User:Jergling/sandbox/HowTo PR

This essay is in development. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. Essays may represent widespread norms or minority viewpoints. Consider these views with discretion, especially since this page is still under construction.

Editor's note: This is a satirical take on the way paid PR editors tend to approach article creation. Despite being a joke, it may be helpful to new AfD users wondering why otherwise innocuous articles are being tagged for deletion as promotional.

Introduction

Congratulations on beginning your exciting new career as a paid Public Relations editor on Wikipedia. Native advertising is a fast-growing and rapidly shifting market on the web, and a free, public forum like Wikipedia is the perfect way to get in at the ground floor! In this guide, you'll learn the basics for constructing, growing, and protecting the image of your clients amidst the whirlwind of information we call The Internet. This endeavor may seem daunting, and you will encounter many obstacles in the process, but armed with this guide, you are guaranteed to succeed.

Crafting your Article

The form and function of your article are intertwined, so it is key that your article is designed for maximum appeal both to other editors and to the target market. The following sections break the article's form down into its constituent parts. It is absolutely imperative that your article follows these templates to a T, because the formula is time-tested and proven.

Introduction

The introduction is the first thing users read when visiting your page, so it needs to flatter your client as much as possible. The objective of this section is not simply to contextualize the subject of the article, but to heap as many qualifications as possible upon them. For instance, it is simply insufficient to start an article with:

MyInternetWebsite.gov is a website started in 2004 which contains a series of links to itself in plaintext.

Instead, consider adding an exhaustive list of every source (reliable or not) which has ever mentioned the website. Be sure to add double-brackets around anything which you suspect might be a valid internal link. Avoid describing the subject itself, except in the broadest terms.

MyInternetWebsite.gov is a world-famous internet startup founded in California in 2004, by tech moguls Stephen Stefanopolous and Mary Marinson. It has been featured in Better Homes and Gardens, TechCrunch, International Business Times, Buzzfeed, GQ Magazine, and Google, and won over fifty awards. MyInternetWebsite.gov released their eponymous product in 2008 to great critical acclaim, and it was entered into the Internet Hall of Fame shortly thereafter. CEO Stephen Stefanopolous calls it "Like YourInternetWebsite.gov with a twist!"

Remember to keep the introduction to a single paragraph, as line breaks at the start of an article will confuse and dissuade readers. The single-block format also helps to increase the apparent density of links and references, which will be important later. In a later portion of this guide, we'll come back to add credibility by inserting "references", which are highly valued by Wikipedia's resident editors.

For now, this Introduction should suffice, and lend enough credence to your client for readers to continue on and discover more!

History

For some reason, this is always the first body section. It's not entirely clear why, but I don't make the rules, I just follow the ones handed down to me by the Ancient Mayan Deity Cthulu, Lord of Knowledge.

Your History section should contain a tedious, exhaustive list of milestones in your client's ascension to notability. This means absolutely every detail, from the first meeting of the founders to office building changes to the dates on which the coffee machine was replaced. No detail is too small, and adding this content shows that you are committed to supplying the kind of intimate, complete knowledge of your client that proves you care about encyclopedic completeness.

Make sure to include the actions of the founders, including their personal and non-business-related accomplishments. Wikipedia loves biographical content, so adding this extra info will win you points with the regular editors.

(Startups Only) Funding

Many readers, upon finding a startup article, will wonder how it came to be. There must be no question in their minds that your client is a legitimate business with powerful and proven VC backing. Be sure to divide the investments into internally-named funding rounds, and list them by specific investor, date, and value to-the-cent. Once again, no information is too much information!

Products

It is only at this point in the article that you should inform your reader of exactly what the subject does. If your client is only responsible for a single product or patent, this is your chance to improvise! For instance, a single software product can be extrapolated into a list of versions and environments, while a single physical product can be split into model years or color variants. By maximizing the number of items in this list, you maximize the notability of the parent company. As you'll learn from experience, quantity is the most important factor in Wikipedia politics, so focus on making more of something, rather than worrying about the individual value of each item.

Instead of:

Products:

Fart Button: The Game!

Try:

Products:

Fart Button: The Game! (iOS)

Fart Button: The Game: Android Edition

Fart Button: The Game? (Windows Mobile)

Fart Button: The Game (Palm OS)

Fart Button: Steam Edition

When writing descriptions of your client's products, you'll want to make reference to the content of the next section: Awards. These go hand-in-hand to establish the subject as credible and successful. Avoid embellishing, but try to include as many uncontroversial facts as possible, even if they feel ponderous.

Instead of:

Fart Button: The Game is FartCo's first release, available for iOS, Android, and Windows.

Try:

Fart Button: The Game is FartCo's premiere, flagship gaming software. It invites players to press over fifty different fart buttons across a variety of themed levels. Fart Button: The Game received widespread critical praise, and one user called it "the best thing ever on the app store". It resided at the #1 spot on the iOS App Store for 2 weeks, and the Google Play leaderboard for the entire month of January, 2012. Fart Button was critically acclaimed, winning the Sunnydale Film Festival's Best In Show award for unreleased video games, and making IGN's top 100 list of iOS games released in January.

Awards

Your client's image is everything, and awards always convey a positive image. Like the History section, the Awards section should be an exhaustive list of every accomplishment attributed to the client. No award is too small, so throw in every local, industry-specific, non-winning or only-nominated award you can find. If your client doesn't have any awards, that's an easy fix! Have them apply to every awards committee that will allow them to enter, and watch the nominations roll in. Many specialty awards only receive one or two entries, so that's already a 100% chance of at least being a runner up!

Don't forget to return to the Products section to patch some of these awards in. Adding a few awards and nominations to a product description goes a long way.

Outlinking

An oft-overlooked portion of a good PR article is solid wiki-linking. While you should always strive to turn as much of the text blue as possible within the article, sometimes your text alone can't cover everything. To remedy this, Wikipedia includes two nifty features: See Also sections, and Categories.

The See Also section is a great way to weave your client's page into the fabric of Wikipedia. Treat this as a catch-all for any article you can find when searching terms related to your client's article. There's no harm in adding more information here, since readers love to jump between articles. Imagine this section as a hub which places your client at the very center of all of the linked topics, because it is in their best interest to be associated with as many established articles as possible.

Categories are a special feature of Wikipedia that allows you to add your article to any number of master lists. By placing a tag like "Category:Puppet Manufacturers" at the bottom of the article, anyone who is looking for a list of puppet manufacturers will come across the category, and see your article in the mix. Categories are self-managing, so you don't even have to edit this outside page. Just throw as many categories in as possible, because they'll help readers find your article when searching.

After fleshing-out these sections, you'll want to look for any links within your article that you could loop back into the main one. For instance, if your company makes magnets, take a moment to add a short, linked snippet about your client to the magnets. All it takes is a small section in the other article, and it's practically already sourced!

Citing your Article

While browsing Wikipedia, you've probably noticed tiny numbers floating between sentences, like this one:^[1] These are "references", the lifeblood of Wikipedia, and a very important feature of the editing ecosystem. Referencing your article is absolutely critical to its survival and future success, because the value of an article is measured by how many references it has. Some articles are considered very high quality, because they have reference numbers going up to 300!

As a PR editor, you need to maximize the credibility of your client by including the longest list of references possible. Some of this responsibility will fall on the client, which will need to buy some interviews. This is one case where there is no such thing as bad press. Have them accept any and all takers for publication, whether they're publishing full interviews with the C.E.O., single quotes in a larger article, press releases, or single quotes from press releases. Since websites like Forbes and Inc. now host user blogs which are indistinguishable from their professional content, those are great opportunities to hire an SEO professional to add articles about your client. If you don't feel you have enough unique sources reporting on your client, many sites will gladly add your client to a listicle if you provide them with one of the previously-developed interviews.

Another important source for references is first-party media. This includes, for instance, the client's website and any partner or parent sites, blogs written by the C.E.O., any product pages on web stores, and databases on which the company has entered itself. The best part about these sources is that they are controlled entirely by your client, and so require very little additional effort. Plus, no one knows your client better than the company itself, which makes them your single most reliable source.

With these references ready, open them all in tabs, and pick random tidbits of information from each one. Then, find a point in your already-written article where those bits seem relevant and use the <ref> tag to drop the links in. You'll want to format these references correctly, giving them titles and dates so readers know they aren't just random links. You know you're done when there's at least one ref number per sentence, but there's no reason you can't go above and beyond!

Maintaining your Article

As Wikipedia is a free and democratic marketplace for ideas, you will inevitably have to defend your article from all kinds of damage. You will face three primary types of attacks: Vandals and Deletionists.

Vandals

Vandals are editors who attempt to damage your work by altering it in any way. You can spot a vandal by going to the page history and looking for editors who are not you. They will attempt to remove helpful content, possibly even deleting entire sections, but the easiest way to spot them is by the notes they leave. Fixed POV, rm irrelevant, rm WP:PROMO, and copyedit are some typical vandal calling cards. They might also leave "tags" on your page to attempt to devalue it. You are well within your rights to hit the "undo" button on any and every edit that violates the tone you want to set in your article, and it's a good idea to counter any vandal edit by adding a few more inline references and possibly some new content, which will help to show your dedication to quality. Vandals will rarely use Wikipedia's official ruling system, but if you get on their bad side, they may become deletionists.

Deletionists

Deletionists are the true enemy of our industry. They hate you, your client, and everything you've worked to achieve. Deletionists are users who seek to remove your hard-earned page completely, undoing all of the work that went into it. Deletionists use admin abuse to unilaterally destroy your page and prevent re-creation, but fear not! There is a way to stop this.

Deletionists will first attempt to go through a process called "Articles for Deletion", wherein they add a scary, permanent tag to your page and share it on a public noticeboard full of slander. Keep calm; just as there is a standard procedure for deletion, so too is there a standard procedure for protection. First, add a vote to *KEEP at the top of the noticeboard, followed by a solid defense like "There are a lot of references and the editor who nominated this page has a vendetta against me". Then you'll want to add a few more references to your client's page, just for good measure, a Google Books search for any pages containing words similar to your client's name is usually sufficient.

When you've defended the page, you'll then want to look into the edit history, and find any non-vandal editors who helped improve the positive tone of your article. Invite them to the Articles for Deletion discussion by adding a Username tag below your comment. If you can't find anyone in your own page's history, now is a good time to ask friends and family with Wikipedia accounts to enter the discussion. It's very important that they preface any comments they make with *KEEP and include at least one sentence confirming how reliable and notable the sources reporting on your client are.

Endgame

If you make it this far, congratulations! You're already out of the woods. The best-kept secret about Wikipedia is that their voting system has a bug that requires a landslide victory for deletion, but only a small minority vote for protection. Those Wikipedia fat-cats are so busy cranking out articles for Naruto episodes that they never noticed this glaring issue in the system. Their loss, your (and your client's) gain!

In the unfortunate event that you are prevented from defending your article, it may be removed. This is why you should keep a local backup at all times. After discovering that your article has been deleted, you should wait one week and recreate it under a slightly different name. For instance, if your client's deleted article was "Buttz Incorporated", re-create the article as "Buttz Inc." to prevent confusion. You don't want editors drawing wrong conclusions about your article a second time after all!

Through this process, your article can be kept safe for years to come. It only takes one successful pass through the Articles for Deletion crucible to affirm your article's validity, so you can rest easy and let the commission money roll in.

References