Principled Innovation LLC

A grassroots effort to save your Wikipedia entry?

July 14th, 2006

Early this evening, I received a “non-member special edition” of the WOMMA Update newsletter in my e-mail inbox with the following first item (italics emphasis added):

1> CALL TO ACTION: Help Save WOM at Wikipedia
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Help save “word of mouth marketing” at Wikipedia. A proposal has been made to close the Wikipedia entry for “word of mouth marketing” and subsume it into the larger entry for “viral marketing”. Viral is a marketing technique of word of mouth equally valid with others such as buzz, grassroots, evangelism, and more.

So we’re spreading the word and asking your help. Go to the Wikipedia entry and contribute to the discussion. Let’s show everyone what good positive WOM can do.

Special thanks to Gary Spangler of DuPont for bringing this to our attention.

>> GO TO: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_of_mouth_marketing

What’s not to love about this? The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) is trying to jumpstart a word of mouth effort to preserve an entry about word of mouth marketing in a collaboratively-created encyclopedia that has grown by leaps and bounds in the last few years in large measure due to…you guessed it…word of mouth! It is stuff like this that makes blogging really fun!

Just out of curiosity, when was the last time you tried to launch a grassroots effort to save what you regard as the primary Wikipedia entry for your industry or profession? Do you even know if/how Wikipedia describes your association, industry or profession? Perhaps it is time you found out.

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