Google Sidewiki - what it looks like | Social Media Strategies

Social Media and Sidewiki – The Sky is Falling…or is it?

Okay, what if I said that your corporate website, all carefully designed, had been hijacked by spammers and negative comments? Would you believe it possible? Google Sidewiki is hog heaven for spammers and malcontents. I’m not saying that some people don’t have legitimate ‘beefs’ with companies and that Google Sidewiki can give them a voice. However, the possibilities for the aforementioned spammers and malcontents is virtually endless.

Sidewiki is very new and so only some major websites have yet been targeted by it. Take a look at some samples below.

Google Sidewiki visible on Walmart.com

Here’s a closeup of one of those comments.

Closeup of Sidewiki Comment

On Sidewiki anyone can write a comment about a whole page or can highlight some text and write only about that text. Those comments show up in a the individual’s google profile and may also be searched and appear on websites talking about similar material. I will do some more research on that aspect for tomorrow’s post.

According to Derek DeVries, a blogger on communications and technology,

Spam: For high-traffic sites like Facebook, spam is already proving to be an issue (14 percent of the Facebook sidewiki entries were spam; and fairly obviously spam – there were many other entries I classified as “neutral” because they weren’t overtly related to Facebook but also were not overtly advertisements).

Derek’s whole article is well worth reading.