The Wikipedia Advertising Vulnerability And How Not To Mess It Up

Thomas Ptacek | December 9th, 2007 | Filed Under: Uncategorized

Just because the blog had been on unintentional hiatus does not mean I managed to shut up for any length of time. I’ve been putzing around Wikipedia for the past month, instead of writing here. Here is what I’ve learned:

You vendors have some stupid and terrible marketing departments.

Here is what the $130k/yr directors of marketing at venture-funded security startups seem to have figured out: Wikipedia articles land on the first page of Google search results for any given topic. Prime placement on Google is something they pay money for. All they have to do is edit “the encyclopedia anyone can edit”, and bam! There they are, way more prominently than their competitors’ Adwords buy.

Here’s the M.O. of these crack marketing squads: find the article that covers the space their product is in —- say, Data Loss Prevention —- go to the “List of vendors in this space” section, and add a link to their company.

Stop doing this. Here’s how serious I am about you needing to not do that anymore: I’m going to tell you how to do it right.

  1. Find two (2) trade press articles about your company. The more mainstream the better, but Wikipedia editors have a hard time differentiating, so “IT Journal” or “Government Computing Quarterly” will do just fine.

    These articles verify your notability. If you aren’t notable, you can’t have a Wikipedia article. If you can’t verify that notability with a reliable source (read: trade press hit), your claim of notability doesn’t mean anything.

  2. Register a Wikipedia account. Do not try to do this anonymously, and note that you will gain privacy from having a Wikipedia account; “anonymous” editors are identified by their IP addresses.

  3. Your account comes with a “user page”, like this one. To that user page, write one short sentence saying that the account is affiliated with your company. Do not skip this step.

  4. Add a page for your company. Make it one paragraph long, footnote it with the two trade press hits you came up with, and add one link to your company at the bottom of the article. Here is a data point: the article for RSA Security. Is your company more notable than RSA Security? I didn’t think so. Consider that an article an asymptote for what you will achieve on Wikipedia.

  5. Now go to the page on Data Loss Prevention, and instead of linking to your website, link to your article.

Here’s what will happen. Either:

  • The page will remain on Wikipedia forever, and nobody will be able to muster an argument against you being listed on “Data Loss Prevention” (or “Network Access Control” or whatever), or

  • Somebody —- maybe me —- will put your article up for deletion, and the community will vote on it, and if you lose, you will have no presence on Wikipedia for awhile.

In several places in this handy guide for how Alan Shimel and Michelle McClean can abuse Wikipedia to advertise their products, I said things like “don’t do this” or “don’t skip this step”. Notice the second bullet above this graf. If you skipped any of those steps —- for instance, by anonymously adding a big long article about Consentry to the Wikipedia without disclosing your conflict of interest —- your article will come up for a vote and be deleted out of sheer spite. You are dealing with a group of people that spend literally 30-40 hours a week arguing about the Franco-Mongol Alliance, they have limited patience, and I find it incredibly amusing to egg them on.

A public service announcement from the marketing department at Matasano Security. Matasano: helping to feed a hungry world.

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