Proposal:New marketing concept in social media in 4 phases
Every proposal should be tied to one of the strategic priorities below.
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- Achieve continued growth in readership
- Focus on quality content
- Increase Participation
- Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
- Encourage Innovation
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Summary
Achieving new marketing and social media benefits while improving wikipedia platform by organizing existing meta-data in 5 phases:
- 1- Marketing contributor support platform (half way to phase 2)
- 2- Platform for integrating Wikipedia with social network services
- 3- Micro Wikipedia service
- 4- Geo data on Wikipedia web articles, visitor and user
- 5- Wikipedia Analytics (additional phase)
Proposal
Phase 1:
Title: marketing contributor support platform
Environment and the need of proposal:
Wikipedia have a regular way for accepting online donations. Donation requires some amount of money willing to be transfered to help the goals and belief of Wikipedia.
Contributors are world wide, and they contribute their articles voluntary. Wikipedia is regarded as world social collaborative treasure that should be preserved.
There are companies that are willing to help Wikipedia as their corporate social responsibility. Still front page statement that some organization donated Wikipedia is not a big letter news that can be actively marketed and promoted, nor will be regarded as medium or long term public relationship campaign.
Companies and organisations are interested in promoting Wikipedia beliefs while discounting their products or services that they are willing to promote in joint effort. Companies are willing to cut their profit margins if they see social value of campaign.
Wikipedia does not have solution/platform for supporting such corporate social responsibility or public relationship (overall marketing) needs of possible discount or promotion oriented campaigns.
Wikipedia users can be rewarded (sponsored) by interested companies while they contribute to Wikipedia content. Missing part for providing such service is information system - marketing support platform that would provide general purpose interface for accounting contributor activity, that third party companies can use as measure for awarding their product/service users, while preserving privacy/anonymity for wikipedia users.
Such marketing support platform later can be proactively promoted by wikipedia representatives as a service that will engage world wide companies that are willing to promote Wikipedia and share same beliefs, while supporting work of contributors.
Practical Example:
Let us, for example, say that in UK there is BT telecom operator that wants to have some kind of social network engagement, and have decided to sponsor Wikipedia, by promoting Wikipedia content as national interest, and that they are willing to discount internet access monthly fees for 5% for 5 articles submitted on Wikipedia every month. (they can even state that they sponsor articles related to telecommunications or any other interest for this month)
In practice, wikipedia user of BT, would login to their own BT cutomer page, then he would jump to the page named 'wikipedia promotion'. BT customer will be transfered to wikipedia login site (like facebook do for facebook applications) with unique BT identification (real username, or some hash or some user ID numeric). Wikipedia will confirm login as successful (or create new account), provide uniqe Wikipedia identification (real wikipedia username, or some hash or some user ID numeric) and user will be returned to BT customer service web page, to choose what type of discount arrangement details he is ready to accept/subscribe. From that time and on, on end of each accounting period time, BT could ask for report of actions of shared (wikipedia/BT) user (by stating their identifier and wikipedia identifier) and decide which discount policy should it use in monthly fee.
In Wikipedia report there coud be IP address, or topic/category, or article title, for that user, (or any other data that is of interest of promotional partner than can be retrieved with regards to privacy) so BT could decide (in predefined agreement with Wikipedia and BT) should BT sponsor actions under this account than from other teleco operator, or other topic than agreed for.
We can imagine any other product and company (from cocacola to nike, mc donalds, universities, national institutes, telecommunication companies, air transport companies, touristic destinations ...), that could do the same.
For example in Belgrade/Serbia for each Cocacola can you buy on street you have some code written on the package, that when you send that code by SMS to cocacola lottery service, you have a chance to get free fancy mobile phone.
For each created article wikipedia could provide you with some (general purpose) promotional code. Which ever partner that wants to promote their own service/product with discount is capable to 'consume' this promotional code, in any purpose he likes.
I'm not saying that Wikipedia should be on every corner, I say that there shuold be promotional platform in production, and ways of using it come to Wikipedia policy.
So there will be two general purpose usage case scenarios: - one actions -> promotional code (requires interface for promotion provider to consume promotional code) - aggregated actions (time period, or amount) reports (requires interface for interconnection users)
Direct benefits should be in providing support for Wikipedia goals by engaging number of companies in supporting contributors around the world, while promoting Wikipedia in partners corporate social responsibility and PR needs. Ways of implementing them are not easy numberable, since there is inumerous ways of promoting. Still there Wikipedia should provide clean, understandable, respected, and secure web service/API for interconnection.
The same user activities tracking module from this phase could be used for phase 2 social interacting, but this time there will bi no wikipedia partners but wikipedia users social networks. That's why this phase is necessary as a first step.
Architecture:
There are projects on Wikipedia that provide additional information while processing wikipedia meta data content. All user meta data (activity) is available for consuming, but may be used for good proactive approach.
While integrating user activity information as a web service that can interconnect with other marketing/accounting information systems that can use anonimized user activity data to measure their own service/product discount/promotion policy, Wikipedia could provide clean, available, integrated, confidential (in one word secure) and reliable source of measures of user contributed content.
Company that is interested in campain for promoting Wikipedia may be interested in: - uniqe relation between their user and wikipedia user (in anonymous way like on social networks) - one or more activity measure attributes (ie. agreed metric of contributed articles geoip, ip, time ...) - way of accounting measured activity (ie. make sure that not the same article is multiple accounted)
Wikipedia in such joint campaign is interested in: - company general information - award/discount/promotion model - measure of award/discount/promotion (as a tracking information) - measure of used promotion/discounted products/services
Project scope: Create informational platform that can correlate wikipedia user exported as anonymous unique numeric identification, with other company unique identification (anonymous or not), and that can account and export reports of such user activites to interested company, as a web service.
Project stages for described platform: - gather and analyze requirements (cca 3 months) - designing data model, reviewing available data and interface needs (cca 2 months) - building prototype (cca 4 months) - review and consolidate (cca 3 months) - building production web service and documenting basic interconnection (cca 6 months)
- supporting different partnership needs (as it is expected that there will be finite but more than few requirements for interconnecting with platform - during service lifetime period)
Benefit:
Wikipedia will provide platform for joint promotions of wikipedia while
providing benefit for wikipedia, third party company, and contributors.
Phase 2:
Title: Platform for integrating Wikipedia with social network services
Environment:
Large and increasing number of users are using social network sites. Most of Wikipedia contributor and users are using social network sites, but Wikipedia services and other services are regarded as separate isles.
Project goal: Position and integrate Wikipedia user activity in a anonymizing social web service in such way that it would be possible to integrate with other social networks.
Practical example: Twitter: John Doe just contributed to WWI article. Facebook: 7 of your friends was recently interested in Picasso wikipedia article. MySpace: Marta have contributed to Wikipedia article on 'Rolling Stones'
Additional benefit of Phase 1 service is capability of easy and anonymized user
interconnecting - a basic social network functionality.
With additional work on extending such service Wikipedia could provide integration point for/with other social network services as Google Wave, Myspace or Facebook, that will allow Wikipedia to socialize and promote Wikipedia user activities on other social media content.
Existing Phase 1 service should be extended in such way that it can provide these functionalities: - anonymized user friends interconnecting (ability to recognize friends from multiple identity locators (name spaces) ie: gmail/wave, facebook, myspace ...) - provide set of information of user activity such as
* user/friend read wikipedia article * user/friend contributed to wikipedia article * user/friend recommended article ...
- social network graph of multiple presences and interactions of users with
wikipedia content
Benefits: Wikipedia will enter the field of social networking while preserving their own primary focus (encyclopedia), providing social interaction and promotion between contributors on multiple social networking sites/presences.
This phase will allow building practical modules such as: - anonymous (other social network id) reading actions tracking - registered (other social network name space) user contributing actions tracking - list of contributed articles for person/user in each social network - manipulating of wikipedia articles (sending, recommending) inside some social network - become a social network itself (users and their interactions in wikipedia space)
Phase 3 : Micro Wikipedia service
Environemnt:
Wikipedia is a referent encyclopedia. For every term (search keyword) that exist in wikipedia there is on average two printed pages of detailed explanation. Crucial advantage of Wikipedia relevance is hidden in stabile social processes/procedures/interactions that in time provide relevant articles.
New web services such as ubiquity/wave provide easy web integration. Web services will never be capable of integrating multipage and detailed article of some term on wikipedia (except referencing it)
Wikipedia have vast knowledge in articles, still it is not capable to put content of one article it in one sentence, and that is not because this is easy work.
It's easier to explain some term on few pages than to put it briefly, and that is because for brief view on some topic you must recognize readers point of view (frame of reference, user context while reading some article)
Wikipedia could implement her crucial advantage (social
processes/procedures/interactions that result in relevant articles) for creating relevant
short wikipedia descriptions - wikipedia micro.
Project goal: Provide parallel wikipedia wikipedia-micro-service (wus), that will describe each term in current wikipedia with one sentence, but allows multiple descriptions related to specified context. Such ability will allow wikipedia to expand it's primary focus from term->article (content) to term->(short,context) and will provide additional benefits and term/article relations.
Practical example: For term 'Wikipedia' in context of 'ethymology': wiki - cms software, paedia - greece for . ... For term 'Wikipedia' in context of 'internet': online encyclopedia For term 'Wikipedia' in context of 'user interface': web interface
Practical example for ubiquity service: - user selects some term, selects wikipedia, result is multiple brief description, in multiple contexts - user select some paragraph, select wikipedia, result is possible context of selected words
Service will provide additional information for some term such as: - multiple brief descriptions in same context (arranged by most voted) - most used brief description in same context - related context for brief description - alternate context brief descriptions - more descriptive brief description (more words) - possible context of selected words
Notice: once service is in production provide interface for mobile platforms !!!
Benefits: Wikipedia will become capable of providing essential and briew description while preserving link to native article form, it will additionally provide fast and reliable web service for integrating with future web experiences, that need shorter article/context/explanation form.
phase 4: geowikipedia web service
Environment:
More and more users are gps ready. Wikipedia is not capable to provide relevant gps/geo related information for data in user range.
Project goals: Provide webservice that returns atricles based on gps coordinates, related to article or contributors (general view, no personal contributor report) Provide additional gps data (set of gps coordinates) for each article. Integrate current geoip service data as relation to article.
Practical example: each article would have a set of coordinates as additional meta data, user (anonymous web visitor) could specify his own geo location, and could ask for articles describing some facts that are nearby.
This feature would lead to new way of describing life history of existing articles. For example it would be interesting to know where Mahatma Gandi slept while his visit to UK. And it would be also interesting to be able to acknowledge to user that his standing in front of that house.
Benefits: - Wikipedia could recommend some article as interesting for some geo-located group of users. - Wikipedia could provide number of term/articles relevant to user location
phase 5: Wikipedia Analytics - Article/User lifecycle
Project goal: provide tool for data analytics to identify distinct phases (segmentation) of article/User lifecycle
Purpose: predicting growth, prolong longevity, identify weak areas, promote
Benefits: long term prediction, strategy and decision supporting analytics
Motivation
Improving Wikipedia usability in new social media environment
Key Questions
Does Wikipedia need such improvements ?
Potential Costs
Most of data and features will lean on existing meta data, that should be reorganized to support new attributes (actions, geo datA), and new interfaces (social media, marketing)
References
Community Discussion
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