Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

I’ve just added a new tool to the research belt, a site called wikiinvest. I’m sort of a business junkie, and enjoy reading/listening to market news and information. This is a site that is creating some information-rich, enlightening and fun (for me) profiles.

They have (so far):

• 821 companies profiled (anyone is welcome to sign up and start a profile of a company - they focus on companies with $100M and up in market capitalization)
• 155 concepts - on concepts ranging from aging baby boomers to US economic cycles profiled (as above)
• 1177 contributors writing and editing content, annotating stock charts (Apple stock example here) and providing other industry research

I had a look at Southwest Airlines, for example, and found their annotated stock chart updated in real time, a list of their top contributors to their pages (take that! Wikipedia), and a whole bunch of other very interesting information about the company, at-a-glance.

As much as I’ve been on rants about business’ dependence of Wikipedia lately, I’m very, very pleased to be able to pass the word about this wiki site along to anyone looking for real, nimble, interesting business information.

I got a note this morning from my friends over at Anvil Media, a Portland, OR search engine marketing (SEM) firm. Their online reputation was being bashed. I know them well, they’re above reproach in my book, so I wanted to look into it, and asked for an accounting of the situation.

A Marketing Coup Crumbles

Here’s how it rolled out:

1. A few months ago, Anvil and Attensa worked together to put information on Wikipedia about Attensa’s RSS feed server. Now, that’s a feat, because no “marketing” information is allowed on Wikipedia, it’s all about facts, according to Wikipedia’s “neutral point of view” policy.
2. They adhered to Wikipedia’s editorial guidelines, even to the degree that they neutered marketing language and listed Attensa’s competitors in fairness to the ‘encyclopedic’ nature of the site. Their content added enough value to the site to be published.
3. Leads started flowing into the Attensa site, and they were good ones. A marketer’s dream.
4. Their program was good enough to get coverage in Marketing Sherpa: “How to Use Wikipedia for Lead Gen…”
5. The shit hit the fan.
6. Someone pulled down the Attensa citations on Wikipedia, and everything else Anvil had ever written on Wikipedia - to boot. Emails were sent (some not-so-slightly threatening), memes ensued, and on and on…

I’m not one to fan a flame of reputation bashing (no matter the source), so suffice it to say, Anvil and Attensa and everyone I’ve been talking to about it have been (rightfully) alarmed by the response.

Wake Up Call for Transparency

So why am I taking the time to write about this? Because everyone in corporate America needs to know this story. I will go a little deeper here, to further illuminate the irresponsible nature of the secret sect that seems to control Wikipedia. In June I attended the Drug Information Association convention in Boston for the Academic Network. I blogged about it here, but it’s worth repeating…

One of the panelists lamented of their company’s inability to change a factual error on Wikipedia for a drug they manufactured - it was listed as being taken ‘orally’ when, in fact, it was not. They couldn’t do anything to correct it, though, for fear of being held liable for all of the constantly changing information about their drug on the site. So they opted, on the advice of their attorneys, to leave it.

That’s a pretty big deal. A drug company being unable to correct a HUGE inaccuracy about a drug, because of fear.

You see, since about August of last year, there’s been a tool that will show who’s editing what on Wikipedia, called Wikiscanner. When it came out, so did the horror stories (like these in Wired)… of companies editing (and deleting) entire paragraphs of information from Wikipedia. This is exactly what the Wikipedia Editorial guidelines are out to prevent, but now Big Brother can expose exactly who’s writing what…

And prevention is exactly what they’re getting - pharmaceutical companies are afraid to (or being banned from) righting obvious wrongs.

Meanwhile, guess what comes up as the #1 search result in most searches? Wikipedia. In fact, in the case of health and medical information, look who’s trusted most:

That scares me, just hearing one little story of an inaccuracy found, and the company being unable to change it.

People trust Wikipedia. Google trusts Wikipedia. But can we trust the people who edit Wikipedia? Not based on the backchannel I saw this morning.

Who are these people? A pretty clubby society of folks who’ve been able to figure out how to:

• Use the (fairly technical) programming language
• Participate and thrive in the backchannel conversations while doing so (see below)
• Control not only postings, but entire access to Wikipedia, and
• Block companies from editing entries

Who are these folks? To sum up with an insight as to their mindset (from Wired article Wikipedia FAQK), author Lore Sjoberg wrote:

“What should I know if I want to contribute to an argument nexus (or “article”) on Wikipedia?
It will help to familiarize yourself with some of the common terms used on Wikipedia:

• meat puppet: A person who disagrees with you.
• non-notable: A subject you’re not interested in.
• vandalism: An edit you didn’t make.
• neutral point of view: Your point of view.
• consensus: A mythical state of utopian human evolution. Many scholars of Wikipedian theology theorize that if consensus is ever reached, Wikipedia will spontaneously disappear.

Is it true that anyone can contribute?
Sure, Wikipedia is absolutely open to absolutely anyone contributing to absolutely anything! As long as you haven’t been banned, or the article you’re contributing to hasn’t been locked, or there isn’t a group of people waiting to delete anything you write, or you don’t make the same change more than three times in one day, or the subject of the article hasn’t decided to send scary lawyer letters to Wikipedia, or you haven’t pissed Jimbo Wales off real bad. It’s all about freedom.”

Freedom for those who know the secret handshake, that is. As for the rest of us, we’re probably just non-notable at best.

Count me as a meat puppet - on behalf of Anvil and Attensa, in this case…

I have a new client, Topia Technology, out of Tacoma, WA. They’ve been working since 9/11 to help the FAA make airspace safer and the US Army Intelligence Security Command to link together disparate systems in support of homeland security. Nice pedigree, great causes.

Today, they’re announcing their first product in the “civilian” world, SKOOT, which helps people transfer huge files (they’ve tested files up to 65GB) securely from one machine to another without relying on FTP servers, email or FEDEX.

Ad Hoc Private Networks (Even on the Fly)

The thing I like about it the most is that you can (from a Windows machine) simply “Save As” any document into a SKOOT folder (that’s right, from within PowerPoint, InDesign, PhotoShop, etc.), and the file will be automatically sent to any user with whom you choose to share that file. On a Mac, it’s a simple drag and drop…

When it’s done shipping, it doesn’t go to some seldom-used “portal” in the clouds, the data ends up right in a SKOOT folder on the recipients’ hard drive - giving sender and recipients secure control of the file at all times.

Corporate Marketers: Imagine being able to simply SKOOT the latest corporate presentation/video/suite of product material to every sales person in your far-flung organization, and the security of knowing they always have the latest “blessed” version with them at all times.

IT Professionals: Huge file transfer is now as easy as “save as…” for your users. You no longer have to take the time to coach Jim in product development how to send large files using an FTP server (if you even have one).

VCs or Investment Bankers: Securely send information during due diligence using SKOOT, and even the IT guys will be unable to tell what’s being moved around.

Read the PC World article where nearly half of IT workers snoop on confidential files. No offense guys, but to make up, here’s how SKOOT relates to Cloud Computing as a bonus. SKOOT is the first in a series of cloud computing apps from Topia.

If only embedding a YouTube video on this blog (and having it render correctly) was that easy! You can download a free 30-day trial, or learn more about SKOOT here, by watching the video.

I’ve been witness to quite a mental mindstorm brewing in my brain over the past few days, and it’s likely to consume my blog efforts for some time to come… (fair warning, or fantastic relief to my four or five regular readers.)

I attended my first non-high tech conference in years (where I wasn’t a speaker), the Drug Information Association’s (DIA) annual convention. There to represent the Academic Network, I was fortunate to research the state of the pharmaceutical industry’s online strategies; especially as consumers are flocking online to research medical conditions and the medicines they’re being prescribed.

Back to the Basics

What I found was quite surprising - for someone who recently declared 2008 to finally be the year of the business blog… the state of technology (and technical infrastructure) in pharma was pretty surprising.

Partly because of regulations, and I’m not sure what other excuses there are… but frankly I was appalled at the lack of IT infrastructure to do even the basics - like supporting remote work teams. (At least, assuming the session speakers I heard were representative.)

Some examples of issues I heard:

• Many Medical Liaisons (remote representatives of pharma companies) have no access to a shared knowledge base with internal Medical Information team members. An example of a “case study knowledge repository” was shown, but there were no search capabilities, no collaboration capabilities, nothing beyond a database of PDFs or templates. It was as if I was looking at an online portal from 2000.
• Many software representatives (Oracle, Microsoft and others were at the show) had no real notion of allowing their vertical tools to accept web-based information via XML and RSS. When I tried to describe why one might want to poll online communities for potential Adverse Events (something pharma has to monitor and report to the FDA on a strictly regulated basis); I got blank stares.
  • Meanwhile, according to JupiterResearch, the top three reasons people congregate online are:
    • To see what other consumers say about a medication or treatment (36%)
    • To research other consumers’ knowledge and experiences (31%)
    • To learn skills or get education to manage a condition (27%)

Between Rocks and Hard Places…

The panel I was most looking forward to, (and delighted to find it at the show) was titled “Drug Information, Wikipedia and Google Scholar: Implications for Medical Information.” It was both frightening and enlightening at the same time. I Twittered my thoughts as the thing was unfolding… but to net it out:

Frightening: Hearing panelists scoff at the lack of viability of Wikipedia because it’s not scientifically reviewed, yet having them be unwilling (or unable) to correct inadequacies themselves. Even when it comes down to correcting a “simple” edit like changing an inaccurate method of drug delivery - from “oral” to some other method. If they change one heinous error, does that mean the rest of the article is correct by implication?

Enlightening: Because of the advent of WikiScanner in August, 2007, even anonymous entries can be tracked to an IP address and attributed to an organization. Examples were shown where organizations (Diebold and others) altered Wikipedia entries “anonymously” and were later outed for doing so in Wired. The last thing these public companies, tightly regulated by the FDA (ugh, those poor people and their systems… more on that later), want is to be publicly derided for anonymous changes.

Meanwhile, look where most consumers go to find information about medical conditions online:

So my new crusade is to do two things: help enlightened health care organizations safely enter the Health 2.0 space (while trying to stay patient - no pun intended), and to help those of us poor schlubs who are out there looking for information to find the most accurate, up-to-date information possible.

It’s a big job, but somebody has to do it. I welcome all the help I can get…

In a fascinating and compelling cover article in this month’s Atlantic magazine called “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” Nicholas Carr writes:

“My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

He goes on to say that years of using “the Net” has begun to effect the way our (extremely malleable) brains are actually wired - and we’re reprogramming the neural network within our heads every time we go online. I’m in agreeance.

He goes on to cite historical changes in technology that have affected the brain - the printing press, the clock, the advent of Turing’s efficiency studies… in a very, very cool article.

I first heard of it from a friend who (ironically) hadn’t read the whole thing. I ran out and bought the publication in order to read it at my leisure (which could also be deemed ironic). I did read it all, and it’s both insightful and slightly frightening at the same time. Read it to find out why…

Meanwhile, my favorite quote from deep within the framework of the pages:

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

I am, indeed, a “pancake person,” spread wide and thin. But I’m not stoopid. Maybe just stuffed.