How to Wiki: Wikis as Marketing Tool?

The Wikipedia definition of Wikipedia reads: “Wikipedia’s articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and nearly all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet. Having steadily risen in popularity since its inception, it currently ranks among the top ten most-visited web sites worldwide.

In fact, Wikipedia is the 7th most visited website in the world, according to Alexa, with 52% of its page views coming from the English version of the encyclopedia. Wikipedia is the worlds biggest and most successful wiki, but there are thousands of niche wikis out there and due to their collaborative and social nature, they should be part of any social media marketing strategy.

Marketing on Wikis

• Many wikis let you make updates anonymously. Ideally, you should log-in and create an identity. Be honest and be yourself.
• Don’t use wikis for self-promotion. It is not intended for that and your entry will end up being deleted or at least edited.
• While you want your business or brand to be added, it is better to build out complementary and appropriate information as part of adding your business. For example, if you are a professional social media marketing consultant, you’ll want to add content to the definition of social media or the definition of marketing.
• It is OK to correct mistakes, it is not OK to remove competitors.
• When you add a new page, make sure you start with the template that is appropriate. If you make mistakes, other people will fix them, and if you spam with inappropriate content, other people will remove you.

It is important to have a clear picture of what wants to be achieved with wikis. The main professional aim on Wikipedia or other important wikis should be tracking and managing what is said about you, your brand or your company. At least in the case of Wikipedia, their links are far too influential for anybody to ignore its content, especially given the public’s misunderstanding of its liberal editorial policies. It is also a very good way to contribute your knowledge of your market or the focus of your business to the community. Wikis should not be looked at as a tool to generate links or to increase a website’s page ranking. In fact, all links on Wikipedia are “nofollow”, meaning that they are not counted as a link by Google or the other search engines, which use links as part of their ranking algorithm.

Wiki Etiquette

There is a set of unwritten rules that will ensure a successful use of wikis as marketing tool.The bottom line is that any significant wiki community will be very vigilant and strictly opposed to biased information. Any effort to enhance a Wikipedia listing should make sure that it aware of and follows the established guidelines. That said, here’s a guide to creating a new page in Wikipedia.

Niche Wikis

This is a short list of niche wikis, which can be relevant to specific businesses or brands:

• WikiTravel: the wikipedia of travel.
• Dealipedia: a business wiki for mergers, acquisitions, venture investments, IPO and other deals.
• LyricWiki: all the lyrics you can handle.
• WikiMapia: collaborative mapping.
• Wikia: community supporting the creation and development of wiki communities on any topic people are passionate about. Currently, they support over 6000 communities in more than 70 languages.

While wikis allow very little deviation from the established rules and customs, if you pay attention and follow the rules, wikis offer an extremely powerful forum for enriching the community and associating your online brand with intelligent and useful content.

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