Just Look Us Up on Wikipedia

I've always had a humble dream for The BeanCast Marketing Podcast -- to one day be an entry in an encyclopedia somewhere. To be part of history in some small way. Well, today is that day.

Åsk Wäppling (you may know her as Åsk Dabitch) over at AdLand.tv has finally made this dream come true by developing The BeanCast Wikipedia Page. She and I made a deal of sorts. So expect a BeanCast-developed AdLand page for the U.S. Wikipedia soon.

The Rewards

But let's get serious for a minute. Why, beside the obvious ego reasons, would I be so excited about a Wikipedia page? The answer is simple: A listing on Wikipedia is probably the single most important tool out there for establishing relevance for your content.

Now don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying Wikipedia is an SEO tool for raising your page ranking. Frankly, they'll sniff that out a mile away and can you page quicker than Vienna Sausages in a meat factory. Besides, all outbound links from the site include a no-follow tag, so it wouldn't work anyway.

No, this is more important than a simple SEO trick. Wikipedia provides legitimacy for your content. People who search Wikipedia are looking for facts, not promotion. So having a listing on the site includes you among the relevant facts available on the subject. That's gold, as far as I'm concerned.

This is clearly a step above a Google or social search on the relevancy scale. Wikipedia entries are heavily policed to ward off marketing hype, stop link farming and verify fact, so there's a trust factor that goes far beyond that of Google results. Certainly people are skeptical of Wikipedia as well (it is a user-created site, after all), but comparatively it's more highly regarded.

Even Google itself treats Wikipedia with respect. Wikipedia pages have much higher relevancy within Google's own searches. So even though the links from the page don't count to your site ranking, the wiki page still helps you build name recognition.

The Risks

Of course there are some risks associated with this effort. Because it is a "wiki" it means anyone can edit your content. So you need to police the site constantly to make sure the facts stay correct. You also will be held to keeping the site factual. The minute you stray into promotion or verbose descriptions of product advantages, there may be calls to take down or ban your page as spam, so you need to be careful. And most of all, you need to be respectful of what the Wikipedia is all about. Although I speak of the promotional value, Åsk and I stayed focused on providing well-documented facts for people researching the subject of my show and marketing podcasts in general. That means cross linking from and to other Wikipedia articles, outbound linking only the legitimate news/content sources, avoiding statements that are unverifiable and keeping all writing concise.

All in all, I'm quite please with the result and hope you'll check out the page -- or even, if you feel led, edit the page yourself. That's what the Wikipedia is all about, after all. It's a collection of facts provided by the community for the benefit of us all.

I'd love to hear about your own experiences with Wikipedia, as well. I want to hear what other pitfalls we may be missing or suggestions for how we could improve the effort. And thank you for making us worth a Wikipedia page in the first place. It wouldn't be there if people weren't listening to the show.