Wikipedia - friend or enemy?
This morning one of the more interesting newsletters in my inbox was iMedia Connection's daily marketing newsletter, including an article called "Memo to Brands: Fear the Wiki." In the brief piece, a professor of marketing and e-commerce alludes to the dangers that sites like Wikipedia present to branding efforts by enabling others to "screw up the message and muddy the brand image that firms meticulously try to construct online."
But wait...isn't the whole challenge behind PR and marketing is that you don't have complete control over the message, as advertisers do? There's a myriad of benefits to giving up a little control, perhaps most important is the added credibility your brand gains from media placements, analyst reports, blog postings and reviews that are not paid for. In that sense, sites like Wikipedia offer you an opportunity to gauge how well your efforts are doing--are consumers buying into your message? Do you even have the right one?
And it's not as if marketers and brand managers don't contribute to wikis, too. In fact, here at Matter we've used wikis as internal tools to increase productivity when drafting, sharing and editing documents or pitches. They're fantastic for brainstorms. What's more, since so many people now see Wikipedia as a go-to source for information, it's a marketers duty to be aware of what other folks are writing on his or her company's Wikipedia entry. More than that, there's an opportunity for you to write in it yourself, provided that you're presenting factual information, correcting inaccuracies and backing up any claims with relevant, credible sources.
Too often marketing and PR is seen as an "us vs. them" when it comes to communicating with the masses. If you're willing to stand behind an organization or a product, you should be willing to engage in an honest conversation with the media, potential customers, current clients and yes, even competitors. That way, the carefully crafted messaging becomes a vehicle, not an end-result. How others view and perceive your brand will become the real metric...and that, my friend, is what translates into real business results.