Entrepreneur’s Journal: Does your business need a Wikipedia page?

15 12 2007

Entrepreneur’s Journal: Does your business need a Wikipedia page?

Posted by: in Small Business

Filed under: Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Starbucks (SBUX), Small business

Started in 2001, Wikipedia has grown into a massive knowledge base, with more than 75,000 contributors and nine million articles.

No doubt Wikipedia is a great resource to learn about the more massive companies - such as Starbucks Corporation (Nasdaq: SBUX), Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG), and Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq: MSFT). But there are also many smaller businesses on the site.

So, should you jump in too?

“Wikipedia is one of the most frequented databases on the Web,” said Dan Nichols, director of marketing communications at RightNow Technologies (Nasdaq: RNOW). “We posted an entry on RightNow to make sure we were accurately represented on the site and to increase awareness.”

Keep in mind that a Wikipedia page can help improve your website’s search engine rank - and perhaps drive some traffic. What’s more, a Wikipedia page can lend some credibility to your business.

However, you need to consider some things:

Don’t Get Sales-y: When you put together a page, you need to provide useful factual information about your company (it’s an encyclopedia, right?). Actually, if it gets promotional, a roving Wikipedia editor may change things.

So, a first step is to check out other company sites. How do they present the information?

Street Cred: If there are articles about your company, make sure you link them on your Wikipedia page.

Risks: Keep in mind that Wikipedia can be a free-for-all. For example, a competitor can come to your page and change it. Or, what if a disgruntled customer makes an edit?

In other words, you need to monitor things.

Edit Other Pages: What are other topics that relate to your company? No doubt, these can be good areas to add and edit content.

Example: If your company operates a social network, there’s a page on Wikipedia for “List of social networking websites” that has many companies listed. Why not edit your website into the category?

Tom Taulli operates SmallBizMix.com.