IN CLEAR FOCUS: William Beutler, founder of Beutler Ink, explores the role of Wikipedia for brands. He explains why brands must approach Wikipedia ethically, how to navigate its guidelines, and best practices for managing a company’s presence. Bill shares insights on WikiWatch, AI’s impact on Wikipedia, and the risks of misinformation. Learn why Wikipedia remains a critical, yet challenging, platform for brand reputation management.
Episode Transcript
Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS
William Beutler: You can’t control your narrative on Wikipedia. You can just seek to influence it. And you can contribute to it, but you can’t decide. Wikipedia editors are skeptical of brands who are not happy with their coverage. So you get kind of an extra scrutiny if you ask for a change.
Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. Wikipedia has long been an essential source of information for consumers researching brands, products, and companies. For marketers and brand managers, having accurate, up-to-date information on Wikipedia is crucial. Yet managing a brand’s presence on the platform comes with unique challenges. Wikipedia’s community-driven model and strict guidelines about conflicts of interest mean that traditional marketing approaches often don’t work and can even backfire. Our guest today is an expert in helping brands navigate Wikipedia effectively and ethically. William Beutler is the founder and president of Beutler Ink, a digital agency known for its pioneering work in Wikipedia consulting. Since 2010, the firm has served hundreds of clients, including Fortune 50 companies, leading universities, and global brands, helping them improve their Wikipedia presence while adhering to the platform’s guidelines and community standards. A respected PR expert, Bill led the creation of a 2014 open letter to Wikipedia advocating industry ethics standards, signed by representatives from eight of the top ten global PR firms. Bill also writes The Wikipedian, a blog exploring Wikimedia movement dynamics, and his insights have been featured in The Economist, on C-SPAN, and at South by Southwest. To discuss Wikipedia’s strategy for brands and explore best practices for engaging with the platform, I’m delighted that Bill is joining us today from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Bill, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS.
William Beutler: Adrian, thank you for having me. It’s really great to be here.
Adrian Tennant: Could you start by telling us about your journey from political journalism to founding Beutler, Inc.? What made you recognize the opportunity in Wikipedia consulting?
William Beutler: Yeah, absolutely. So I’m a writer first. From when I was young, I wanted to be a movie maker. I was always into creative things. And being a child of the 90s when the internet came along, I was fascinated by that. And because becoming a filmmaker wasn’t really within reach, journalism became the obvious path for me. So after college, I had moved to Washington, D.C. I had joined the Atlantic Media company and worked for a political tip sheet that they published. And so writing about politics and combining the Internet with that, I found myself writing about the political blogosphere that was then new. We’re talking about the early 2000s here and the political bloggers of the left and right did not agree on very much, but they did agree on linking to Wikipedia, which they all found very useful. And at this point, Wikipedia has been around for a couple of years. We’re talking 2003, 2004, maybe. And that’s how I found out about Wikipedia to begin with. I’m always fascinated by people writing as part of a collaborative project. And the blogosphere was that, and Wikipedia is that too. So I found it very interesting, but it was a few years yet before I actually like dipped my toe in the waters. And that came actually when I had moved on from journalism to go work at a consulting firm. It was an early social media firm, but we didn’t know that yet. We were still calling it new media at that point. And one fateful June day in 2006, my boss asked if I would make a change for a friend of his who was a member of Congress on his Wikipedia article that said something that they thought was wrong enough to try changing. And so I did a little bit of reading about it, and I made a change, and then I explained myself on the discussion page. I was trying to be very conscientious from the start. And it worked. I had a conversation with an editor who was like, thanks, here’s some tips on how to do it better. And like, that was the light bulb moment, I guess. I realized that my employer had a lot of clients who were the subject of Wikipedia articles. But Wikipedia’s guidelines discourage companies or individuals, anybody who’s covered by Wikipedia, they have this set of rules called conflict of interest. That says, please don’t come edit your page. We’re afraid you’re going to turn it into a brochure. And I also knew that couldn’t be the end of the story. You can’t just leave it at that. There has to be a feedback mechanism. So over the next couple of years, I started to develop what that service would look like, because it really didn’t exist yet. And at a certain point, I was like, I want to focus on this full time. And my employer, it was a neat little add-on for them, but it was not their focus, their business. So I ended up starting a company without really meaning to that I started off as a solo consultant, and then I had enough work that I needed to bring on help. So we grew organically. Today we’re 17 people, including myself. And you know, we’ve expanded beyond Wikipedia to do other creative marketing services, but that’s still our core service. 13 years later, we’ve had hundreds of clients. We’ve worked on thousands of pages and it has brought me to have a conversation with you today.
Adrian Tennant: Perfect. What types of clients does Beutler Ink typically work with, and what are the main services you offer?
William Beutler: It’s a good breakdown, right? There are clients in one hand and services on the other. And we specialize in services more than we specialize in a type of industry. Our services, when it comes to Wikipedia, again, most of the work we do. The thing that people ask us for the most is creating new Wikipedia articles. But for reasons we may get into later, we can’t do that for everybody. And that one can be a challenge. The thing that we actually do the most is we help to improve existing articles, make them more accurate, bring them up to date. Sometimes we find ourselves on the opposite side of antagonistic editors, but more often than not, it’s just a page. No one has given it any love in a while, and we help to make sure that it’s good. On top of that, we will monitor articles. We will do trainings, especially for corporate comms teams. And we have monitoring software that we developed that we use and we have customers of as well. We’re kind of broadly in reputation management, but we’re in a really narrow part of it. Or we’re, you know, a PR company, but a very narrow specialization. Our clients then with a 17 person team, with account managers, with strategists, were really well organized to work with corporate comms teams. And so a lot of our clients, to segue to that, we’ve worked with more than 30 Fortune 500 companies, some of which are in the Fortune 50. Generally, they tend to be either tech firms or consumer brands or financial services where they have a public profile, but they don’t have a fan base necessarily that’s going to curate their page. I’d love to work for Nintendo, but I don’t know if Nintendo needs us because they have people who are just following their every announcement. Not so true when you’re talking about a financial services or FinTech company. We also work with individuals too, a lot of entrepreneurs and CEOs. Even if we’re working with a company, a lot of times it came from the CEO who was like, why is my page wrong? Or why don’t I have a page? So that can be a way in to do the article and the CEO.
Adrian Tennant: Bill, from your experience, what are the most common challenges that consumer brands face when it comes to their Wikipedia presence?
William Beutler: Adrian, where do you start? The challenges are many and different types of clients. Like every project is different. Every client has a different situation because their page is in a different situation. The media coverage that would be needed to verify new information is different and the circumstances of their business are different. But I think with their commonalities, one I alluded to, that even though sometimes we’re dealing with negative pages, most of the time we’re dealing with neglect, is I guess the best word for it, where these articles have become outdated because Wikipedia’s volunteer community is really interested in working on topics that they are personally passionate about. and that usually does not involve writing corporate profiles. So we fill that gap. Not only do we help our clients improve information about themselves on Wikipedia, we also help Wikipedia fill gaps where their volunteer community is not putting in the effort on topics that are within the scope of the encyclopedia. Again, just not what their volunteers want to work on. And so if they’re not working on those pages, when it comes to negativity, sometimes it can be a controversy that made headlines when it first broke, but then maybe the lawsuit was dismissed or it resolves itself somehow, but Wikipedia still portrays it as being a major thing. And you can’t control your narrative on Wikipedia. You can just seek to influence it and you can contribute to it, but you can’t decide. And so I think one of the other challenges that you have anytime you try to influence your page is that Wikipedia editors are still skeptical of companies and brands and people who are not happy with their coverage. So you get kind of an extra scrutiny if you ask for a change. So that can make our job hard. But yeah, those are some challenges that everybody faces.
Adrian Tennant: Wikipedia describes itself as the encyclopedia anyone can edit, yet you advise companies against directly editing their own pages. Bill, can you explain why and what approach you recommend instead?
William Beutler: Absolutely. So I alluded to the conflict of interest guideline. If you are a brand manager or if you have a page about yourself, it is worth going to that page and familiarizing yourself with it. You know, broadly what it says is don’t edit in the articles that are about you or about a subject where you have a direct financial influence. We will sometimes get questions from prospective clients who say, Now we know that we can’t edit our entry, but you can do it, right? And we’re like, no, no, no. If we’re going to work for you, we also have this conflict of interest. So we need to be mindful of Wikipedia’s rules of engagement. And so, yeah, the encyclopedia anyone can edit would come with a big asterisk that if you’re paid, if you have a financial relationship, you are not encouraged to go roll up your sleeves and start editing. So what they do say is you should create an account and you should say who you work for. You don’t technically have to give your full name and everything, but you do need to acknowledge your affiliations. And the other thing is they do say, don’t go make direct changes to the page. So what are you supposed to do instead? Every Wikipedia article that you see also has a talk page attached to it. And you can get to that link at the top of the page. It’ll say talk, click through. And that’s where editors discuss issues among themselves. And that is where as brand representatives, they would prefer that we do our work. That is, we post a message, say who we’re working with, say what our issue with the page is, and we have done our research and our preparation, and we will bring solutions. So we create content that follows Wikipedia’s content rules, and it can be from one sentence to a word change to a whole paragraph or section. And then what we’re doing is we’re asking volunteers with the Wikipedia community to review our changes. And if they think that what we’ve brought to bear makes Wikipedia better, we’re intending for it to make the client information better, but Wikipedia cares less about, don’t care about the client. client necessarily, they care about Wikipedia being a good resource about the client. And so that’s where there’s the overlap in Wikipedia’s mission and our client’s messaging goals. And so discuss that with the community. If you’re trying this on your own, I would say patience is key, but also it can be slow. So you do have to go sometimes. Prior to find editors to help. So this is where, you know, ultimately at some point, I do say the best advice is to hire someone like us because we can take a lot of the guesswork out of it. But if you do your reading, I think pretty much any marketer or PR person can get at least small changes made if they follow the steps.
Adrian Tennant: Bill, which kinds of sources are useful on Wikipedia?
William Beutler: Great topic, huge topic. There is a guideline that is called reliable sources. And you would wish that it was just a list of sources that you can use. But like the notability guideline, it is a multi-part test. And if I was to boil it down to what’s most useful, It would be professional, traditional, mainstream reporting, news publications. That is more challenging than ever in the kind of new media world that frankly we’ve been in for a while. Since the blogosphere and since social media, you know, it used to be that you had the Daily Newspaper and you knew that was the trusted source and you had Walter Cronkite and now you have YouTube channels that do the news like they were Walter Cronkite. So Wikipedia wants everything that it includes to be sourced to a credible source. A reliable source is their term. And it’s really tough working in business. A conversation I have often, here’s a really relevant thing because we were talking on a podcast. We will get asked, our CEO was on a podcast. Can we use that to add information to his page or the company’s page? And the answer is no. Podcasts are a very, very common type of media these days, but Wikipedia editors look at podcasts as if they are informationally no different from a press release. This is the same would be true of a Q&A that is published in a reliable source like a newspaper or a news website. A Q&A is perceived to have not gone through the kind of editorial scrutiny, editorial processes that a reported piece has done. And so while they’re a lot easier to produce, of course, then they are than it is to have a reporter spend a while writing a feature piece. And that’s one reason why Wikipedia editors favor the feature pieces, because they are harder to do. They’re more likely to be reliable. They basically figure that if a CEO says something in a podcast, well, it’s going to no one has fact checked it. They’ve just said what they want to say, but no independent source has evaluated the claim and judged it to be legit. So that’s a challenge. Navigating the field of which sources you can use or not is a big part of what my strategists do every day. I would familiarize yourself with the reliable sources guideline. And then another page in Wikipedia that’s really fascinating to look through is what’s called Perennial Sources. And you can just find that through Google, Wikipedia. Perennial Sources is a long list of publications that have been discussed over and over again about whether they are reliable or not. From the New York Times to Fox News to ProPublica, to WorldNet Daily, or the National Enquirer is one that has come up, because sometimes they do print things that are true, and people try to use that. But you can’t. You can’t use the National Enquirer, though. That’s a really fascinating list to go through. It’s another topic I could spend an hour talking about, but I’ll leave it there for now.
Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.
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Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with William Butler, founder of Beutler Ink., and an expert in Wikipedia strategy for brands. Bill, how should brands handle potentially controversial topics on Wikipedia, such as sustainability claims or maybe ingredient-related concerns?
William Beutler: Both interesting ones and ones that we’ve worked with over time, working with various ingredients such as oils derived from plants that are harvested from areas of the world with economic or political instability. Those could be really touchy sometimes. Those articles are mostly controversy sections in a way. And I might as well say one thing about controversy sections. You will find them, just a heading that says controversy or heading that says criticism. A thing that most people may not realize is that Wikipedia, actually the rules suggest that there should not in most cases be a section in an article called criticism or controversy. There may be a section that is about a particular controversy, but the headings should be more about the particulars of the subject. So, you know, in that way, the heading can be a little more neutral, even if the material is kind of challenging. And if there is a controversy that has been well covered in the press, You just have to be aware that it is likely not going to go away entirely. If it’s a true thing that happened and it received that public attention, it’s part of the brand’s story. So the best thing you can hope to do is to one, make it neutral, because sometimes the editors who are interested in the topic, they might go overboard and add more details than are really necessary for an encyclopedic treatment of the subject. So there may be opportunities to streamline it. However, it’s careful. You want to be very careful because it is not unheard of for Wikipedia editors to say, hey, don’t whitewash this page. You’re trying to sweep your worst actions under the rug. For us, we’re never trying to do that. We are trying to, however, give the proper proportion and balance relative to the rest of the topic. And so, look, that is an interesting challenge. And really the way you do that is you got to bring the research. You got to understand the topic better than Wikipedia does. Because the Wikipedia editors, even if they’re well-meaning, even if they are trying to be impartial, and I do think most of them try to, but everybody brings their own biases to the table. And if they don’t have like deep expertise, which is the case lots of times, they’re going to get at least a little bit wrong. So if you can bring new information to help Wikipedia become more accurate, and if you can cultivate some relationship with editors, so you show them that you care about their project and not just making your client or your brand look as good as possible, but you’re trying to help them help their readers. Because ultimately, this is all about what information are we giving to readers? If you can show them you care about their project, they might be likely to care a little bit more about yours.
Adrian Tennant: Mmm, good advice. Bill, you developed a tool called WikiWatch for monitoring Wikipedia pages. Could you tell us about its capabilities and how brand managers might use it?
William Beutler: Yes, thanks for asking. So WikiWatch is software that we’ve got. We’ve been developing it over time, and as of this last year, it really took a big leap forward. The primary function of WikiWatch, which you can read a bit about at wikiwatch.net. Information will be updated and there’s more to come this year. What it really does, the primary thing is you can follow Wikipedia articles of interest. You can track pages to get updates when edits occur. And so you can get alerts in real time to tell you what’s happening on a page. This also includes traffic spike alerts. If an article all of a sudden gets a lot more page views, a lot more traffic than it did in the previous period, we will send an email alert about that. And you can see what that’ll look like. The big leap that we took this last year that I mentioned was that we have now built in AI edit summaries that provide context. So when you get that email, the thing will actually tell you what happened. Rather than you having to then go click through and figure it out for yourself. It’ll show you the edit as well, but it’ll also give you a summary. So you have an idea of what you’re actually looking at. And so this is something that my team uses, and so do some of our clients as well. And I said that there would be more coming. Right now, this is proprietary software that is available to our partners and it costs money right now. My dream has been to make a simplified version of it available for anyone to sign up for. So Adrian, as you and I are talking right now, that is not finished, but I expect we’re gonna be launching it by Q3. So go to wikiwatch.net bookmark it, and pretty soon you’ll be able to try it out for yourself without having to become our customer.
Adrian Tennant: Excellent. You mentioned artificial intelligence in the context of WikiWatch. What role do you see AI playing in Wikipedia’s future and how might this impact brands?
William Beutler: So, you know, AI is as big a topic of conversation on Wikipedia as it is anywhere else. Certainly the last couple of years I’ve been very preoccupied with trying to figure out what does this whole artificial intelligence thing means. And particularly we’re talking about the large language models like chat, GPT and Claude. You know, the first thing to know about those LLMs is that they would not exist without Wikipedia. That all of those large language models have been trained on Wikipedia because Wikipedia and its millions of pages is a really well-structured database of information that all links together logically and helps the AI brain keep track of information and learn. And so it’s already had an influence that way, but it is starting to have an influence back the other way. And that’s the thing that really fascinates me. And I know a lot more about Wikipedia than I know about AI, even though I do use AI on a daily basis. Some of the really interesting things that people are using AI for right now is, for one thing, just detecting vandalism and identifying problem edits. Wikipedia has been doing a version of that for a long time, using bots and creating algorithms, but it’s taken a step forward. Another thing that’s really interesting but is still coming online is having AI suggest changes or suggest new areas for development of a topic or an article. for then human editors to follow. So automated suggestions has the potential to save editors some of the work of figuring out what are we missing. AI can do that. If there’s a controversy or a big question around it, it is whether people will come to rely upon the chatbots at the expense of Wikipedia. And frankly, the same question is being asked perhaps even more so about search engines like Google. Will people come to rely upon it and less on Google? And obviously for anybody who uses Google, you know that they too have started putting AI answers at the top of many searches. For better or worse, some are better than others. And so there’s this question, I’m like, well, there’s some irony here. If AI was built with Wikipedia, but then would it kill the golden goose? Could it have that effect? And I’m not particularly worried about that. I have found myself over time finding that there are certain things that I use Google for, certain things I use Wikipedia for, and certain things that I use. I’m a fat GPT man myself, so I will use that. I think that’s fine. I think that Wikipedia, its place is secure in the global information infrastructure of the world. And the AIs continue to use Wikipedia to answer specific questions even beyond their training. And so I think another interesting, this is the last point on this, 20 years ago, Wikipedia was brand new. It was nifty, but you couldn’t trust it. And, you know, especially teachers said, oh, don’t use that. But you know what? It was too compelling to ignore. So of course you used it. And then look, over time, Wikipedia got better and better. And today, what they said about Wikipedia back then is what is said of AI now. So I think what’s actually happened is, and there was actually a CNN article not too long ago where the author made this point I’m about to make here, is that Wikipedia has become the trustworthy place to go because you can’t really trust AI for specific facts. It is not really what it’s good at. But Wikipedia over time has become really good at that. And so it’s a fascinating thing to watch. We’ll continue to change, but I think Wikipedia is going to stay part of the mix.
Adrian Tennant: Great. Well, you’ve been a strong advocate for ethical Wikipedia consulting. Bill, could you share some examples of practices to avoid?
William Beutler: Well, I mean, let’s see here. Let me start about, you know, the fact that we are strong advocates for kind of doing Wikipedia the right way. As you say, I should say something about those who don’t. And this has always been a problem within the Wikipedia consulting space to the extent that as an industry, anybody knows about. If you were to go right now, go to Google, I think you would go to Google for and not Wikipedia or AI and try to find like say Wikipedia consulting companies. And you’ll find us in the mix. You’ll find some others. You’re also going to find a whole bunch of websites that to me look transparently shady, that are very generic. They’re using stock photography. They’re doing the hard sell discounts, money back. A lot of those are run by overseas scammers who have no intention of delivering any service whatsoever. So be aware that is, unfortunately, a lot of what you’ll find out there. And then there also have been a handful of firms, and there still are a handful of firms, who do intend to deliver results and who know better, but do break Wikipedia’s rules, especially by not disclosing and by making direct changes to articles. And a lot of times they’re just hoping that the client isn’t any wiser. There’s no doubt if you can get away with it and no one notices that you’re doing paid editing secretly, everything goes a lot faster and is a lot easier. Until of course, somebody detects a pattern and puts a warning on your page or blocks that account. We just never recommend going that way. And so it’s been a bit of an uphill battle for the entire time I’ve been in this business. I definitely say evaluate your vendors carefully. Ask them to show their work. If they can’t show the discussions they’ve had with Wikipedia editors, then you should definitely not hire them. And then if you are trying to do it on your own, well, don’t edit anonymously. You might get lucky the first time, but it’s going to blow up in your face the more you do it. Another one is, if you’re in an argument and you’re not getting your way, something people do is they will create multiple accounts and they will bring the multiple accounts to a discussion and they’ll all chime in and say, well, I think this should be changed too. Yes, me, I agree as well. Wikipedia editors call that sock puppetry and it is the most obvious thing, never works, just actually just never, never works. Don’t treat it like a marketing platform. You want to go there and bring quality information. You want to read up on Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines, so you have an idea of what it is that they are looking for. That’ll make you more successful. And the last point is, use talk pages. Strike up a conversation with editors, see what you learn from them, see where you can help, and start to build some trust.
Adrian Tennant: Excellent advice. We love case studies on IN CLEAR FOCUS. So Bill, could you share a success story of how you helped a consumer brand improve its Wikipedia presence?
William Beutler: Yes. The first thing I’ll say is there are so many I wish I could share. And when my team is leading the outreach, we’ll just disclose working for Butler Inc, working for this client. If you know how to find it, it’s there on Wikipedia. But even so, even though it’s in public, clients usually prefer that we don’t publicize it. So there’s many brands who you’ve absolutely heard the name of and then probably bought from that we work with, but we just don’t really talk about it. That said. We have a couple who have agreed that they’re proud of the work that we did and have authorized us to talk about it. And some of these case studies are on our website. And so one of them we’re really proud of is working with Tyson Foods. We worked on a couple topics for them, but one that we were proud of, we thought was really important, was improving coverage of how COVID-19 impacted the meat industry. So back when the pandemic was at its height and there was a lot of controversy around that, a lot of misinformation as well, we worked with them to bring quality information to Wikipedia, knowing that’s a place where people were getting information about where is their meat coming from, how is it being handled. So that was one. And then another, it’s more of a holding company for a consumer brand, but it’s Vox Media. We work with them. They’re the company that owns New York Magazine and The Verge, among a number of other kind of web news properties. And so we help them to create new articles and improve existing articles about their leadership and about some of their publications and about some of their journalists. Wikipedia had information about them, but there were just a lot of gaps. And so we worked across a number of pages. We did an audit for them and made recommendations. And then one by one went through all of those and corrected things and added new information. When it comes to the Wikipedia work, the details change, but the work is always some version of, we did some research, we wrote a thing, and then we brought it to Wikipedia editors for consideration. And the Wikipedia editors put it in place, you know, if we did our job. And on these ones, we definitely did.
Adrian Tennant: Bill, if listeners would like to learn more about your work at Beutler Ink or the WikiWatch platform, what’s the best way to do so?
William Beutler: You bet. Thank you. So our website, beutlerink.com and I’ll spell that. It’s not necessarily the most intuitive. Beutler Ink is B-E-U-T-L-E-R-I-N-K dot com. That is the best place to learn about our services and our approach to Wikipedia. We have a whole section that we have been building since late last year. We call it the Wikipedia Resource Library. So it’s got frequently asked questions, and we’re going to add some more information on industries that we work with, and more detail about how to get a new article. So go check that out. Our blog has lots of interesting commentary on the way that Wikipedia works. I write a blog that is actually completely separate from the company and I started before the company, The Wikipedian. It’s at thewikipedian.net and I started back in 2009 and I’ve just been writing about, you know, trying to explain the peculiar ways of Wikipedia. To people who are familiar with Wikipedia, but who don’t know how it works. That’s almost everybody. Very few people know how the sausage gets made, and it’s fascinating. So I’ve been explaining that there for over a decade. And then for WikiWatch, it does have its own page at wikiwatch.net. Actually, I’ll just add one more. We also write a newsletter about Wikipedia and business topics, and that is called WikiWise. So if that is more interesting to you, that comes out monthly, just look up WikiWise, Google will surface it for you quickly. And particularly for people in business who want to know how Wikipedia relates to subjects that are in the business press, that would be the one.
Adrian Tennant: Perfect. Bill, thank you very much for being our guest this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS!
William Beutler: Thank you, Adrian.
Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, William Beutler, the founder and president of Beutler Ink. As always, you’ll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at Bigeyeagency.com. Just select Insights from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.
TIMESTAMPS
0:00: Introduction to Wikipedia’s Influence on Brands
0:20: Welcome
0:31: The Importance of Wikipedia for Marketers
1:14: Meet Our Guest: William Beutler
2:26: Bill’s Journey from Journalism to Wikipedia Consulting
5:54: Services Offered by Beutler Ink
8:03: Common Challenges for Consumer Brands on Wikipedia
10:02: Why Brands Shouldn’t Edit Their Own Pages
12:45: Understanding Reliable Sources on Wikipedia
15:48: Handling Controversial Topics on Wikipedia
19:38: Introducing WikiWatch: Monitoring Wikipedia Pages
21:30: The Role of AI in Wikipedia’s Future
25:08: Ethical Practices in Wikipedia Consulting
28:01: Success Story: Improving Wikipedia Presence for Brands
30:25: How to Learn More About Beutler Ink and WikiWatch
32:09: Conclusion and Thanks
