iCrossing's VP of corporate strategy explains the importance, and constraints, of this collaborative encyclopedia.

It's tough to do a search for a branded term these days without running across prominent results from Wikipedia. Thanks to its aura of objectivity, the engines consider the collaborative encyclopedia an extremely authoritative site. Certainly, its popularity among internet users cannot be disputed. Wikipedia ranked as the ninth most visited brand in Nielsen//NetRatings' July survey of home and work users in the United States, while comScore found Wikipedia sites to be the sixth most popular among home and work users globally, demonstrating a reach that extends well beyond the English language.

Wikipedia's growing importance as a source of information about anything and everything coupled with its rising traffic numbers makes it an attractive target for brands looking to gain search visibility as well as engage with what is in effect a large, global social network. Chances are good that anyone conducting a search for a brand will end up on a Wikipedia page at some point. By the same token, many of those searching may turn out to be contributors to a brand's entry.

In my May column, I discussed the importance of following two simple rules for social media, the first of which (and perhaps most challenging for brands) is listening to your networks. When I talk to clients about how to engage with social media, one of the first steps, particularly for those clients not intimately familiar with the world of social networks, involves walking them through their Wikipedia profile, not just the entry itself, but also the discussion and history around the entry. Because of the site's prominence, visibility and authority, the discussion and history serve as good indicators of how engaged members of the community are with the brand, and may provide some clues as to general sentiment as well. It's one small, simple, but useful way to demonstrate how to listen and what to listen for.

While recent iMedia features have focused on the potential damage a Wikipedia entry can do to a brand's reputation, I think it's also worth highlighting the damage a brand can do to its Wikipedia entry (and by extension its reputation). As with most social media, the content that visitors to Wikipedia see is not necessarily controlled by the brand. As a representative of the brand, you may have a voice, but yours will not be the only one, nor can you expect thinly disguised marketing pieces to make it past the army of "editors" that make up the broader Wiki community. Rather, promotional materials, unless cleverly masked, will generally fall under the rubric of spam and constitute grounds for deletion.

The emergence of Wikipedia Scanner, a tool invented by CalTech graduate student Virgil Griffith to track the IP addresses of Wikipedia editors, has upped the ante in the transparency game and made it that much harder for brands to be the arbiters of their own entries (or saboteurs of those of their competitors). Some of the meddling carries the weight of a school-yard taunt. On the entry for Honda's popular Fit hatchback, a user with an IP address registered to the Ford Motor Company renamed the model "Honda Loser" (the entry has since been changed back, although the edited page can still be viewed). In other cases, intervention appears more calculated to minimize potentially unfavorable coverage. Users with IP addresses registered to companies such as Diebold, Raytheon, MacDonald's, Pepsi, Exxon and Wal-Mart have been found to have removed or edited sections that are critical of the companies or which highlight public controversies involving the brands (in the case of Wal-Mart, edits focused on employment practices, while for Exxon, discussion of the Valdez oil spill was the target).

Undoubtedly, through IP spoofing and other black hat tactics, there will be ways to circumvent the tool's reach, but the larger point is that the community is watching and ever-vigilant in its efforts to prevent abuse. Judging by a check of WikiScanner's socialmeter scores and the growing number of edits posted to Wired's running list, it has quickly emerged as a topic of significant conversation across blogs and social networks in the short time since its public launch, suggesting a widespread interest in preserving the transparency that is the source of Wikipedia's credibility.

Under Wikipedia's content guidelines in bold type appears the simple phrase "Wikipedia is not an advertising service." That may be true, but for all the reasons noted above, it is a de facto advertising medium. Brands cannot be expected to resist the opportunity to reach such a large audience, especially in today's marketing-challenged environment in which consumers have such a powerful voice. Using the medium to deliver a message, in essence, straddling the often razor-thin line between informing and advertising, means respecting the rules or risking exposure for not doing so. The potential for embarrassing and negative attention hardly seems worth the risk given what's typically at stake.

Noah Elkin, Ph.D., is vice president of corporate strategy at iCrossing. Read full bio.