SES notes: SEM via Communities, Wikipedia, & Tagging

Monday, 4:00 pm – SEM via Communities, Wikipedia, & Tagging

Packed house for this session, the final session of the day in the “Social Search” track which moderator Chris Sherman says has been crowded all day long.

Neil Patel of Advantage Consulting opens with the presentation I was most interested in — a look at marketing opportunities via Wikipedia. If you’ve been using Google, in particular, recently, you’ve probably seen Wikipedia pages ranking quite well. Despite some controversy about its openness, Wikipedia has become a trusted site in the search engines’ eyes. Neil’s main points of emphasis? Don’t spam Wikipedia. Become an active contributor to the community. Follow the rules for adding content to Wikipedia. My notes boil down to this sentence: “Same community rules as Flickr.” (see my How to Market on Flickr article) If interested, you can download Neil’s Powerpoint here.

The other presentations focused on things like tagging and linkbait. I was most interested in hearing what the speakers would say about del.icio.us as a marketing tool, and how to use that. My gut feeling was that people were creating multiple del.icio.us accounts and trying to spam-bookmark their way to the del.icio.us “popular” page, but to a person everyone said that’s not the way to go. Instead, and this’ll sound like a broken record by now, spend your time becoming an active member of the community. With del.icio.us and similar sites, your goal is to build up a strong user profile that other people want to track. And, in doing so, your bookmarks get more eyeballs (and clicks / traffic) because you’re an influential member of the community.

tags: sessj06, sessanjose06, delicious, wikipedia, social search, tagging, neil patel