Social Media Marketing: Working with Wikipedia

As we get more involved with social media, we've learned three very important things:
1) You have to play by the rules
2) You have to know the rules to play by them
3) The rules are always changing

Recognize that Wikipedia is a third party source. That means that it does NOT publish original information, only secondary information tha is referenced or validated by some other first party source. For our clients that means we need to get the trade press to publish what we would like included in Wikipedia and then we can reference it.

Wikipedia should not be looked at as a tool to generate links or traffic. ALL links on wikipedia are rel=”nofollow” meaning they are NOT counted as a link by Google or the other search engines which use links as part of their algorithm. No follow links are internal to the site they’re on.

There is a Wikiproject Food and Drink which is an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to articles on food and drink on Wikipedia. If you are interested in editing pages related , you need to visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Food_and_drink where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion

Making Contributions to Wikipedia guidelines:
-Don’t write it yourself
-Don’t directly edit it yourself
-Don’t hide/be anonymous/or use a fake persona
-Start at the talk page, Introduce yourself and identify your affiliation on the talk page and ask for permission to do things
-Make your edits suggestions via the Talk page and let others do the posting

Newbie Mistakes
-Don’t use a promotional username (e.g. with your brand or company name in it)
-Copyright violations/fair use of photos
-Conflict of interest…don’t write about yourself
-Not clearly understanding what defines a neutral point of view.

Use the system to your benefit by following the rules and participating.
-Let your audience do the marketing
-Content spreads virally because of open copyrights
-Participating can build your reputation
-Things learned on Wikipedia can be applied elsewhere
-Become a part of community/forum, answer questions, interact with editor, donate images, report problems, building goodwill and obey social norms
-Do not badmouth competitors and withdraw from personal attacking.
-Only secondary knowledge can be posted (has to be published somewhere else before going on Wikipedia) and info has to be referenced
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