Matt McGee is speaking first

Matt is going to discuss Yahoo Answers
More about expertise and knowledge, not so much for selling products
It is a simple and incredibly busy Q&A site
There is a constant stream of questions and answers, very busy
there are friending aspects
you can create a profile page with a link to your own website
links are no followed
Yahoo answers is for traffic building not link building
21 million users in the US
95 million users Globally
Yahoo Answers condones marketing your products or services
As long as you provide a helpful answer, all is well
Spam is not okay

Benefits of Yahoo Answers
referral traffic
lowest bounce rate through Yahoo Answers
your answers will be indexed
crawl depth is great

How to use Yahoo Ansers?
find questions you want to answer
They have RSS feeds for every category on the site
They have a search box on Yahoo Answers
You can filter your search by the number of answers or date
make sure you sign your name when you are leaving a question or an answer
Lastly, do not Spam

Next up is Jonathan Hochman

Jonathan is a Wikipedia admin
The amount of wiki traffic is huge
Use wikipedia as a poll media

Marketers…please do not spam the system (don’t be a dick…exact words)

Top newbie mistakes are:
don’t use promotional usernames
don’t make copyright violations – pictures and content
no conflict of interest editing, don’t write about yourself or things you are close to you

You can get blacklisted for spamming Wikipedia
all domains that are blacklisted are made publicly available
SEs use the data to tweak their algos
A Google employee actually spammed Wikipedia and their IP was recorded
The IP recorded will not be from the company’s firewall but actually the specific computer within the network

Your audience does the marketing for you
content spreads virally because of loose copyrights
participating within Wikipedia can improve your reputation

Next to speak is Stephan Spencer

Getting your wiki edits to stick
develop a profile that has street cred
add edits that are cleaning up spam not creating it
fix typos
practices that are clearly non-commercial are best
you can receive barn star awards for doing a good job at moderating
age and histroy of your account matter
over time you could become an admin
incorporate content edits when adding a link. It makes it harder to revert your edit
communicate with the main editor of the article before adding an external link that you think is valuable but could be looked at with suspicion and removed
when you add links, if you add them as references instead of adding them to the external links section they are more likely to stick

Creating brand new entries
be logged in with an account that has a solid contribution history
make sure there is no connection between you and the article’s subject
have the subject of the article weigh in via the talk page rather than making edits themselves
watch the page so you can be alerted to an AfD nomination or reversion of your work
use lots of references, particularly ones that are from mainstream media sources
references serve two purposes
1. external links that will stick
2. establish notability, you have to have great articles in the media that you can reference in the Wiki

Getting over the notability hurdle
press release mentions do not help establish notability
use google’s new archive search for finding reference articles
an article with just a passing quote isn’t good enough
get your PR firm to help you land an article even if it is with a small newspaper that profiles your company

Protecting your investment
when admins and the new page partol see new usernames and page creation which are blatantly commercial, they are ordered to “shoot’em on sight” – Brad Patick, Wikipedia
make firends, you’re going to need them
Watch the pages you have an interest in
Don’t just rely on the wikipedia watch function; use a tool that emails you when changes are made (trackengine.com, changenotes.com, urlywarning.net, changedetect,com)

Playing the game
internal politics, reversion wars, ego trips, indiscriminate removal of commercial content
www.wikitruth.info can detect changes
There are other tools that can detect edits. Wiki scanner is one of them.

Next to speak is Don Steele

“Comedy Central and Wikipedia, a match made in heaven”

How we execute digital marketing
DVDs & other biz
Mobile
Wikis
Social Networks
Podcasts
Email
Viral

South Park has 185 Wikipedia pages
Bono was mentioned in a Wikipedia edit pertaining to a recent South Park episode
Bono’s Wikipedia page is now referencing South Park

Traffic volume is great
Content is highly referenced and referred to on Wikipedia
Wikipedia has become a relevant traffic driver to comedycentral.com

Comedy Central started editing pages
Wikipedia warmed them not to
Comedy Central editing was a conflict of interest
Now Comedy Central has a great relationship with the Wiki administration
Follow the rules and don’t be a dick

Next to speak is Lise Broer – Wikipedia Admin
Suggests that all companies should handle Wikipedia entries the way that Don from Comedy Central does
Lise has 18,000 edits and has been working with Wikipedia for around a year
Lise sees a lot of people making wikipedia mistakes
15% of what people say on Wikipedia can ruin careers
Wikipedia is not Facebook or MySpace
She’s now talking about Virgil Griffith who created the Wiki Scanner

Lise is talking about a commercial Wiki edit that went awry
Some guy from Idaho Falls was spamming Wikipedia over and over and denying it
He was selling Tea Tree oil
He tried to login using a new ip and new username
However the new user name was IdahoFallz
Lise references Wikipedia: WikiProject Spam

People are constantly trying to spam Wikipedia
Said something about angry mastodons