Page 267 - Foundations of Marketing

234 Part 3 | Customer Behavior and E-Marketing

The World’s Largest Wiki
Wikipedia is an online
encyclopedia that allows users
to add or edit information in
more than 285 languages.

Rob Wilkinson/Alamy

or defend their corporate reputations. Many major corporations have created blogs or encour-
age employees to blog about the company. Boeing operates a corporate blog to highlight
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company news and post correspondence from Boeing enthusiasts from all over the world. As
blogging changes the face of media, companies like Boeing are using blogs to build enthusi-
asm for their products and create relationships with consumers.
A wiki is a type of software that creates an interface that enables users to add or edit the
content of some types of websites. One of the best known is Wikipedia, an online encyclo-
pedia with more than 22 million entries in more than 285 languages on nearly every subject
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imaginable ( Encyclopedia Britannica only has 120,000 entries). Because Wikipedia can be
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edited and read by anyone, it is easy for online consumers to correct inaccuracies in content.
This site is expanded, updated, and edited by a large team of volunteer contributors. For the
most part, only information that is verifiable through another source is considered appropri-
ate. Because of its open format, Wikipedia has suffered from some high-profile instances of
vandalism in which incorrect information was disseminated. Such problems have usually been
detected and corrected quickly. Like all social media, wikis have advantages and disadvan-
tages for companies. Wikis on controversial companies like Walmart and Nike often contain
negative publicity about the companies, such as worker rights violations. However, some com-
panies have begun to use wikis as internal tools for teams working on a project requiring lots
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of documentation. Additionally, monitoring wikis provides companies with a better idea of
how consumers feel about the company brand.
There is too much at stake fi nancially for marketers to ignore blogs and wikis. Research
has shown that approximately 46 percent of companies that use blogs have gained new cus-
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tomers from blog-generated leads. Despite this fact, statistics show that only 28 percent of
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Fortune 500 companies have a corporate blog. Marketers who want to form better customer
relationships and promote their company’s products must not underestimate the power of
these two tools as new media outlets.

Media-Sharing Sites
wiki Type of software that
creates an interface that enables Businesses can also share their corporate messages in more visual ways through media-sharing
users to add or edit the content sites. Media-sharing sites allow marketers to share photos, videos, and podcasts but are more
of some types of websites limited in scope in how companies interact with consumers. They tend to be more promotional

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