Wikipedia is a global phenomenon; the openly-editable encyclopedia is the sixth most popular site in the world. So it’s not surprising that, every now and again, vested interests seek to manipulate its content. Not least in the American presidential race, where, its been reported that Mitt Romney’s Wikipedia page has been edited hundreds of times since the Republican primaries began.

Wikipedia’s community guidelines are all available online and easy to find, and emphasise that entries must be written from a neutral point of view, in line with the second of its five pillars. So as a communications professional it’s always worth bearing in mind the following principles (adapted from Wikipedia’s guidelines), to avoid wasting your time creating/editing changes that are undone, or worse, cause severe embarrassment or legal consequences:

1. All of your edits should be in line with the aim of Wikipedia, which is to produce a neutral, reliably sourced encyclopedia
2. Wikipedia is not a battleground – you should not try to begin or engage in disputes via Wikipedia entries
3. Avoid Conflict of Interest (COI) editing. This involves contributing to Wikipedia in order to promote your own interests or those of other individuals, companies, or groups. Where advancing outside interests is more important to you as an editor, than advancing the aims of Wikipedia,this counts as a conflict of interest
4. This includes avoiding self-promotion: adding advertising links, personal website links, personal or semi-personal photos, or other material that appears to promote the private or commercial interests of the editor, or their associates. Examples of these types of material include:
   • Links that appear to promote products by pointing to obscure or not particularly relevant commercial sites.
   • Links that appear to promote otherwise obscure individuals by pointing to their personal pages.
   • Biographical material that does not significantly add to the clarity or quality of the article.
   • Promotional article production on behalf of clients Editors should not create articles which serve solely to promote their subject. All Wikipedia articles should contain useful information written as if from a neutral point of view. The writing of “puff pieces” and advertisements on Wikipedia is strictly prohibited. If you contribute to Wikipedia on behalf of clients, you owe it to both them and the encyclopedia to make very sure you understand the standards for content here, and do not insert promotional material.
5. Wikipedia is not a soapbox or means of promotion or advertising. All information about companies and products are written in an objective and unbiased style. All article topics must be verifiable with independent, third-party sources, so articles about very small “garage” or local companies are typically unacceptable. See also Wikipedia:Notability (organizations and companies) for guidelines on corporate notability.
6. Those promoting causes or events, or issuing public service announcements, even if noncommercial, should use a forum other than Wikipedia to do so.
7. If you are in a situation where you need or wish to try and adapt a Wikipedia page on behalf of an individual or institution on the grounds of accuracy, explain your case on the Wikipedia talk page that sits behind it (example shown below) – being transparent about how you would like the page to be edited and why, and including reference links.

(Adapted from a post which first appeared on Mariamz blog).

This was supposed to be one of those posts which gleefully exposed a company for bad digital practice, pointing out that I’d have done a much better job and they’re very naughty. I was over the moon when I caught a large (well, punching above its weight – temporarily) company out recently, and instantly began plotting their bloggy demise. But the professional in me put the brakes on, and I called their press office. That’s when things got a little strange…

Astroturfing

According to Wikipedia, astroturfing describes “political, advertising, or public relations campaigns seeking to create the impression of being spontaneous “grassroots” behavior, hence the reference to the artificial grass”. In a nutshell, if I were to go onto a blog, assume an alias and make a comment singing the praises of Porter Novelli, or of a client, I’d be astroturfing.

Here in the digital team at PN, we really frown upon astroturfing. There are a number of reasons for this, the most important few being that a) social media thrives on transparency and we want to execute campaigns which fit that ethos, b) if web users are offended by it, we just can’t do it and c) you will get caught.

The guarantee of being caught out doesn’t seem to occur to some people. Belkin were caught red-handed in January, something I wrote about at the time.

I’m not going to name the company I caught for two reasons. First, their response – though it initially knocked me for six – made me think. Second, they offered to meet me to discuss how they could improve their social media approach. For a number of reasons this was an attractive proposition to me, so you’ll have to excuse me maintaining their anonymity.

Discovering the astroturfer

The company in question was a little unlucky to get caught, but it just highlights the fact that someone, somewhere will find astroturfers. One morning, they sent me a press release. I ignored it, as I always do from them, because of their agency’s appalling blogger relations. Not five minutes later I was browsing a forum to which I have moderating rights and spotted the same story, apparently posted by a user, with suspiciously similar wording.

The user had posted only four times, the kind of number which always raises the alarm when posting links to big corporates. I checked the previous three, and two of them posted links to the same company’s site – and related to the previous two press releases they’d sent me. One IP check later, and I’d discovered that the user was posting from this company’s headquarters. Bang to rights.

I also checked Boardreader, and found that the same activity had been carried out by the same person on three different sites. To the best of my knowledge, those site owners still have no idea. I did ask the company to make their activity known to the relevant sites.

The baffling response

Rather than go straight for the throat, I got in touch with the company’s press office, who quickly passed me on to the relevant contact, who kindly called me that afternoon. His response horrified me initially. I’d been expecting “we’ll find out who it is and have a word” but what I got was effectively “yes it was us, we’ve been doing it for a while”. It’s a signed off strategy!

But further into the conversation, my contact said something that got me thinking. The company in question had tried to engage with these web forums through accepted routes, but had met with a mute response. So they went ahead and posted anyway.

“Well,” said my contact on the phone. “Them not responding doesn’t change the fact that we need to engage with their members”.

In a way, he’s right. His objective is to engage with the members of a particular set of forums (a notoriously suspicious and difficult bunch, as it happens), and it’s not his job to maintain the integrity of the social web. So b*llocks to it. I have to say, that point makes a lot of sense to me even if I don’t agree with it.

What that does ignore, of course, is the possibility of getting caught and the ensuing PR crisis. It’s only been avoided in this case because one person is willing to concede that the company was wrong and agreed to a meeting.

So is it ever okay to astroturf? Setting aside the PR issue, is it ever possible to just say “sod it” and ignore the unwritten rules of the web? After all, you’ve got targets, right?

I still think it’s always wrong, for what it’s worth.

Any regular reader’s out there will have got the gist long ago that we at PN Towers love Twitter. We’ve compiled Twitter lists, held Twitter events, written Twitter guides and talked about how Twitter is looking at monetization to name just a few ways we’ve expressed our Twitter-fu, so understandably we get a little concerned when it seems that people or brands are misusing our (current) favourite social network for their own devious ends. Which is what PC World currently stands accused of.

Over the past 24 hours or so one of the top trending topics on twitter has been #twitterpornnames, a meme in which people are combining the name of their first pet with either their first headteacher’s  surname, your mother’s maiden name or the first street upon which you lived. All of which may well also be the answers to security questions asked by your bank, or favourite retail website, as well as a way of coming up with an amusing pseudonym.

PC World kindly pointed out this may well be a phishing attack to people and advised them that if they had joined in the the online fun they should now go and update answers to security questions and change their passwords. All rather sensible, although it was then accused by What the Trend? as being the originator of the #tag purely so that it could then write the warning story and make cash from increased advertising revenue.

Now admittedly this could be true, I’ve done a bit of digging but can’t, as yet, find out from where the meme originated but it does strike one as being a rather far fetched and a slightly laborious way to build trafficbut stranger things have happened.  Of course human gullibility fallibility is always the biggest hole to patch in any security system, there are countless examples of people handing over passwords in return for sweeties as the perennial survey from InfoSec Europe reveals. However  could this mark the beginning of cynical companies/individuals perverting a fairly easily gamed system for their own ends, though Twitterettes do have their own form of swift justice, just think about how quickly tweets such as this…

…appeared when Skittles decided to divert its web site front page to a stream of any tweets that mention skittles. That was actually one of the more polite ones (if you are interested you can find the NSFW stuff with a quick google search)

So with that in mind it will be interesting to see if the accusation of shenanigans on PC World will be found to be true or not, and if in either case we’ll see an increase of cynical attempts at corporate twitter manipulation and what the backlash will be.