Wiki Ways

Late last month, Marketing Sherpa featured a case study on How to Use Wikipedia Entries for Lead Gen. A company named Attensa submitted the case and boasted about the 4% increase in their website traffic and 18% higher conversion rate.

Shortly thereafter, Attensa’s page was removed from Wikipedia for abusing Wikipedia’s Conflict of Interest policy and their Neutral Point of View Policy. Both the company and their media agency defended their contributions as valuable content that is not unlike other content existing on the site. Unfortunately, by posting their approach on Marketing Sherpa, they got burned.

To find other examples of infringement of these policies, I searched on a current release movie, Wall E, and found an in depth promotion of the flix. This post is a clear promotion of the movie and Pixar. Additional searches turn up Microsoft and IBM, with detailed pages featuring their logos and links to their websites. Hmmm. Am I missing something here? Is this about who posts the information? I am not sure that it’s realistic to analyze the motivations of every poster to this giant content site.

Perhaps Wikipedia yanked their content because the company admitted it was marketing strategy and their motivation for increasing their site traffic. How does one distinguish Attensa’s approach from the likes of IBM? The folks at Marketing Sherpa admit that there is ongoing confusion about how marketers can participate at Wikipedia and promise to report on developments as they happen.

Blog Backlash

In another story , Paul Gillin reported on a Forrester report in B-to-B Magazine last month that the misuse of blogs as a press release library is causing a backlash for corporate blogging. If the key goal of a blog were solely to raise your position in the search engines, this approach would be effective.

But blogs are about community discussion. No one is going to discuss your press release. They probably aren’t even going to read it. Alternatively, the corporate blog is a great place to open discussion about a customer service issue, in straight language, by real people. Gillin gives kudos to HP, General Motors and Marriott for having figured out how to use blogging to engage customers in honest and open dialog.

We Are Still Learning

The point of these stories is that we are still learning to use these new media tools successfully, and with new frontiers, there will be pioneers who learn the hard way what doesn’t work. These are the challenges and adventures of new media marketing. At the risk of sounding promotional, this blog is a good starting place to learn what some of those things are. Our blog roll provides you with many more.

As always, keep your ears open and enjoy the ride.