The Importance of Wikipedia to a new Professional Athlete

The Importance of Wikipedia to a new Professional Athlete

Anastasia C. Banks

Sports Branding Aficionado

As an athlete you have worked your entire life to get to this moment. You have made sacrifices and you have shed blood and tears to finally reach the big stage of your chosen sport.  You are now about to sign your first professional athletic contract and it is clear to the world that you are someone to watch.  So what happens next?  Sure, the organization you have joined may have a marketing team that is suppose to work with you to get your name and your image out into the community, but what about the world? Have you thought about the average sports fan watching the NFL draft and they see their rival team draft you...a 6'5" 275 pound lineman and think to themselves, who is that?

When they pull out their smart phones, tablets and computers, most will go straight to Google and type in your name.  At this point all control has left your hands and your past, present and future is now in the hands of millions wanting to know who you are.  So how do you take back some of that control?  How do you find a way to manage what people see on page one of their Google search?  It's been said that after search option 10, the traffic to that link falls to less that 1%.  So how can you target your demographic as an athlete and keep them searching in the right areas?  One step that many  ignore is the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

Although Wikepedia is seen as an unreliable source when doing research, it still is listed in the top 5 of all Google searches. The beauty of Wikepedia is that it can be self updated and monitored.  This allows you as a professional athlete to monitor the information about you that is out there in the world.  Many use Wikipedia as a source for information whether it is deemed accurate or not, so why leave your page up to whoever creates it first or wants to edit it?

Take your personal athletic brand in your own hands and take control.  This is the first step towards successfully managing your brand.

Citations

1.Lee, J. (2013, June 20). No. 1 Position in Google Gets 33% of Search Traffic [Study]. Retrieved August 9, 2015.