Danny Sullivan is moderating the session. He ask about who has heard of wikipedia? Many people raise their hand. This is a pretty packed session. My laptop had a case of senioritis so I missed the first few mintues. Sorry Neil.
Neil Patel is up first, and starts explaining about wikipedia and what it does. He talks about the Colbert report and his campaign to make sure the elephant population was well represented. He explains how wikipedia is beneficial and what not to do on wikipedia. How to do you add links to wikipedia? Only add reliable links from authorities sources. Neil next discusses how to add images. He gives an example of a bottle company and putting an image of a bottle that improved the brand of the company. Wikis are everywhere.
Jonathan Hochman is up second. He says wikipeida gets more pageviews than myspace and other areas. He says we have a lot of bright SEO’s here, but wikipedia ranks first for the term search engine optimization. SEO have enough reputation problems already, so try to remember wikipeida isn’t a linkfarm. The wikimedia Blacklist means “no links for you”. He says there are people that like to hunt for spammers. The blacklist is a bad thing, because you will not get a link from wikipedia or all the other 2000 wikis out there. Search engines could eventually look at this public list and take it in account. Yet that is doubtful. Wikipedia links actually deliver traffic. To reduce spam wikipedia adds no follows. Ha, he mentions the attempt of some SEO’s to create entries for themselves in wikipedia. These are the non-notable people. He explains that Matt Cutts was non-notable because the majority of people don’t know who he is. You need to state your cause. I wonder if Jon is an editor? He says that articles that fail to assert notability, supported by reliable sources, are nominated for deletion. Writing an article about yourself or a client is a conflict of interest. He says not to get involved about an article about yourself or your competitors. He says read the conflict of interest guidelines. Barry Schwartz posted an article on wikipedia about himself. Wikipedians jumped on this article to delete it. There was a few editors that changed their minds about Barry’s article and decided to keep it. Barry is notable they decided. COI doesn’t prevent you from participating. Learn the policies and customs and work with other editors to get your points into the article. If you have an article you have no control to edit that article or influence it in any way. He puts up an example of the Criticism of Wal-Mart page. On this page Wal-Mart can not do anything about this page. Ideally, the page needs to have a pros and cons section of the article. With an article about yourself, you can delete spam, remove slander, revert vandalism, and state your view on the article talk page. He also gives an example for Green Zap, and how the companies reputation was ruined because they did some bad things and it found its way into the search engines. Oh my! Wikipedia is a bit stick for generic search terms. Even if your own site can’t outrank the competition, Wikipedia probably can.
Don Steele from Comedy Central is up next. He is here to talk about how wikipedia works with Comedy Central. Comedycentral.com is the online arm of Comedy Central Cable Channel. They use a lot of methods to market their content in a diverse manner we can create momentum, capitalize on buss and are constantly driving traffic to Comedy Central. He puts up a video of Steven Colbert about changing a wikipedia entry and that enough people believe it, then it becomes true. So why do we care about wikipedia? Traffic volume and soccues in SEO made wikipedia a vital channel for us to understand. Our content is highly reference and referred on Wikipedia. Make sure information is accurate and up to date. Make sure our site has the information being referenced. Wikipedia has become a relevant traffic driver to comedycentral.com. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report is an example that sends traffic. He says that they had 90,000 visits come from wikipedia in one month. It’s a top 5 traffic driver. He says they are saving $20K a month by using wikipedia and the traffic is coming to comedycentral.com. 9AM Wednesday morning they announce a new south park show. He shows an example of the wikipedai article. The episode plays on TV and then their appeared 900 entries on the southpark page about the episode and it becomes a little community about that episode. The Da Vinci code was really the Hair Club for Men and so on from the Southpark story. Don talks about the benefits of wikipedia. They identify relevant content and post references on discussion pages. Wikipedia editors become decision makers. All of our discussions have been added as they are relevant and do meet the standards. If you are marketing content, make sure what is appearing in wikipedia. Monitor traffic from wikipedia. Good presentation.
