Wetpaint Launches HP-sponsored Wikis – Excellent Social Advertising Option

Wiki provider Wetpaint has announced a partnership with HP to bring two branded Wikis to their customers: a Home/Home Office option and a Small/Medium business option.

“We are dedicated to helping brands employ the social computing aspects of Wetpaint to directly collaborate and communicate with their customers,” says Ben Elowitz, CEO of Wetpaint. “We know that consumers are ready to participate actively with brands in an organic, unscripted fashion, so we are excited to work together with HP to continue to define a new set of standards for customer interaction and care.”

This is an excellent social advertising option as it gets HP customers engaged with each other around a topic (printing projects) while keeping the HP brand relative to fostering the conversation. Brands are looking for ways to engage consumers and we will see more of these “communities” sprout up as social media becomes more mainstream.

Here are my suggestions from a marketing standpoint. First, the HP logo should replace the Wetpaint logo in the top left position. This campaign is about HP first, Wetpaint second. Next, does this really need to be called a “Wiki”? For the casual HP customer, I doubt they understand (nor care) what the term means. Why not just allow people to edit without classifying the site?

And if you want a little humor in your day, here is one of the Wetpaint vs. Wiki videos currently running on YouTube: