At the end of this post is a link to a pretty interesting, high level conversation between heavy peers from the corporate marketing world - there are Clickz.com people involved, an IBM, person, etc. - about Wikipedia and SEM.

Aside from the topic itself - wikipedia and how marketers could / should / do think about it - what’s interesting about this page is that it’s sortof like an open conference being hosted in facebook. it’s actually just a moderated thread on a forum, i suppose. at any rate, most of the comments are smart and read like a very engaged conversation.

though i’ve not really taken facebook myself for a variety of reasons, i have to admit, this simple page feels pretty state of the art and downright well-designed, esp compared to myspace and others.

Reading sites like Clickz.com and as if there’s a whole crowd of corporate marketing big shots that wants Facebook to win the social networking wars, and indeed there are many influentials working to make FB the most advanced & appealing pure social networking platform out there, to both users, marketers & programmers.

To me it seems like at the very least they are winning their class .

FB has critical mass to boot, which as a marketer you always ignore at your own peril.

Of course, at the end of the day, it’s all about context - which tool work best to promote a certain offer, to solve a particular problem, to reaches the right audience, or to develop reputation for that client?

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=2570737150&topic=4300

Given that most of our clients are not corporate or even mid-sized companies with in-house marketing departments or long-term brand equity building strategies, a lot of the ideas being bandied around here don’t feel that relevant to our everyday work, concerns, & ambitions.

That said, there probably are opportunities every now & then to think about and even use Wikipedia to promote some of our clients - or, if not Wikipedia itself (since the consensus among these high-brow marketers seems to be that the big WP is not to be directly screwed with), then perhaps some of the sister Wiki sites like wikitravel.org.

In fact, we’ve had some limited success getting links to some clients’s sites on http://wikitravel.org/en/Boca_Raton - although there is no “nofollow” code used on that page, there’s also no anchor text, and the jury is still out as far as I’m concerned on whether there was a real benefit in the end.