[WikiEN-l] Marketers on Wikipedia

[Guettarda]

On 9/13/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 13/09/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > My heart bleeds for them. Really.
> >
> http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?dist=newsfinder&siteid=google&guid=%7BA449A54F-8662-4100-A268-B34BBADC2D11%7D&keyword=


http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?dist=newsfinder&siteid=google&guid=%7BA449A54F-8662-4100-A268-B34BBADC2D11%7D&keyword=

"Companies are wasting some of the millions of dollars spent each year to
improve their visibility and ranking in search engines such as Google and
Yahoo"

"Wikipedia should carve out an area on each page where brand managers can
respond in an official capacity." - we do - it's called the Talk page

http://adage.com/article.php?article_id=111747

"the Wikipedia open-source phenomenon looms large right where companies are
increasingly spending billions of dollars to jockey for position: on
search-engine results pages."

Forgive my ignorance, but how do you spend billions on search engine
optimisation?  Who's ripping off these companies?  In any case, doesn't
Google improve its search algorithms as people get better at fooling them?

If you have millions to spend on something like that, why not spend it on
making your website more useful and attractive?  Or maybe make it easier to
find the things you want?  For a company with physical stores, the main
reason I visit their websites is to check the hours on a local store, or to
find a local store.  That generally takes hunting around the small print,
and then clicking a couple times.  And that after waiting for all the flashy
animation to load...and I have about as fast a connection as any average
person.

Wikipedia is more useful for getting basic information about companies.  If
you don't want your customers seeing the good and the bad, one would think
the place to start is on their own websites... but no, they want to spend
their money fooling search engine algorithms.  Are all companies run by
idiots, or just most of them?