Study: Wikipedia Dominates Brand Search Results

Wikipedia articles on the top 100 advertisers in the U.S. are consistently among the most highly ranked pages in Google on direct searches. This is according to an exclusive Micro Persuasio study conducted over the past week. The study was compiled by simply taking the largest 100 advertisers from AdAge, entering them into Google and then tallying the results.

The obvious conclusion here is that most search results are full of related entries from Wikipedia (not to mention blogs and other peer media). Taking this a step further, this means that millions of individuals who hear about products through these billions of dollars advertising and then turn to Google to research them are likely influenced by what Wikipedia says. Further, many searchers probably do not even know that the encyclopedia is not run by a single body but by a collective of individuals, even people they may know.

Below is a summary of where Wikipedia ranks in the Google results of the top 20 media spenders. You can download the full Top 100 table here (PDF). If you want the spreadsheet so you can slice the data some more, shoot me an email. All data is current as of yesterday. In the notes I have ID'd Edelman clients.

Key findings:

* On average, Wikipedia articles for the top 100 brands appear as result number 11 out of thousands. This is just shy of the magic number 10 required to make Google's first page of results. However, many brands have Wikipedia articles in the first 10 results. Some even have them in in the top five.

* The more domains you have with your name, the less likely you have Wikipedia all up in your grill The more unique your brand is, the more likely its relevant Wikipedia article will rank high on Google

* Results are similar on MSN, Yahoo and Ask, though they're not documented here. I focused on Google since it's the market share leader

So what do you do? In short, nothing. The following article, which appears in this week's AdAge, explains more...

This is Your Brand on Wikipedia

Question to marketers: Do you know what Wikipedia says about you?

Last year Home Depot spent over a half a billion dollars on measured media, according to TNS data. The money was well spent - Google Trends shows that U.S. searches for Home Depot nearly doubled this year.

But it's highly likely that many consumers, in conducting their due diligence, landed on the company's Wikipedia article which, as of this writing, ranks fifth in a Google search for the retailer. Among a lot of neutral-to-positive information, you will learn that there have been several cases where illegal drugs were found inside some Home Depot merchandise in Massachusetts.

Like it or not, the Wikipedia open-source phenomenon looms large right where companies are increasingly spending billions of dollars to jockey for position: on search-engine-results pages. A quick check of dozens of the brands on Ad Age’s Top 200 Megabrands list reveals that Wikipedia often ranks high not just among Google search results, but also among results from Yahoo, MSN Search and Ask.com. The same can also be said for media brands, celebrities, CEOs and other personalities.

Consider the following examples. Febreeze's Wikipedia entry (#2 on Google) notes that the product may be harmful to household pets. Or the article on McDonald's (#4 on Google), which basically summarizes the critical movie Super Size Me. Even advertising icons like Snap, Crackle and Pop aren’t exempt. The trio's Wikipedia entry notes the team once had a short-lived adventure as super heroes in the UK.

In all seriousness, as soon as brand managers learn where they stand on Wikipedia there is a natural inclination to want to control it. Some, in fact, actively police it. After all, anyone can. But doing so is asking for trouble. Case in point: One firm offering to author Wikipedia articles for companies has been banned by the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that manages the site.

The Wikipedia community prides itself on making sure all articles have a neutral point of view, and this community can and will sniff out corporate manipulation of entries. Wikipedia policy, in fact, clearly states that all articles "must represent views fairly and without bias, and conflicts of interest significantly and negatively affect Wikipedia's ability to fulfill this requirement impartially."

Nevertheless, brands should have a way to challenge inaccurate information in a way that respects the wishes of the community. Wikipedia should carve out a special area on each page where brand managers and personas can respond in an official capacity to what the community has published. But until that happens, "look but don’t touch" is the best advice to heed.

Tags: wikipedia, brands

:Update: Greg Kohs notes that his company's user account was not banned. They were blocked for a bit of time until Wikipedia's "Arbitration Committee" decided that the case didn't warrant a review. The block has since expired.

Comments

[Rex Hammock]

Steve, perhaps some research folks can weigh in on the validity of your findings (certainly, you interpretation of the findings can be debated), however, I think your actual research method was "formal," not informal. If you were wearing a tuxedo when doing those google searches, I'd be sure of that.

[Dave]

great article.

and you know what the lesson here is?

hint: it's *NOT* that Wikipedia is a great place to make sure you post a profile of your business... (altho it's true you should).

- dave mcclure
http://500hats.typepad.com/

[RisingSunofNihon]

I agree that companies should monitor their Wikipedia entries. These days it's critical to know what's being said on the Internet about your company and to try to control your image as much as possible. For example, there's no way that the entry on McDonald's should basically be a summary of Super Size Me. I guess that speaks to Wikipedia's overall credibility though (another issue altogether).

[mroonie]

The reason why companies THINK that wikipedia is such a great marketing tool is because it IS the voice of the people. Companies can get a real good idea of where they actually stand by referring to Wikipedia. Because of this, people think that by policing the data that appears on wikipedia, they can somehow mold and shape the thoughts of those who refer to it. But that's the beauty of wikipedia. Wikipedia doesn't shape the public, the public shapes wikipedia! Marketers seem to hope that this relationship is bi-directional...

I agree that companies should be AWARE of what is being said about them on wikipedia but should not attempt to control this free-flowing tool.

[joanna]

Interesting study, and I fully subscribe to the advice to companies of 'look but don't touch'. Do you know if Wikipedia is exploring any official avenues for companies to address inaccuracies, such as a special area of the page as you mention here?

[B House]

I find it amusing that marketers want to "correct inaccuracies" and that anyone would want to give them that chance. The business of marketing is to put positively-slanted "inaccuracies' before the public in order to influence purchases. When was the last time any marketer was 100% truthful about their product or service?

[C]

The best thing for companies to do is click the "discussion" tab at the top of the article. Edit the page, identify yourself, point to externally verifiable sources that correct errors or contain info that should be in the article, and let Wikipedians do their work.

[Gregory Kohs]

Steve, you (like many others) have seriously misinterpreted the status of MyWikiBiz.com. We are not "banned" from running our business, which is to author free-documentation licensed articles about our clients who wish to have their information within Wikipedia. We were "blocked" (note, not "banned") from editing Wikipedia for 10 days total, while a compromise was ironed out. And, in fact, we have been operating for weeks now under an accord that Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales endorsed publically. Please amend your blog post. While you're giving your opinions about leaving Wikipedia alone (maybe true for Fortune 500 firms, but laughably naive for the "bottom 40,000"), you don't want to be caught making the mistake of libeling another firm in your blog.

P.S. We've successfully helped PR professionals get important factual content into Wikipedia, measurably improving the image reputation and ranking of their products in consumer search results. Thus far, 100% of our clients have been delighted with the results.

P.P.S. You're always free to contact me before writing about my enterprise. No hard feelings!

[Daniel R]

Steve,

Building on your excellent report, Michael Gray did some test against the AOL Search Data and found some interesting stuff. Here's a snippet:
"Looking at the AOL data for Directv we see it was searched for 815 times and no one clicked on the wikipedia result. Just as reality check searching on AOL we see wikipedia is there.

For Circuit City we see 3200 searches with only one click to wikipedia. Again checking AOL wikipedia is present."

Original Link Here

[Niall Cook]

Steve,

Wikipedia already has guidance on how companies should go about challenging the accuracy, impartiality, and referenceability (?) of entries about them.

Note to a previous commenter - it does not recommend editing the page itself (this is seen as a conflict of interest), but using the Discussion page for the entry to put your argument to editors and point them to reliable sources of information.

[C]

Sorry, Niall -- I guess it was rather ambiguous in my post. I certainly did mean that they should edit the "discussion" page, not the article itself.

But pointing to verifiable information (that is not, itself, a company press release) is the key thing companies can do to help Wikipedia create a balanced article.

That, and resisting the urge to remove verifiable *negative* information!

[eszter]

We don't know much about who searches for these terms in the first place and whether they click on this particular result so in that sense this analysis in not very helpful, although it is certainly interesting to observe the position of Wikipedia links.

Regardless, I think in this case, it would be more meaningful for you to focus on the median rather than the mean of where the Wikipedia link lands in the results. The median for this list of 100 (or 98) is 7, so it is on the first page. The median is more useful, b/c the mean is very much biased by a few outliers at the upper end (51, 77, 199).

[Niall Cook]

Technorati's reporting 45 links to this post, yet there are no trackbacks displaying here. What gives?

[Niall Cook]

C - agreed.

[Max Kalehoff]

Steve,

To your point, Wikipedia matters as search result shelf space if anything. Those brand impressions are important, even if they're not clicked on. But that click-through to Wikipedia is what you're missing, and can drastically influence the impact of the point you're trying to make.

Graywolf expresses that here through use of AOL search data: http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/steve-rubel-wikipedia-and-aol-data-part-ii/

However, there are some data that show some support for your argument. When I was working with Hitwise on their search behavioral data over a year ago, I asked a similar question: How does Wikipedia rank among all sites based on dowstream click-throughs from all search engines?

Here was my key finding:

Wikipedia: The Ultimate Search Magnet

With nearly 600,000 "living" articles to date, Wikipedia's orderly collection of consumer-created content is becoming a high-powered magnet for Internet searches. A ranking of all Web sites based on the total volume of traffic received directly from search engines placed Wikipedia at 146 in June 2004. But in September 2004 it jumped in the ranking to 93; 71 in December 2004; and in March 2005, it was the 33rd most popular site in terms of visits received from search engines.

More details from a column I wrote on my analysis is here: http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=30253&art_search=

The fact is that relative to all sites, it does get signifacant click-through, though that's against a very long-tail average.

I'm talking with Hitwise about re-running these data for me.

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