Paola Dovera | B2B | BtoB Magazine

Paola Dovera

By By Pat Riedman

Story posted: June 11, 2012 - 6:01 am EDT

Title: Director-online marketing and Web operations

Company: Sybase Inc.

Years in current job: 2

When Paola Dovera, director-online marketing and Web operations at Sybase Inc., set out to add industry information to Wikipedia's entries on enterprise mobility, Sybase itself and other relevant topics, she didn't know what to expect. It turned out to be anything but easy.

Through a hired journalist, she worked to create pages on topics relevant to Sybase in the open-edit encyclopedia. She also edited existing pages that mentioned Sybase, trying to give balance to negative content. “With constant monitoring and a fair balance between allowing or undoing comments made by other contributors, we seem to have these pages in good standing,” Dovera said.

“You have to be patient and know the rules,” she added. “You don't want to be flagged as pandering to your company.”

Ultimately, the efforts paid off, as traffic coming from Wikipedia to sybase.com rose 51% year over year.

It's just one of the ways Dovera is promoting the Sybase brand with its target audience. SEO continues to be a strong driver as well. Thanks to the company's SEO efforts, its traffic from search is up 10% from last year, Dovera said.

This year, the company has also experimented with microsites, such as sybase.com/gomobile, targeting the mobile device segment with its Mobile Enterprise services. Only viewable on mobile devices, the gomobile site shows how Sybase's services rank against rivals'. Display ads on Google AdMob, in-app ads and mobile Web ads on tech sites were used to promote the microsite, which attracted 90,000 visitors in six months, Dovera said.