Wikipedia:Wikipedia as marketing channel

Let's say you're in charge of marketing a new product, business, band, film, celebrity, whatever. As with any modern marketing manager, your digital marketing mix will naturally consist of SEO, SEM, social media, Wikipedia page, etc. – right? Wrong. Wikipedia is emphatically not a marketing channel. (Get that clear in your own head, so that you can also explain it to your WP:BOSS – preferably before they even think to request it.)

Social media platforms expect you to set up your own profile. After all, if you don't do it, no one else will. Some, such as LinkedIn, go some way towards verifying that whoever sets up a company profile for ACME Inc. actually represents ACME Inc. and is vaguely authorised to do so.

From this it seems to follow that many people assume that's what you're meant to do on Wikipedia as well, ie. 'set up your profile' to tell the world about your product/business/band/self. Instead, we have strict rules in place to prevent WP:COI / WP:PAID editing, and at least strongly discourage autobiography creation. Yet this apparently comes as a great surprise to many new editors, despite the multiple warnings they will have seen when creating their draft or article.

Quite simply, promotion of any sort is not allowed on Wikipedia. And before you say "but I'm not selling anything" or "it's not advertising" or "I'm just creating a factual profile on a real [whatever]", that's as may be, but what you're doing is almost certainly still promotion (see WP:YESPROMO for more on that).

It probably doesn't help that the Wikipedia tagline is "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" – it seems to be too easy to misinterpret the "anyone can edit" bit as "anyone can write whatever they want" (especially if that's how one wants to interpret it). Wikipedia is free, and it is for all, but it isn't a free-for-all. Some even go so far as to consider the creation of 'their profile' on Wikipedia as some sort of freedom-of-expression issue or other basic human right, and tend to get awfully cross when they discover otherwise (usually around the same time as they discover their account has been blocked).

It's understandable that you want to get whatever-it-is-you're-marketing on Wikipedia, for a number of reasons, not least because Wikipedia is among the top-10 most visited websites and therefore holds a helluvalot of clout on 'them interwebs'. But resist the temptation; don't do it. Don't pay anyone else to do it, either. And remember to show WP:BOSS to your boss.

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