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Jimmy Wales shames PR editors

By Gregory Kohs

 

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Some companies, like General Motors, Procter & Gamble, and Apple, spend many millions of dollars in promotional advertising campaigns. Other companies, like Rolls-Royce, Krispy Kreme, and the makers of Sriracha hot sauce, allocate no money toward traditional ad marketing. According to Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, we can add his new wireless telephony firm to the list of “no advertising” operations. Ever since its principal financier Andrew Rosenfeld met an unexpected and untimely death, cellular start-up The People’s Operator has put its hopes in Wales’ hands, relying on him to enhance their “no ads” public relations campaign. While the company’s recent initial public offering on the London exchange raised about £20 million for the company’s bottom line, The People’s Operator (TPOP) share price has remained stuck below its initial 130 pence peg, with very little trading activity. Expenditures at the mobile virtual network operator are outpacing revenues by a factor of sixty percent, and its P/E ratio is negative 63. Perhaps desperate for new life, what better way to spike awareness and boost consideration than to send Wikipedia’s co-founder on a media tour to announce TPOP’s new social media platform and its pending entry into the U.S. market? If there’s anything Jimmy Wales is good at, it’s getting his mug in front of consumer eyeballs.

But then there’s the matter of the things that come out of his mouth once he’s on camera. As The Register recently quipped, “How can you tell Jimbo is lying? His lips are moving.” On Monday, July 20, Wales appeared on HuffPost Live, with Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani. Wales talked for a while about how TPOP was unique because cellular customers will see 10% of their monthly bill redirected to a charity of

…continue reading Jimmy Wales shames PR editors

Victoria Taylor, Wikipedian

By Gregory Kohs

In the United States, the tenth-most popular website is Reddit.com, a message-based social networking and news sharing site. On Friday, July 3rd, the various message boards of Reddit erupted in turmoil. Volunteer moderators shut down hundreds of the site’s message areas, in protest of the company firing a popular employee named Victoria Taylor. Taylor was Reddit’s communications director and, more widely known to the Reddit community, a beloved facilitator of the “Ask Me Anything” program, where famous celebrities sit down with the Reddit members to answer their questions. The uproar was so provocative, where two days earlier Victoria Taylor didn’t have a Wikipedia article about her, suddenly she does. If you type in “Victoria” on Google right now, the search engine recommends “victoria taylor” as the auto-fill just below “victoria secret”.

Now that Taylor has a Wikipedia article (that is, if it doesn’t get deleted), we learn that prior to Reddit, she worked in the field of public relations for a company called ID PR. The ID public relations firm has its own Wikipedia article, too. If you look at the “history” tab on that article, you can see that it was created in March 2011 by User:AnnBLea, who has also been the most productive editor of the article since its creation. Is it possible that the ID public relations article was written by someone with an affiliation with the ID PR firm itself? AnnBLea’s wiki editing history certainly crosses over several known clients of ID PR, too.

…continue reading Victoria Taylor, Wikipedian