Winning Online

On Wednesday, Google launched its online-publishing service that, at face, is a potential competitor to Wikipedia.org, the highly-trafficked and ubiquitous user-generated reference Web site. 

This is all quite top of mind, as Wikipedia has become yet another spot to monitor for our clients.  Those in the public eye can easily have an entry pop up at a moment’s notice.  And with Wikipedia’s preeminence in the search engines, that entry can be right at the top of search very quickly.  Suffice to say, the real-world application happened here; it was nothing to be alarmed about - the entry was straightforward and honest - but it was something we found in our regular monitoring of the online chatter, the blogosphere.  And it was something we needed to educate our client on and put together a plan moving forward.   Most of the time, that plan will come down to taking no direct action. 

You see: Wikipedia has had a trail of companies caught in the act, after having changed true information detrimental to their greater good.  The online world is becoming one where everyone is involved yet everything is transparent: IP addresses, the fingerprints of your network, are easily indexed and traced back; signed-in users - who have the ability on Wikipedia to keep their IP address hidden - can still be “flagged” quickly for an entry that seems self-interested.  Discretion - but active monitoring - can be the better part of valor.

The blogosphere is magnified and can be intensely territorial; if its users perceive that somebody is “wagging the blog”, this can make a benign offense quickly much worse.  We tinkered with the idea of simply adding a link to our client’s Web site in the reference section of the Wikipedia entry, a tactic that makes no perceived subjective content changing - and in our minds seems an open, fair part of being part of the conversation.   Again, discretion however leads you to at times to eschew entering this conversation.  Wikipedia does have a “talk” section, though, which is the recommended way for an entity that even has the slightest potential self-interest in the entry to put something out there for consideration and which lets the editors decide.  With this tact, transparency is still the best choice: say exactly who you are and recommend your idea or revision with a clear reason why; If you are not comfortable with that, it may be the decider that you should not proceed with an active addition/retraction.  Just this level of thinking shows how much goes into an online plan, and this, for something that to this point has yielded no discernible action.

Which brings us back to Knol.  Google’s newest application is something to monitor.  It seems close in nature to Wikipedia but differs in several areas, most notably that it is written by someone, right now mostly experts, and allows users to recommend revisions/edits but not necessarily edit entries in real time.

For a company that seems to corner the market on almost everything else, don’t be surprised if this new service becomes a new part of the modern vernacular.  Be out in front and look it over, get a feel for its lay out and its aim, and see if there is any potential for action - or simply just monitoring - on the part of your company.  New applications can breed new angles and new ideas for your product or campaign.