PR Wars Podcast: Strategy for Wikipedia

Is Wikipedia in your communication plan? On today's PR Wars podcast, we talk with Josh Greene, CEO of The Mather Group about strategies to make the world's largest reference site work for you.

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A.I. generated show transcript: 

Show open: “We want the truth.” “We want the truth.” “We want the truth.” “I have news for everybody. Get over it.”

Announcer
It’s time. Welcome to PR Wars coming at you live from Atlanta, Georgia. Now, here is your host… Chris Shigas.

Chris Shigas
Hey, everyone, welcome to PR wars. I'm Chris Shigas. Look it up on Wikipedia. I mean, how many times a day do I say that to myself when I'm searching? Chances are if someone wants to learn about your brand, the likely take a look at your Wikipedia page. It's the largest reference site in the world. It attracts 1.7 billion unique visitors a month. In many cases, Wikipedia is completely ignored in public relations and communication plans. Well, that stops today. Our guest on today's PR Wars is the leader of a digital marketing agency. And, one of its specialties is Wikipedia. So welcome to the show, the CEO of the Mather Group. Josh Greene, thanks for joining PR Wars today.

Josh Greene
Chris, thanks for having me.

Chris Shigas
This is something I'm really excited about. Because I've been in public relations for decades. And this is probably the most important marketing tool for your brand. That is usually completely ignored. Wikipedia. I mean, that's the first place people go when they want to learn about you, there's so much mystery around the proper ways to strategically position your Wikipedia page. Or even if you can, or should influence your Wikipedia page. So so so tell me you have a great Wikipedia program at your agency and tell me where do you start with clients who are looking for counsel,

Josh Greene
usually, it's an education process, before we do anything in terms of here's what's possible, here's what's not possible, and here's a reasonable expectation of what you might be able to achieve with your page. And for a lot of clients, they just want to get to neutral. They know Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. It's not designed to list the 43 industry awards that you've won, okay, and they just want to have it be balanced and neutral. And most of the time, if we're talking to them, that's probably not what's going on with their page. So, you know, a big driving factor for a lot of people is just how do we deal with this? What can we do? And what can we expect? Because oftentimes, it's an internal messaging problem, as much as it is an external facing problem.

Chris Shigas
So I assume I can't just write an advertisement give it to you, and you're going to post it on my Wikipedia page.

Josh Greene
No, no, that wouldn't work, and would probably lead to a lot of disappointment on your end.

Chris Shigas
All right. So so so as far as level setting, and getting those expectations, right, what, what should I expect out of my Wikipedia page?

Josh Greene
And what part can I control? The first thing to keep in mind is Wikipedia is designed to be very transparent. So you can see who's editing a page. And all the citations that a page relies upon should be visible. So you can go back and see, say, each of the 19, citations or footnotes that were used to create your page, and make sure they're legitimate sources, so they should all be legitimate sources, which we can talk about what sources but you should be able to see them, they should be legitimate. And then your expectation generally is you should have a page that's that's similar to how it would be written in an encyclopedia, very, very balanced, very neutral. Sort of laying out the facts about your organization, your company, your CEO, whatever the topic might be.

Chris Shigas
So let's start with who I don't know if this the right word deserves a Wikipedia page. So maybe you have a new brand. Maybe you have a new product, a new company, maybe you're a publicist, and you represent a B level C level celebrity or what at what level Do you can you expect that you are worthy of a Wikipedia page?

Josh Greene
So Wikipedia has its own definition, and it's based on notability. And unfortunately, Wikipedia definition does not line up with anyone's idea about their own notability. at all in the real world. So Wikipedia definition is you have to have a lot of third party articles written about you. So interesting. That's what we do in PR. Right? Right. But it needs to be an inner, it needs to be something where it's not an interview with the subject. So if someone's interviewing the CEO of a company, that doesn't count, because it's viewed as a self serving, generating your own content about yourself. And so that that makes it very challenging. And if you're quoted in an article, that doesn't count either, so it needs to be sort of a neutral third party profile. And I think the guideline is, is five or six of those out there. And then there's an approval process as well. So actually getting a new page created from scratch and actually live and published is one of the more challenging things to do on Wikipedia. It's also partly driven by the fact that many of the people who gravitate towards a free crowd sourced encyclopedia are not the biggest fans of companies. So that that adds a degree of difficulty to getting a page set up as well. There's a little bit of a negative feeling towards companies setting up new Wikipedia pages, I see,

Chris Shigas
I see. Let's just say you either have an existing Wikipedia page, or you go through this process to get yourself a page. Now, obviously, you provide a service for your clients, can companies edit their own Wikipedia page? Or do they need a third party to do that?

Josh Greene
You are not supposed to edit your own page, the absolute white hat role in Wikipedia is there's a talk page associated with every Wikipedia page. And what you're supposed to do is go to that page declare your conflict of interest. I am Josh green of company x. And I would like these three sentences change to the following our number of employees is now two x our revenue for 2020 versus 2018. And then the theory is that a Wikipedia editor will come across your request, make those edits, evaluate them, and publish them to the page. As you can probably see any system relying on the kindness of the internet to get you to where you want to go, is not designed for long term success. So there's, there's some challenges going that route. But that is that is how Wikipedia as an entity feels companies should engage and sort of post on the talk page and make requests for edits.

Chris Shigas
So when, when a brand or a company is looking at its page, at a minimum, what would you expect them that they should expect that they should be able to accomplish with your help or the help of an agency? Or what should they expect to be able to use strategically that Wikipedia page for their business?

Josh Greene
I think the most important strategic thing is keeping in mind that the first two sentences of your Wikipedia page gets syndicated all over the internet. They're the first two lines when Wikipedia is in your search results. There the first two lines in the knowledge panel on the top right of a Google search when you see that, and Google's even integrating it into some other areas of their products. So if you've got those first two sentences, they should describe what your company does, as opposed to you know, company x is located in the Dulles tech corridor near Dulles Airport, 30 miles from Washington DC, versus you know, company x is a leading provider of home automation systems. One of those is a lot more helpful to have show up in a lot of different places. Absolutely. The other thing companies should expect is usually there's an info box on the right side, that sort of a just the facts type of place, revenue employees do. And then there's usually a table of contents that sort of shows you how the page has been organized over time. And that's something that you can take a look at usually and get a feel for whether or not there are issues that you might need to address. For example, if in the table of contents, you see something titled executive compensation, that's probably negative there. There very few Wikipedia pages that highlight how fairly companies pay their executives. So when you when you sort of browse through that you can get a feel for, you know how Wikipedia is, is as an entity treating your page at the moment. And then you can sort of dig into the specifics of different editors who might be involved in your page. Now,

Chris Shigas
now, this next question, I think, is intriguing. Because, you know, I just learned talking with you that really managing a Wikipedia page is really a process. It's not, my original impression was, you write a piece, it looks like an About Us page on your website, you post it, and then you forget about it, and you live there forever. But But there's more to it than that, and why you might need some professional assistance, can you tell me about some of the process of maintaining a page?

Josh Greene