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6.10.06

Wikipedia and social marketing

Over at Greenblog Simon Collister has added an interesting post on social media. Here's what he says:

Picked up quite a mind-blowing stat highlighting the power of social media.

According to research carried out by search engine marketing firm, Spannerworks social media site Wikipedia appears in Google's first 20 results for 88% of the top 100 global brands."

This figure is based around Business Week/Interbrand's 2006 brand survey. Heavy stuff! It reinforces two things for me.

Firstly, organisations that think Wikipedia is just a handy reference tool are overlooking its vast SEO potential. Just think of the link-love and the frequency with which it is updated. Secondly, there have been many discussions on PR blogs about the first steps in developing a social media strategy.

Blogging godfather, Microsoft Ireland's Tom Murphy, suggested that if nothing else, SEO would be a good place to start. Obviously Spannerworks have a vested interest in pushing SEO but even beyond pay per click and organic optimisation look at the power of Wikipedia in doing the job for nothing.

Obviously given its omniscience Wikipedia needs to be managed effectively, but then that's where PR people come in!

2 comments:

News Update said...

As always Simon makes an excellent point and shows that social media is slowly usurping some of the accepted views about the internet.
It also poses and interesting question for anyone trying to control messages about their brands on an open source like Wikis.

Anonymous said...

Nothing slow about it, Ian!

No-one owns their brand anymore...