicago, IL

  • 7.Folks might be interested in an article I wrote for PR Tactics (the PRSA newspaper) about Wikipedia and using it for PR. I provide some background and some guidelines for editing articles. It's on PRSA's site at http://www.prsa.org/viewNews.cfm?pNewsID=197 or on my Web site at http://www.brianwasson.com/portfolio/wikipedia.html

    Brian Wasson | July 2006 | Philadelphia, Pa.

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