Inserting the Owner’s Sidewiki Entry

1. In the image above you’ll see the Sidewiki icon circled at the top of the image. You click on that and the Sidewiki opens on the left side of your screen.
2. Be sure to indicate, “Write as Page Owner” to be certain that your entry remains in front of the queue.
3. Create a welcoming title
4. Insert your text below
5. The final step is to publish your entry. Scroll down the Sidewiki to find the “publish” button.

What your entry looks like when it's published.

So what should you say in your Sidewiki? I suggest a general welcome message. Highlight interesting parts of the website, locations for commenting on your site or products and other ways to follow or connect with you on the web. Of course, if you have a particular brand message, be sure to include it here.

The usual warnings apply. Make sure you use correct spelling and grammar. Use some important keywords. What I’ve read on the topic so far indicates that Google is reading (indexing) the Sidewiki comments. If you want an interesting geek-level explanation of Sidewiki’s effect of search efforts, I recommend “Tracking Google Sidewiki” at LunaMetrics.

If anyone has additional advice or comments on my information, please post a comment after this article by clicking on “No Comments/Comments”. I really want to hear from you.

Yesterday, just because I could, I went and posted a comment (positive) on the BBC website. I was surprised that I was the first. Of course, maybe no one will every read it but it made me proud. I was rather surprised that no one at BBC had gone in and claimed the site and written their own comments. As I mentioned in a previous post, once you’re claimed your site and posted as the owner, you comment always show up first. That means that whatever negative things people say about you will be buried just that little bit further in the stack of mentions.

How to claim your site

Be prepared to be very close to Google from now on. To get in to claim your site you need a google account.

1. Go to Google Webmaster Tools When you arrive on the page you will see this button.
   
2. Once you’ve created your Google Account, login here.
   
3. Next, go to Add a Site. See the red arrow on the following image.
4. Now you have to verify your ownership of your site. If you have no HTML or FTP knowledge, then you need your in house IT person or your web designer to do this for you. It is a very simple step that takes only a few minutes, but first you need to know what you’re doing. You can verify with either an HTML file or a in the of your page.
   
5. To access the Sidewiki, you need to install the Google Toolbar. (Remember I said that you’d be getting very intimate with Google.) Go to Google Toolbar and follow the instructions. In the following image you can also see an example of a Sidewiki and the yellow tab that indicates there is a Sidewiki entry.
   

I’ve noticed that it took a day before my sites became available for writing a comment as owner of the site. I will post about the next steps tomorrow with some more details about what you should say in that first comment.

Note: You cannot claim a Wordpress blog that is hosted on Wordpress. You do not have access to the code to be able to verify your site.

Your first option and the most comprehensive is to download the Google Toolbar. After it’s installed, go to your website and you can see right away (the Sidewiki icon turns yellow when there’s an entry) if anyone is talking about you. Of course, they could be making comments on any of the pages of your site so you’d have to search the whole site each day. I’ll update you when something more sophisticated is available.

The second option is to go to google.com and search the following:
site:google.com/sidewiki/entry/ examplecompanyname

Now, I did this and for mainstream sites like Microsoft and Walmart, you get results. For smaller sites, even when they have a Sidewiki entry, you do not seem to get results. I did not get any results for my site even though there is a Sidewiki entry on it. I will investigate this further and get back to you.

Why should you care about Sidewiki? The answer is that people may be posting derogatory comments about you or your products in the Sidewiki adjacent to your website. When visitors see the yellow Sidewiki icon, they’ll look. This could help you lose business. You can report spam and abuse to Google but you have no way of removing these comments on your own.

Look on the bright side; this is the one time that having a low traffic site might be an advantage. There just aren’t enough tech-savvy people visiting your site and posting comments. Tomorrow I’ll give more details about claiming your site on Google and getting your comments in first.

Thanks for reading. Please comment if you have anything to say or if you have information to share on monitoring Google Sidewiki.

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

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.