Wikipedia: a marketing channel as powerful as it is free

Frowns, rolled eyes and sarcastic laughter. If you’re in the conference room discussing next quarter’s marketing plan, you’re likely to be met with any or all of these reactions when making reference to Wikipedia. Some people have formed their opinion and simply will not be budged. But let’s talk about how you can convince the rest of the world to sit up and take notice of one of the most powerful marketing channels around.

Over four out of ten consumers consider Wikipedia very influential in online purchasing decisions — skewing particularly high among 18-44 year olds {1}.

Here’s a list of the top ten most visible websites for retail-focused keywords in search engines (also courtesy of Opinion Research Corp.):

Notice a pattern? All are either e-commerce sites, or portals which drive traffic directly to e-commerce sites.

Why would Wikipedia, a web-based encyclopedia, rank as one of the most important consumer-focused commercial sites?

The answer can be summed up in one word: aggregation. A site like Vitamins.com clearly sells vitamins. If they tried to add their link to a Wikipedia page discussing a popular product like ginseng, they would be quickly admonished and their submission removed. Many people depend on the integrity of scientific knowledge to allow any commercial messages shown in ginseng’s Wikipedia entry.

But consider some of the inputs that go into selling a bottle of vitamins:

Demonstrated scientific breakthroughs on active ingredients
Specific ailments which suggest a need for the product
Consumer research on who tends to buy vitamins
The technology behind delivery systems (capsules, tablets, etc.)

The ginseng entry is an aggregation of many sources of information. All of these can be traced to other specific Wikipedia entries, where a marketing executive at Vitamins.com might decide to weigh in on the discussion. If relevant research is underrepresented, for example, they are justified in adding content about it, as long as the public’s right to know outweighs any potential commercial benefit. If an entry for a product like ginseng were to be absent all together, adding the entry would be, first and foremost, an altruistic acknowledgement of the public’s right to know…and to a lesser extent, would help create a market for that product.

The last important point to make is that the aforementioned Top Ten list refers to organic (that is, unpaid) search queries. We can be reasonably confident that most people search for retail-oriented keywords do so with purchasing intentions. What this means is that Wikipedia is one of the top sites driving traffic to e-commerce sites — making a well-reasoned Wikipedia contribution not unlike a targeted, high-conversion ad campaign on Google Adwords or other pay-per-click programs.

Say what you want about the quality of the information present in Wikipedia. With this kind of scale in viewership, the people with a vested interest in the integrity of a given submission tend to far outweigh the influence of a few rogue vandals. (A visit to the authors’ manifesto on the pros and cons of their own creation will help drive this point home.)

It’s a slippery slope. That’s why Wikipedia has so many editors in the public at large. You won’t know if you don’t try…and a lot of smart marketers already have.

{1} “How America Searches: Online Retail,” Opinion Research Corporation, September 2007.

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