[Foundation-l] Fundraising & Networking updates

[Chad]

I'm not as concerned about the major Fortune 500 companies that already
have a major presence and who's having an article (or not) on Wikipedia
largely won't affect their business.

I'm talking about small start ups and under-the-radar companies. These are
groups and individuals who do not have that massive Google rank you find
for Microsoft, Adobe, DuPont, and Viacom. Those companies care about
their Wikipedia articles (PR reasons), but the smaller companies care more.
To them, a link on Wikipedia is golden. They know we're in the top 10 sites,
and they know that many many people go there for information and consider
it authoritative. This being said, for them to get a link (or even better, an
article), helps them tremendously. It gets their name out there. People
who might've never heard of them before can now get information on them.

Last time I checked, "Getting your name out there" is a major aspect of
advertising.

Chad

On Jan 16, 2008 12:37 PM, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 16/01/2008, Chad <innocentkiller at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I don't. For any company you Google who happens to have a Wikipedia
> > article, you see a page with their logo and a company description.
> > Now, it may be a neutral description, but the company is still there.
> > People pay SEOs truckloads of money to get that kind of Google
> > ranking for their companies, and an entire industry has emerged
> > from search engines (as you know).
>
> The thing is, this isn't really the issue. Search engine optimisation
> is trying to ensure that wilsonpharmaceuticals.com (a hopefully
> fictional site) gets a good google ranking when someone searches for
> "medication" or "drugs" or one of our beloved spam-product names -
> Google would not automatically rank them highest, so you need to game
> the system to make it so.
>
> It *isn't* trying to ensure that wilsonpharmaceuticals.com is the top
> Google hit for someone looking for information *about Wilson
> Pharmaceuticals* - that is exactly the behaviour Google is intending
> to give, and any company which is spending stupid amounts of money to
> ensure they have a good search result for their own name is... not
> spending its advertising budget sensiblyy (well, outside of naming
> conflict issues etc - remember prince.com?).
>
> > You mean to tell me that these
> > companies who are otherwise paying very heavily to get that top-ranked
> > spot aren't getting free advertising from us?
>
> Only if we start out by defining it as "advertising"! This seems to be
> falling into the trap of assuming that any writing about an
> organisation acts advertising for them - arguably the case - and
> therefore is to their benefit and therefore a bad thing - somewhat
> less apparent.
>
> (Subjects get all kinds of subtle small benefits out of us having an
> article on them, mostly entirely coincidental. Should we be
> restricting our coverage to only things which don't benefit - or, I
> suppose, suffer - in any concievable way from the article's
> existence?)
>
> > We may not be getting paid
> > for it, but companies left and right are advertising all over Wikipedia and
> > this must stop.
>
> How, exactly, would we "stop" it? Stop writing about anyone who we
> might think has a motive to advertise themselves? Hold companies
> ransom - "pay up or we won't write about you?" Deliberately restrict
> what we write unless they pay us and make it "honest" advertising?
>
> I really don't see how this would work.
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
>
>
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