Final Session – Wikipedia Clinic

This is a working session, so I won’t try to post very much, but if you have an issue with your page on Wikipedia, or a competitor’s page (which is probably more likely), you have several options as far as bringing suspect content to the attention of the Wikipedia P. D., but probably the best place to go is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Adopt-a-User . 

This is where you can ask an experienced Wikipedia volunteer to Adopt You and show you the ropes.  Why make a blunder trying to fix a blunder?  Get some good, free advice first.  “What might take you hours to find / figure out, a mentor could probably tell you in five minutes.”

Note: Wikipedia is not the place for original content.  The content must first be in a blog post,  online media, or some other source so that it can be *cited* in Wikipedia.

Danny Sullivan just searched for himself in Wikipedia, and there is a race car driver also named Danny Sullivan.  So, in the spirit of the Wikipedia Clinic, I’m going to conclude my coverage of this Search Marketing Expo (SMX) conference with this search:

Charles Knight, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Charles Knight may refer to:

Charles Knight (publisher), an English author and publisher
Charles Knight (soldier) Lieutenant-Colonel during the Waterloo campaign
Charles Landon Knight, an American lawyer and publisher
Charles F. Knight, American chairman of Emerson Electric
Charles R. Knight, an American artist who specialized in dinosaur paintings

Drat! No Wikipedia page for me -yet.  

End of Session Ten.

End of Conference.

Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, and Answer Sharing

Lise Broer, Wikipedia

This was the most interesting talk so far.  I was listening so closely that I didn’t even type a word.  What did she say?

She’s a volunteer member of the Wikipedia P. D., specializing in Conflict of Interest issues – people promoting themselves or their companies, thinking that they are being clever.

Trust me.  “Durova” (her Username) will find you – and it will be a very bad day for you.

Editor’s note: I spoke with Lise after this session.  She does not want bloggers like me to perpetuate this image of her as the Wicked Wikipedia Witch of the West!  Marketers who are forthright and upfront about their past, present, and future plans will find that the Wikipedia administrators are firm – but reasonable.  (But I still wouldn’t want to get on her bad side.)

Tip: Release your Press Release to  the  Press.  Let them publish it.  Then cite that in the Wikipedia  top page.  Viola – legit.

Jonathan Hochman, Hochman Consultants

Wikipedia actually provides far more visibility than digg, SU or del.icio.us

Mistakes: Don’t use a promotional username.  Don’t try to add copyrighted information.  Don’t write about yourself or your company.  Spamming is a bad idea with terrible consequences because they share their blacklist!  Edits are public and easily traceable. 

Note: You can sign up for alerts so you will know if a particular page/article is changed.

You can also enhance your reputation by contributing to the accuracy of Wikipedia articles.

Mat McGee, Marchex

Yahoo! Answers: 

* OK for professionals to use.

* Good source of referral traffic

* Yahoo! Answers can rank high on Google, providing even more traffic.

* Check out the “Create RSS Feeds” feature  – very useful.

* Sign your name to your Y! answers.

*Do not spam!

Stephen Spencer, Netconcepts

Pay your dues.  Fix typos, report spam, etc.  Accumulate respect or “Street Cred” within the Wikipedia community gradually.  Eventually you can win awards and recognition.

To pass Wikipedia’s “Notability” test, you should be mentioned in reasonably authoratative media.  Search your company on Google’s News Archives.

Sadly, due to spam, when you create new content, you are “Guilty until proven innocent.”  Suspected of spam?  Wikipedia’s policy is to “Shoot first and ask questions later.”

What’s the greatest tool for using Wikipedia successfully?  Friends.  Just like social networking sites, it may some day come in handy to have a group of friends within the Wikipedia community to vouch for your character, etc.

Don Steele, Comedy Central

Ghandi has 1 Wikipedia page.  South Park has 158 pages.

Wikipedia is a very key piece of Reputation Management for Comedy Central.  Is the information accurate?  Just don’t monkey with your own content directly!  What you can do is makes comments on the discussion pages in order to assist those who are editing or contributing the content.

End of Session Nine.

Micro Communities

Liana “Li” Evans, KeyRelevance

Highly Competitive Markets:..Casinos…Viagra…Travel…Diets…Wine….see Snooth.com

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay Per Click) are far less effective now because of the enormous increase in websites.

Identify good bloggers - send Personalized Emails – offer them a free sample / invites to trials / interviews -Something- Plan Contact / Monitor Results.  Sound calculating?  Welcome to Search Marketing!

You’re looking for the “Big Catch,” so you have to “fish where the fish are.”

Bottom Line:  The new formula is (maybe) SEO and (maybe) PPC, but definitely SMM!

Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz

Read/WriteWeb was just mentioned as a good place to find Web 2.0 companies.

With micro communities – like the niche of Alternative Search Engines – it is fairly easy to find a person or a blog or web site that talks about one very particular subject.  From there, you should be able to expand outwards until you have pretty much discovered the complete “space” for that topic.  It’s a simple – bad news: small audience.  good news: fairly easy to reach them all.

Sites of Interest:  LibraryThing / Care2 / WebMD / Yelp / Trulia / PeerTrainer / DonorChoose / ThinkVitamin / Minti / Real Estate Voices / DeviantArt / SportsShooter / Threadless / Cork’d / Imbee / Virb / Wayfaring / CouchSurfing {other people come through your town and sleep ‘on your couch’} / Wikihow / Helium / Etsy {nice} / Avvo {lawyers} / Urbis / BakeSpace / FoodCandy / Sphinn / The Stranger / ebay (!)

What are these for?  From a Search Marketer’s perspective, it’s not that your topic will necessarily match one of these topics, although that would be great, it’s that you might be able to slide in a post or comment that is semi-related and get some links.  Sound like a bit of a stretch?  Welcome to search marketing and the blogosphere.  SEOs are the has-beens.  Bloggers are the new power brokers.

Here’s the example:  The client markets a Diet Shake.  So they tried SEO – too competitive.  Then they tried PPC – total waste of money.  Then they contacted bloggers and said, “Hey, would you like to have some free Diet Shakes?  Are you a little pudgy?”  But don’t ask them to blog about the Diet Shake!  Play it cool.  The blogger will just say “Buy an ad on my blog.”  Just keep trolling, and wait to see which bloggers “bite” – i.e. write a free post.

End of Session Eight

Evangelist – The Marketer’s Role in SMM

Rob Key, Converseon: 

Online communities are evolving into different “cultures,” each with their own values,  enforcement mechanisms (to preserve those values), and language/lingo (RTFA).  Visitors to these communities violate the existing norms at their – sometime great – peril.  Violators can be ridiculed, exiled, flamed, or buried.  In other words, it can backfire or blow up in their face.

“Ask not what the community can do for your company, but what your company can do for the community.” (digg, FB, MS, de.icio.us, SU, Second Life (SL), and on and on)  For example you can buy a virtual tree in SL, and a company will plant the identical tree in the real world.

Note: when you enter an online community, be prepared to relinquish some control over your contribution, “controlling the message” is old media.

Adam Sherk, Define Search Strategies

Search engine marketers – the ones that spoke yesterday – boast about the number of times that the have been banned from these social sites because they are always pushing the limits of what is acceptable, or I should say “do-able.”  This is often called “gaming” the system.  Well, it is what it is.

Large corporations may get banned, but usually it’s out of ignorance of a social community’s values.  But they also have large (very, very large) dollars invested in their brands/reputation management.  And yet they want to edge into the online world – like a child walking down a swimming pool ramp into the cold water one inch at a time.

Small companies are nimble.  Very nimble.  Large corporations move slowly.  Very slowly.

? How will you sustain your online efforts over the long-term?  Short term is easier.

? What happens if your ‘brand ambassador’ or Power User up and leaves the company?

? What about employees who have their own personal profiles – which mention that they work for your company – and then they misbehave online?  What are the rules about that?

Can anyone comment about that – about policies that you have at your workplace?

Top 10 lists still work.  <me whistling…whistling…>

Listen, corporate online campaigns are like going bowling.  You pick out a heavy ball, aim it toward the pins, but then you let go of it and just stand there, watching to see if you get a strike or a gutter ball.

Sarah Hofstetter,  360i

* SEO – Google this speaker’s TV show “Living with Ed” (Actor & Environmentalist Ed Begley, Jr.) and you would get “Living with Erectile Dysfunction or ‘ED’.”  That’s why some people need SEO help.

* Audience building – contacting boggers, Actually Reading Their Blogs, and then aligning your pitch with their goals.  If you ask AltSearchEngines to write about your new FaceBook application, it is probably not going to get you anywhere.  See also: Common Sense.

Bonus:  See the Bad Pitch blog:  http://badpitch.blogspot.com

The perspective of this conference is that the companies build online relationships in order to benefit the company and advance their corporate objectives.  “Not that’s there’s anything wrong with that.”

But at AltSearchEngines, we build relationships in order to benefit the alternative search community.  Do we want more readers and more revenue?  Of course.  But stop scanning for a second.  Our success means that when we post about a search engine, that post will pack a bigger punch.  This is why everyone wants Read/WriteWeb to cover them.  (That’s not a secret folks.)

End of Session Seven.