Grounded In Reality

A new user group on Wikipedia called the “Companies WikiProject” is aiming to improve the quality of entries about corporations.

Wikipedia’s freeform collaborative nature has, understandably, created gaps in the site’s coverage of certain subjects. This becomes obvious after reading entries about notable companies. Issues like executive scandals, product recalls, and legal battles often take center stage. A clear anti-corporate bias can be seen in many entries.

To fix this, the group is using guidelines for bringing company-specific pages up to par. Entries about Fortune 500 companies are first on the task force’s priority list.

Although this project is just getting off the ground, it’s promising news for executives who feel their company’s Wikipedia entry deserves a second look. Since individuals are prohibited from creating or editing topics that they are affiliated with, the challenge of cleaning up content lies with Wikipedians.

Obviously, the goal of this project isn’t to turn company entries into sparkly-perfect brochures. The good, bad, and ugly will still remain. It’s all about providing balance and prioritizing the facts. It will be interesting to see if this project takes off.

I had the opportunity to attend Nielsen Buzzmetrics’ Consumer-Generated Media Summit today in NYC. Pete Blackshaw kicked things off with a great discussion about how much the digital media landscape has evolved over the past year. Key points:

• Word of Mouth remains the most trusted source of influence for consumers who are making purchasing decisions.
• Search continues to have a huge impact on corporate reputation. Influential communities like Wikipedia are “credibility brokers” for companies.
• Consumer-generated video and audio is exploding, largely due to simple editing, publishing, and storage services. Nielsen refers to this as consumer-generated multimedia, or “CGM2.”
• Consumers are increasingly dictating how branded content lives (or dies) online. Nielsen calls this “Consumer Fortified Media.” Fancy term aside, it means that online marketing initiatives aren’t completed until consumers inject their POV via comments and other methods. In other words, consumers “finish the story” by evaluating and amplifying content that marketers produce (e.g. embracing, DIGGing, spoofing, protesting). This reinforces the fact that marketers no longer have complete control of their messages. The Web has created a flat playing field.
• The “wave of consumer emulation” has arrived. More than ever, brands are mirroring how consumers communicate and act. Look no further than the Presidential candidates who are using Web 2.0 to the max: Add the Fred08 widget to your page! Follow John Edwards on Twitter! Get text messages from Hillary! The takeaway: Brands are benefiting by communicating and acting just like consumers. The warning: Consumers spot imitation and exploitation instantly. Authentic messaging remains critical.

The Summit continued with a series of excellent breakout sessions covering healthcare buzz, media & entertainment, advertising & engagement, and defensive branding. There were great insights from attendees, although we’re prohibited from blogging the deets (Nielsen request).

More at Peter Kim’s blog.

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By: Andrew Foote
GCI Group - NY

Wikipedia, the so called “in-flux” or “open-source” encyclopedia, has become one of the most interesting phenomena in the short and robust history of online media.  Wikipedia is a “.org” and refers to itself loftily as a “project.”  With over 2 million articles in English alone, it is 20 times larger than most traditional encyclopedias and can be found in “approximately 250 languages,” according to the site’s own estimates.  It is by far the biggest and baddest of all wikis out there.

Wikipedia is an example of “collective intelligence” and sometimes also given as an example of Web 2.0.  It has become THE starting point for information on everything from the “John F. Kennedy assassination” to “Cancer” to “Copenhagen.”

Whatsmore, the open nature of the “project” doesn’t seem to have detracted from its credibility.  Studies have shown Wikipedia’s accuracy to be relatively close to that of professionally edited encyclopedias.  But an encyclopedia it is not.  Not in the traditional sense.  Consumers are also increasingly relying on Wikipedia (or are “Googled” towards it) for information on products, brands and services.

This is presenting some serious and interesting challenges for the way companies manage their overall corporate identity.

Case in point: An article in Wired magazine last week profiled a new addition called Wikipedia Scanner. The Wikipedia Scanner allows users to trace the IP addresses of those who make anonymous edits to Wikipedia articles. This salacious little tool is just the kind of thing that can give communications managers nightmares – and in several cases it already has.

The article reported that in a search of 34.4 million anonymous edits on the site, 2.6 million organizations were found to be directly linked to edits related to their own company.  The edits run the gamut - from benign press releases to deletions of entire sections of unflattering material.  The latter has led to the involved companies suddenly being named alongside the CIA and the Vatican (rumors abound about how those two organizations have made heavy edits to their own Wikipedia articles).

In these times where corporate social responsibility and transparency are not only considered important but essential to a company’s good image, it seems natural that the same principles in communications should follow suit.  Wikipedia Scanner is another sign that if companies do not address Web 2.0 media outlets with the same vigilance – and ethics - as other media, that their reputations stand to suffer.

So when you think about “upgrading” your communications strategy, don’t forget to “mind the wiki.”

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Brian Woodward
Senior Consultant
GCI Mannov

InformationWeek wrote an interesting article this week about the latest generation of college grads entering the workforce and what technology they expect to be made available while on the job.

I can vouch that there have been times I was not allowed to access technology  necessary for me to be fully capable of doing my job…with a Google Toolbar being the simpliest of things.

IDC research numbers show(ing) that 45% of companies have workers blogging, 43% use RSS feeds, and 35% of companies have employees using wikis.

What’s interesting about that, according to Susan Feldman, VP of content technologies at IDC, is that the study also showed that IT managers and executives largely didn’t know any of this was going on.

It is understandable that a company would have progam downloading banned from users, but there should be a policy in place for requesting access to relevant sites/downloads.

She (Susan Feldman) told InformationWeek that with Web 2.0 technologies increasingly becoming part of people’s social lives, they will demand that it be part of their work lives, as well. And a lot of companies may have this new technology inside their firewalls that they simply don’t know about.

“We’ll have to deal with the reality of people coming in and using tools that aren’t in the firewall,” said De Beer. “Web 2.0 empowers users beyond creating content. It’s about how we interact. For the next generation, it will be about mass collaboration, using social networking.”

In my opinion, things will morph.  Just as companies had to create ‘blogging policies,’ they will also have to create other Web 2.0 poilicies.