User:Cregox/wiki marketing

wiki marketing is a sugested name for the idea of using sponsors opt-in adverteisments and subscribers opt-in chain marketing to self feed financial growth.

The wikimark, for short, consists on several parts that could join into steps to make it possible to slowly implement the idea into wikimedia, since each part are basicaly proven facts on internet as working solutions.

Examples can be found on wikimark as an attempt to an easier description to the same concept.

introduction
Quoting the Wikimedia Foundation goals:
 * The goal of the Wikimedia foundation is to develop and maintain open content, wiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge.

Wikimedia projects currently have some limitations to achieve that goal, mostly related to financial resources and consequent hardware and software development. That's overcome today through donations of charity.

There are similar problems within opensource (similar idea to free wiki) that avoid faster growing of some solutions due to lack of financial resources. And there are attempts to solve this with ideas as seem in www.opensource.org.

basic steps
The key is managing every step, and minor step, finding out which one might be blocking the flow of information and financial aid and keep that flow as free as possible.

information
It all starts with information, and wikimedia has plenty of it. People want information and they're even willing to pay for it. There are several kinds of information, the most valuable for companies is finding their costumers who would be interested in their product or service. The most valuable for the costumer is finding out whatever he/she is seeking for, without have to pay for it, because we don't always know exactly what we're looking for. The more information we can gather, the better decision we can make.

The kind of information on wikimedia projects is not commercial. Wikimedia doesn't want to get commercial, it's not intended to sell. So, make a new parallel comercial project to help financially wikimedia, call it wikimark, and see what people think about being able to get informed ads (such as google ads) within their wikimedia webpages. While they'll be helping wikimedia foundation to sustain, they can also publish, as subscribers, wikimedia to more people, and even get paid for such service. Marketing is a service overlooked, and people can do it in a way no other marketing technology can, if they see good values within the product or service. If we find good information, we instantly feel like we should share it with people we trust.

members
There's no need to pay cash for subscribers, members. It is just part of the idea, and it may still be not too good to implement since we can get greedy and think about the money instead the marketing. At the same time, if that share of sponsor aid is well distributed, no harm can be done.

Sponsors are already proved to enjoy a good informed marketing specific targeted to each individuals profile or current content at least. People already accept the idea of such "good marketing" not only within google, but anywhere where it is well placed, such as mail marketing within the post office.

Nobody needs to be subscriber to access the information, but membership is required to get paid for member's marketing service. That also provides information for informed ads. And one hand begins to wash each other.

sponsors
It's not always easy to find sponsor, but usually big projects glow anyone's eye with potential for money. Once again, wikimedia is not a foundation for raising money at any sense, it is rather a foundation to keep its projects running through donations. Consider a second associated company which is meant to raise funds for wikimedia through wiki marketing of wikimedia's content. It's goal is just donate every profit to raise wikimedia funds over any limit needed, breaking any donation barrier through capitalism tools.

Sponsors would be invited to join wikimark (or whichever name the new organization could have) and subscribers would be able to see wikimedia as it is, adding ads that would aid wikimedia.

Now the main question left would be how to do all that together. Is it possible? There are enough technologies to manage all that today.

technology
mediawiki lacks on resources, capabilities to be able to manage the whole new organization. It would need to collect more information, filter, sort and search faster and better through two databases, the current one with information, and the new one with members and sponsors.

It would still be the basic software of the project, and adding opensource code available today, maybe with few new break out ideas, it is possible to manage all that. The information is within the own wikipedia and internet. It is still needed a research about the best tools to choose which could better adapt to mediawiki. Even considering a complete rewrite if that path gets clear within a rebuilding project. More likely wikimedia is already dynamic enough to be able to just add technologies to it and incorporate new concepts to build the new brother organization.

note
Adding a little personal note, I just have enough experience with programming, scripting, technology and my whole life time with computers to know that there's a high chance this project can be done and completed within the year of 2006. I know a lot about ever little possible step of it and I can't believe it's not being done just yet. Maybe google is moving somewhere this side today, with Google Pages, maybe not. They still lock too much information for us to know for sure.

Honestly, I don't care if google can make this work first or not. There's one thing google will not be able to do just because of the basis of it... It will be too hard for google to become true wiki, because there's nothing faster than free information. Ideas like this get into google and rebound every day, because it's not a open place. It's not free. It's not quick, and it will never be wiki like that. --Cacumer 00:14, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

reference

 * wikimark - pratical example of how could be applied within wikimedia foundation.
 * www.Resource-A-Day.net - bad application with newsletter of the same idea
 * The age of permanent net revolution - example of news article with same ideas on board
 * Whenu - still missing at least one step of the idea (subscribers as members), but already applied to a wider range of choices

Template:marketing-stub Category:Wiki Category:Marketing