A couple of big Wikipedia stories last week. One was from Hitwise which showed that Google is now responsible for 50% of the traffic to Wikipedia. In fact, 70% of Wikipedia’s traffic comes from the search engines:
Hitwise data showed that for the week ending Feb 10, 2007, 70% of Wikipedia’s upstream visits came from search engines, with 50% from Google alone. Google’s share of Wikipedia’s upstream traffic from Google has increased by 19% over the past year (week ending 2/10/07 vs. week ending 2/11/06), at the same time that Wikipedia’s market share of US visits increased by 143%.
At the same time comScore Networks announced that Wikipedia had cracked the top ten list of most popular Web sites in the U.S. for the first time in January with 42.9 million unique visitors last month. That is quite an accomplishment considering that a little over a year ago, Wikipedia was ranked 33rd with only 18.3 million uniques.
Wikipedia and Google have become the defacto sources of information online. Last year I wrote about the impact that Wikipedia was having on brand reputation and how a study by Micropersuasion showed that 11 of the top 20 advertised brands in the US had a Wikipedia page showing on Page 1 of the Google SERP for it’s brand.
If your brand is on Wikipedia, then you should be checking it on a regular basis to see whether the information presented there is correct. Checking your Wikipedia entry once is not enough as the site is constantly being updated. For example, Jet Blue has received a lot of negative press recently because of the issues it had during last week’s storm. The Jet Blue Wikipedia page already has that information.
Wikipedia doesn’t impact just brands. It impacts market segments. Just as Internet users perceive that the top listings on Google are the top brands, users also perceive that the sites listed in Wikipedia for a search are the best and most relevant companies. For example the Wikipedia entry for Voice of the Customer is dominated with links to isixsigmna.com. Someone looking for VOC information on Wikipedia could perceive that the best web site for information is isixsigman.com, effectively shutting out any other web sites. For companies is this market segment, that is not a good situation.
Companies need to be aware of what Wikipedia says about their brand, market segment and company leaders, and a plan needs to be in place to monitor and update the information that is shown to users.
Wikipedia has RSS feeds for revision history of every page, making it easy to subscribe to the edits made to your brand’s page. It’s not always easy to understand the edits as they’re displayed in RSS, but it will get you the alerts you can click on to check out the changes.
That is a great tip Ed on how to keep on top of Wikipedia changes. It is similar to using Google alerts for stories about your company.
David, very right!
Search has changed. Online consumer information retrieval has reached another inflexion point. There is a shift from pure algorithmic search to social search.
Relevance remains the #1 critical success factor. More than ever, relevance is in essence a subjective measure of perception taking into consideration the holistic search experience one user at a time. Inferring user intent remains at the core of the relevance challenge that social search addresses head front. After “on-the-page-“ and “off-the-page criteria” such as meta tags, Web connectivity and link authority, relevance is now increasingly augmented by implicit and explicit user behaviors, social networks and communities.
To paraphrase Microsoft’s Naam it’s like every human being is a neuron, and humanity as a whole is one giant brain, smarter as a connected whole. If you can increase the ability of humans to communicate with each other, you make the whole planet smarter. As articulated by Chris Sherman, Social Search is information retrieval, way finding tools informed by human judgment. Social search is people helping people find stuff. And by the way, not everybody needs to be tagging and voting for collaborative efforts to reach mass impact and benefit the rest of us.
Wikipedia is absolutely awesome. Broke into collaborative directory building, social search. What’s interesting is that it is leading folks to consensus, a bit off from “the wisdom of crowds” that averages independent, diverse contributions. Wikipedia is more an illustration of the James Surowiecki’s cascading effct. … if I understood his theories correctly. Awesome book anyways.
I would watch out for HitWise stats, though. Look into the methodology, which ISPs they are getting their data from, the distribution of their samples, how representative – or not – the sampling methodology is. It’s good data and I am not a statistician PhD. comparing to Comscore and Nielsen, some of Hitwise’s numbers are just so totally out of range that it makes it difficult to look at any HitWise reported stats with credibility.