Yesterday I got a letter from someone at the Kaiser Family Foundation. She is a PR person who was editing her organization’s Wikipedia article, and since I was watching that article, I immediately knew she was changing it. I wrote to her offering to help her develop the article, and she sent me back a huge amount of material which I could integrate in the article, and then told me that they did not have staff to do this kind of work themselves but they would appreciate whatever I could do. I was really grateful for her response and I feel like she did more for me than she needed to do, but still, I wonder at how her employer came to the decision to decide what is and is not within the purview of her job duties.
I think about 15-20 organizations with assets of 150 million or more have PR people who have told me this same thing. I am baffled that any organization who depends on community support and donations would not make Wikipedia part of their marketing strategy, especially considering that invariably the Wikipedia entry for an organization is among the first returns for a Google search in their name and very often is the first entry which an experienced internet user will choose.
Actually, I know their concerns, and there are arguments which need to be considered. But I think that anyone who actually weighs the arguments will agree that the arguments for contributing to Wikipedia far outweight the arguments against.
Here are the concerns I hear repeatedly –
- Our organization does not have money to fund a Wikipedia administrator.
Counter argument: Wikipedia is a highly consulted resource for the internet-using public to find information about your organization. I am certain that you have neither calculated the costs of a Wikipedia administrator and compared this to the cost of not having a Wikipedia article. Can you please make a reasonable attempt to estimate these things and compare the costs to your other PR strategies?
It is difficult to get page view statistics on sites which one does not control and even harder to say what those numbers mean but here is one tool which counts page views on Wikipedia. Also the people who go to Wikipedia are generally not just idle gawkers – they are going there because they have made a decision to consume information for a purpose. I would argue that this is a better class of visitor with regards to trying to convert a visitor into a person who engages an organization.
If there is any money at all to fund PR, then could you have at least one person contribute one week of time to post on one of the most prominent portals to your organization?
- Our organization does not have money to invest much in internet infrastructure.
Counter argument: This assertion is ridiculous but I am surprised because I hear this one a lot. There are some huge organizations who still have not found a use for internet and they still treat their websites as a sort of business card to present their contact information and a repository for digital versions of the publications they print on paper. I would challenge these businesses to find an respectable consultant who could tell them they are doing anything other than spending a huge amount of resources compensating for not having an online media management program.
I would have to see financial numbers to understand the extent to which this is a legitimate argument, but it must be true to some extent. The area on which I would focus is in appeals for donations and fundraising programs. For public donations, right now there is an old rich fanbase who support many institutions. This demographic does not demand online information, and since they comprise the majority of giving, internet seems not to be a priority.
I strongly suspect there is a younger, more technologically connected fanbase which many organizations could attract by investing in internet infrastructure. Perhaps I am unusual, but I am way poor but have always donated 10% of my income to non-profit causes. I feel like other people in my generation could be persuaded to do the same thing now, and certainly when we are older we will be the old rich highly-giving demographic. Ought not organizations be grooming us to support them now?
I am not sure at what point it will become surely profitable, but the question of internet investment is not an “if” but “when” – there will surely come a time when donors expect access to online information as a basic criteria for considering whether to donate to an institution. I argue that the time is probably now, because the investment will not decay, it is a rather small amount of money compared to other fundraising strategies, and because I think there is now and never before an active base of young people who want to talk about the work of research organizations and non-profit groups with their peers.
- Anyone can change Wikipedia. Our organization only wants to invest in things under our control.
Counter argument: Your organization is extremely fragile and has little power to independently control its own PR anyway. It is exactly one complainant away from a nightmare of a public presence problem – anyone can make a complaint website about your billion-dollar enterprise and with few skills and very little work they can make it a first-page Google return for searches for your organization’s name. If this happens, the complaint will stay on the internet forever and your best option will be to offer other reports about your organization. Until you take action and until people quit seeing the complaint online, your organization will lose donors. What will be the cost of losing even a single donor to your organization?
As for Wikipedia – yes, anyone can change it. Yes, you have to allow people to post negative information about your organization on Wikipedia if they can properly reference the information through reputable and reliable sources. But as far as crank information on Wikipedia – it rarely happens, and even rarer still will it stay on your page for any significant length of time. There is a huge amount of research data showing that Wikipedia works. Wikipedia is not an experiment. It is a part of daily life and it is going to be around long-term.
The front-page Google return results are an excellent investment and Wikipedia is one that a company can influence.
- We have staff for Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Twitter, and our company blog, but Wikipedia is not proven as a site which is going to be around forever.
Counter argument: This is my opinion, but Wikipedia is going to outlast all of these. The reason why Wikipedia has not been in the media much is because it alone among all top websites is owned by a non-profit organization so business leaders have thus far had little reason to engage it.
Myspace was founded in 2003 with no assets. In 2005 Murdoch’s New Corps bought it for 560 million and in 2006 Google committed 900 million dollars to it for advertising. In 2011 News Corp sold Myspace for 35 million. What happened? This story happened to a lot of websites in that societal preferences change. If a Hollywood movie makes 100 million one year, would a similar new movie make that the next year? Probably not. Many of these social media websites are satisfying needs in a trendy way. I would argue that even the biggest products, like Facebook.com, are going to see major structural revision as internet connections become faster and new software is developed. In contrast, Wikipedia is not about presentation – it is about information content delivery. Content can be delivered in any number of ways, but it is always going to be delivered.
- Even if Wikipedia will always be around, it will not direct people to us like Facebook or our company blog will.
Counter argument: This is correct, but Wikipedia is a part of the PR campaign. You need to have some other system for directing people to your organization and then converting them to clients or users for whatever purpose.
Also many companies fail to establish relationships even with people who subscribe to their blogs or friend them on Facebook. I would judge the value of a social media circle by its ability to convert people into the next level of engagement, like for example, to convert someone who reads your content into someone who shares your content with their friends – especially if they make an effort to personalize it by pulling significant parts from it or citing it in their own work somehow.
As an anecdote, I have a friend who manages the Facebook campaign of a large American hardware chain department store. His company directs him to get people to “friend” Home Depot’s account and get them to post messages to the page, with the target being to increase conversations and increase feed subscribers. The thinking is that this is a measure of people who will be loyal to the company brand. But does this really happen? Why would someone actually care in their personal lives about a hardware store social feed? Some people do. But a great many people get convinced to subscribe to the feed but not convinced to engage the company beyond that level. The campaign has been running for years and the conversations are asinine, but now that lots of people are watching they have to keep feeding it or else risk upsetting some customers who will perpetually expect it. An expense in keeping it is that they have to pay for continual promotions, like discounts to people who make posts, plus a lot of users actually resent having to participate in the dumb show that is being put on for no obvious reason.
The same thing often happens with non-profits who think that exposure without a campaign to directs users into a more intimate relationship is a good idea. It is not. “Awareness” is a waste of effort if an organization develops awareness to a point where a client wants to increase their personal closeness with the company, but then cannot find a way to do so. The only point for awareness is as a route by means of which to ask the public to do something more than be informed.
- Information or pictures or other content which is put onto Wikipedia can be used for bad purposes, like for example, resold for commercial interests or to enrich people.
Counter argument: Yes, it is true. Anyone can take the Wikipedia article you have written and the pictures you have uploaded and resell them for profit. Here is a summary and explanation of the licensing agreement.
But is this so bad? There are a lot of big organizations who do multimillion dollar ad campaigns and at the end of the campaign, almost no one cares. I am sure they wish people would care enough about them to try to steal their publications and that other people would care enough to buy them. But the more usual case is that organizations could not pay people to care about their content; the caring has to happen from indirect causes, like a person actually wanting a product the organization produces and the organization actually allowing them to have that product. A commonly sought product about companies is information about the company and its projects, and it is shocking how difficult most organizations make finding the most basic company information.
Another issue is that almost no one has any idea about what non-profit or non-commercial means, including people who have held high positions in the nonprofit sector for their entire lives. Here are some tough questions for non-profit organizations taken from a September 2009 research report on public perception of the meaning of the term “non-commercial.” The question in each case is whether your organization would allow each of the following non-commercial uses of some media content which your organization created.
7. A not-for-profit organization would make money from the use of your work, but only enough to cover the costs of copying and distributing the work (for example, a not-for-profit uses your work in a manual about emergency medical care, which it sells for just enough to cover the costs of copying and distributing the manual)
8. A for-profit company would make money from the use of your work, but only enough to cover the costs of copying and distributing the work (for example, a private school that charges tuition uses your work in course materials, but only charges students the cost of copying and distributing the course materials)
9. A not-for-profit organization would make money from the use of your work, enough to cover the costs of copying and distributing the work, and also some operating costs (for example, a not for profit uses your work in a manual about emergency medical care, which it sells for enough to cover the costs of copying and distributing the manual, and pay some staff salaries)
10.A not-for-profit organization would make money from the use of your work, enough to contribute to its endowment fund
11.A for-profit company would make money from the use of your work, and would donate all the money it makes to a not-for-profit organization
I hope that you the reader find these questions as mind-blowing as I do. There is a hundred page report which discusses these and reams of other questions. Every page of it is poetry and it is linked here.
If your organization has a policy of deciding these things on a “case-by-case” basis, then your company has not come to realize the power of the internet. If you are getting so few requests that you can still manage staff to personally review them all thoughtfully, then you are vastly under-experiencing the immense authority that your organization has in directing the way that the world can be.