Wikipedia is a nonprofit, user-generated encyclopedia, which has all of its content created, edited, and fact-checked by community members. Founded in 2001, it has become a major source of consumer generated media, and is currently one of the top 10 most viewed websites on the Internet.

While any individual can create a username and establish themself as a reliable and accurate editor, this is not required to make edits, however the ip address of anyone making edits is logged, so as to provide some means of tracking. Any single person looking to make edits to a page may do so, (with few exceptions), and publish it for immediate public consumption.

Wikipedia is highly visible in search engines, especially in popular searches, broad keywords and company names, where Wikipedia will frequently display in the top 3 results returned (especially on Google). Wikipedia is a useful component of a social media marketing strategy because it can be a source of traffic, and is considered to be a good source of credibility. Having an established Wikipedia entry requires some notability, otherwise it can be removed, but most nonprofit organizations would not struggle with this requirement. A full-length Wikipedia article on your mission, history, achievements, prominent supporters, and press can easily rank in the search engines for your brand name and possibly even related keywords.

Wikipedia can be one facet of an ongoing positive reputation management campaign that can help spread your footprint. Creating content (that you have the power to edit) on a highly visible social media site can help you take up shelf space in your search results and defend yourself against negative results that may creep into page one (in other words, you can use it to effectively de-optimize already ranking rogue listings).

Recently Wikipedia implemented the ‘no-follow’ tag on all links from the site, while this has decreased the direct effectiveness of the site in regard to passing link authority to a site (although as Wikipedia pages are available for use under the GNU free documentation license, any other sites that take the information may not implement ‘no-follow’), it has no effect on the traffic potential from Wikipedia.

Other social aspects of Wikipedia include the Discussion page that corresponds to each article, and the Talk page of each editor. You can encourage user edits by asking questions and offering suggestions in the discussion section, and engage someone already editing your content in their talk page, as Wikipedia does frown on companies starting or editing their own pages. The reason for this being that they don’t want the data to read like a sales brochure, or be overly biased one way or another. Doing so, and being caught doing so can raise the ire of the community, which may lead to non-complimentary text being added to your pages, or your account being banned. Therefore using the discussion section, or having third parties edit your pages is the best way to go to effectively use Wikipedia as part of your social media strategy.

Filed under: Non-Profits, Reputation Management, SEO, Social Marketing on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 by Jacob Wolfsheimer |
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.