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Bill Beutler on Why Wikipedia May Be the Most Overlooked (and Dangerous) Marketing Channel
39 Plays7 hours ago
Marketers spend countless hours optimizing for Google, LinkedIn, and Reddit—but what about Wikipedia? In this episode of Marketing Spark, host Mark Evans talks with Bill Beutler, one of the world’s leading experts on Wikipedia strategy.
Bill explains why brands can’t afford to ignore the platform that powers both Google search and AI tools like ChatGPT, and how companies can ethically and effectively manage their presence.
From the pitfalls of “learned helplessness” to the opportunities of Wikidata, Bill reveals why a Wiki strategy is now a marketing imperative.
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Transcript
The Role of Wikipedia in AI Development
00:00:00
Speaker
When people think of ai they talk about models, data, and often hallucinations, but they often forget one of the most important sources, Wikipedia.
00:00:11
Speaker
From ChatTBT to perplexity to Google's AI overviews, nearly every major AI tool relies on Wikipedia as a foundational knowledge base.
00:00:22
Speaker
But behind every page is strange rule-bound ecosystem of editors, guidelines, debates, and decisions, many which happen without brands even knowing. And today's guest, Bill Boutler, is one of the few people who really understands how Wikipedia works.
00:00:38
Speaker
Bill runs an agency that helps Fortune 50 companies, universities, and even members of Congress manage their presence on the platform, all within Wikipedia's strict community guidelines.
00:00:49
Speaker
In this episode, we'll pull back or attempt to pull back the curtain on how Wikipedia works, the high stakes implications for brands and how this free encyclopedia is now influencing the future
Challenges of Wikipedia for Brands
00:01:01
Speaker
of AI. Welcome to marketing Sparkbelt.
00:01:04
Speaker
Mark, thank you very much for having me here today. I think we should start, or I should start with a confession is that as a brand and content marketer, Wikipedia is not in my wheelhouse on a regular basis.
00:01:18
Speaker
Sure. It sounds like after this conversation, i'm going to have to change my behavior. i'm going to have to include it along with X and Reddit and LinkedIn into the marketing mix.
00:01:31
Speaker
And I would hazard to guess that my ignorance, my lack of maybe the fact that don't pay too much attention to Wikipedia is probably common among the marketing community.
00:01:46
Speaker
And as we talk about the emergence of AI and how Wikipedia is one of those important, but maybe low profile players right now, why do you think that Wikipedia isn't top of mind. If you think about it, a lot of marketers have now shifted their focus to Reddit. It's all about Reddit because that's where the true answers are. That's where you actually get like real people giving real answers, but not so much Wikipedia. You don't see a lot of those conversations.
00:02:16
Speaker
Why is that happening? you And why should marketers pay attention to Wikipedia? And then we'll talk about Wikipedia and the whole AI emergence. Absolutely. I think the simplest answer for why Wikipedia is not in the conversation, not in the mix as often as a site like Reddit, is ah learned helplessness from many years of hearing stories about brands who tried to touch the third rail of Wikipedia and got themselves shocked.
00:02:48
Speaker
And if you've been in in the marketing or PR business long enough, you've heard some of the ah scary stories. And there are many like public relations firms who just have a policy of, we don't touch Wikipedia.
00:03:02
Speaker
It's too complicated. The Wikipedia community is, they're not they are not looking to do marketing for anybody. And so it is difficult for a brand to find a foothold or a way to contribute to improve their own presence or to improve information that's relevant to their business as well.
00:03:22
Speaker
Different story on Reddit, different story on X, where X in particular, or especially Twitter in its old days and all the meta sites, they want marketers to come do marketing on their marketing platform.
00:03:34
Speaker
And Wikipedia, that's not what we are. We're an educational platform. It's an NGO really, it's a global organization that tries to pull together and organize the world's information and make it all available for free.
00:03:46
Speaker
It's like this altruistic project where corporate strategies are like oil and water. In most cases, certainly not in all to the fact that my company has existed now for ah decade and a half.
00:04:00
Speaker
But yeah, no, Reddit's easier to use. You can create an account, and go there and start posting, and it's just at lower stakes. Wikipedia, very circumscribed ways of contributing.
00:04:11
Speaker
and for most, it's just not worth the hassle.
Strategies for Brand Presence on Wikipedia
00:04:15
Speaker
The third rail analogy is great because... A lot of marketers, I think they have an ignorance of wi bu Wikipedia.
00:04:23
Speaker
Is it really part of the marketing mix? I would argue it's not part of the marketing mix for better or worse.
00:04:32
Speaker
Reddit, as you say, is a lot more accessible, although there are lots of people who are very cautious when it comes to tipping dipping their toes in the Reddit waters. It can burn you too. It can burn you too.
00:04:44
Speaker
couple of questions here. One would be why should marketers embrace Wikipedia? And if you don't have Wikipedia strategy, and obviously you're in the camp that you should have a Wikipedia strategy when it comes to marketing.
00:04:58
Speaker
What are some of the key steps to get started? You're starting from scratch. You don't want make any mistakes. You want to leverage a platform. You want to get ah ROI from it, but you yeah do not want to leap before you're ready. Number one question, why should we pay attention? Number two question is the key steps to get started properly.
00:05:17
Speaker
So the first part's easy and there are more reasons now than there were even six months ago to, or a couple years ago to take Wikipedia and it's like family of sites, seriously. There's Wikipedia, there's Wikidata, there's Wikimedia Commons.
00:05:34
Speaker
The Wikimedia Foundation that oversees Wikipedia also oversees a few other projects. Wikipedia is definitely the most influential, but the others have some niche informational purposes as well that can be useful for brands.
00:05:48
Speaker
And so for many years, Google search surfacing Wikipedia pages to the top of search results pages was the reason why people cared. It was a place where yeah everybody's familiar with it. It was always presented in the same voice and the same fits familiar.
00:06:05
Speaker
It's easier to read a bunch of Wikipedia pages and to go to a bunch of different corporate and academic and news pages where they're all written differently. Wikipedia is maybe not perfect, but it is easy to consume.
00:06:18
Speaker
And its ubiquity has granted it a kind of authority. So it's a place to be seen. Now in the last couple of years, but really in the last six months, as they're the kind of marketing community is waking up to the notion that people are using chat GPT and perplexity to form opinions and make purchase decisions. so all of a sudden it's important to understand how the LLMs are describing you and to figure out what you can do about that.
00:06:44
Speaker
So it happens to be the case that not only is Wikipedia very important to how Google organizes information, but Wikipedia and its sister sites, but clearly Wikipedia the most, are important to how, and foundational, fundamental to how the LLM models are built in the first place.
00:07:04
Speaker
Wikipedia is one of the kind of It's one of the pieces of training data that's in every it's in every training run. It's in every model. It's free. It's incredibly dense. It's so well-structured and interlinked.
00:07:18
Speaker
You would be foolish not to use Wikipedia in training your model. Now to the question of what's that, why you should have a strategy. I would say this, you should have a Wikipedia perspective.
00:07:32
Speaker
Not everybody needs a Wikipedia strategy because not every brand qualifies for Wikipedia. So you should at least first understand whether you qualify or not.
00:07:44
Speaker
If you do have an article, like size up how good it is, see how it's meeting your kind of information goals. I would say that every brand should have a wiki strategy. Notice I left the pedia off there. That's because of those other, the sibling sites of Wikipedia.
00:08:02
Speaker
Wikidata is a structured database of facts. It's Wikipedia is meant to be read by people. Wikidata is meant to be read by machines. And you can go look at it at wikidata.org and look at a Look at an entry.
00:08:15
Speaker
You can get the idea of what it is, but it's not for people really to spend any time reading. Wikimedia Commons, the image of image repository, the media repository of Wikipedia, uploading images to that if you can release them under a free license.
00:08:29
Speaker
Those go like right to the top of Google search results and now, sorry, the Google image search. and and show up in info box, nav boxes. And then increasingly the LLMs are going multimodal and they're bringing in images and other things as well. So it's like you want to be findable where there are opportunities to place your information.
00:08:53
Speaker
Wikipedia doesn't want every brand. It does a bit of gatekeeping. Wikidata, Wikicommons in particular are a lot. They throw open the doors they want. If your content can meet its standards, it wants it.
00:09:06
Speaker
And so that's why I would say that you should have a Wiki strategy, even if you're not quite ready for Wikipedia.
Wikipedia's Reliability and Traffic
00:09:13
Speaker
couple of questions here. One. Given the versus of AI and the fact that when you do a search on Google, you get the AI generated summary. And I would suggest for the most part is that a lot of people go there and they never go anywhere else. They don't scroll, they don't click.
00:09:32
Speaker
What impact has that had on Wikipedia in terms of traffic generation? Because as you mentioned, it used to be one of the top results for and many searches, but maybe now not so much. I think obviously it's afflicting every single website out there.
00:09:47
Speaker
So what's your take on on the traffic impact? And then we can talk about that, obviously. I can speak to the Wikipedia traffic because it's been but a couple weeks since I looked at the stats, but nothing's really changed in a couple of weeks.
00:10:01
Speaker
Wikipedia traffic is steady. It is not declining. There's a study that someone did last year that suggested that at most the LLMs, again, ChatGPT is the biggest by far,
00:10:14
Speaker
are slowing Wikipedia's growth more than they are, it's not actually declining. One reason would be that, i don't know, and no one knows all the reasons exactly for why traffic goes in which directions or not.
00:10:25
Speaker
I will say this though, that because ChatGPT now does cite its sources when it goes and does the real-time search to build an answer, and Wikipedia is so often in those results,
00:10:37
Speaker
People are not really in the habit of clicking on those the way that they used to be in the habit of clicking on Google links. But it is another avenue for people to find Wikipedia information. So it's it's not completely hiding the fact that it's getting information from Wikipedia.
00:10:53
Speaker
I also think the Wikipedia is still a destination site of its own. Even if you don't start out searching on Wikipedia, if you're using iPhone like I do and you start typing in the name of a movie or an actor, like iOS is going to recommend a Wikipedia page even before it recommends a Google page for a certain proper nouns like that.
00:11:15
Speaker
So there are there's multiple ways access it. Also, the way that many people go to Google, type in their search term and then add a Reddit to the end to get a real person's opinion. Yeah. It is also not unheard of for people to add Wiki to the end to make sure they find the Wikipedia article because they know how that they know how to read that. They know what they're going to get.
00:11:33
Speaker
and Wikipedia's value remains... considerable at this point in time and for the foreseeable future. I do think what you alluded to, the traffic being taken away from news publications that depend on advertisements from eyeballs in order to keep creating more news.
00:11:53
Speaker
It's potentially a long-term problem for Wikipedia, though, because Wikipedia articles need to have sources, reliable sources, citations, citation needed being the the common phrase.
00:12:06
Speaker
Yeah, you might have a lot more citation needed if there are not news articles out there to verify information. So there also could be fewer Wikipedia articles written if there are not enough news publications.
00:12:17
Speaker
And I would go as far as to say that there are like certain categories, particularly in business entertainment as well, that the decline of publications serving those markets means that there are fewer reliable sources for Wikipedia to build publications.
Improving and Auditing Wikipedia Content
00:12:32
Speaker
articles out of. So it may have already impacted it. And we just don't know. It's the dog that didn't bark is the Wikipedia page that didn't show up when you search for that topic. Right.
00:12:43
Speaker
One of the biggest focuses for a lot of marketers is generating content for LLMs or fixing their content, updating their content so that they can have a bigger presence. So that when people are using ChatGPT or Anthropic is their brand names will come up as one of the sources.
00:13:07
Speaker
A lot of time and effort is being spent a lot pieces back A lot of AI is being used generate content. Is the same for better worse. Yeah. Is the same approach being applied to Wikipedia? Are marketers starting to maybe it should back up Should marketers start to audit their Wikipedia presence and then proactively look to either fix the content on Wikipedia or create new content so that work their Wikipedia presence is improved, then then it gets crawled by LLMs and like in this sort of virtuous circle that they may want to create.
00:13:44
Speaker
Yeah. So especially for brands, companies, people that already have existing entries, who have long argued that they should care what it says, I think that is even more true now.
00:13:56
Speaker
I think in the past, there might've been a little bit of an attitude of, eh, I don't trust that site. People don't trust that site. Eh, whatever. I don't want to be seen as being too vain as to come get involved there.
00:14:07
Speaker
But I think that increasingly in this LLM, i don't LLM first, but like in this current media environment, in this current information discovery environment, you are doing yourself a disservice if you don't pay attention to what it says, because The machine doesn't know the difference. The LLMs are good at fact sorry they're good at patterns. They're not so good at facts.
00:14:28
Speaker
And so they'll just regurgitate what they find. And so if you have a page and it is inaccurate, or if it is not telling the full story, then those inaccuracies and those gaps will translate to whatever platform is making use of them, whether it's Google, whether it's ChatGPT.
00:14:46
Speaker
So it's just, like it's good information hygiene. I would also say, i mentioned Wikidata before, whereas Wikipedia doesn't want a brand, does not want an article about every brand in the universe. Wikidata, maybe not every brand, but every established brand verifiable going concern where you can show that there is, that this topic can be linked to other topics and where you can show like citations on Wikipedia need to be like news articles, citations on Wikidata can be press releases, which they can never be on Wikipedia really.
00:15:20
Speaker
Wikidata is much more expansive in terms of what it wants to cover. It's also more welcoming in terms of what kind of sources that it allows. It still has a little bit of Wikipedia's kind of corporate skepticism. So there are there there are new invisible tripwires with Wikidata.
00:15:37
Speaker
It's also harder to use in the sense that As a structured database, you're not writing sentences, you're matching statements and properties and properties and values that form statements. And it's a little complicated. It's a little more mathy than Wikipedia is.
00:15:51
Speaker
But these are important information sources. And so at the very least, you should have a perspective on them, even if you choose not to do something about them now. But I will say this, since Q1 at my company, we have received, we've seen like tripling in the inbound interest in creating articles and improving existing ones.
00:16:12
Speaker
So this is definitely a time where people are waking up to Wikipedia as being important. They've always known a little bit about it, but now it has a renewed focus, I would say. Great perspective.
00:16:24
Speaker
but So if we go back in time, when it came, when SEO emerged as the force yeah on the web and people were keyword stuffing, manipulating the content and searches. And yeah now you've got marketers that are for lack of a better phrase, LLM stuffing.
00:16:43
Speaker
they're writing They're writing content. Some of them writing content at scale around particular words so that this, that the LLMs can pick it up. When it comes to Wikipedia, because the rules of engagement and the community guidelines are so strict, what's like, how do you work with clients to make sure that they can improve their Wikipedia preference, but they're ethically on side yeah and they can,
00:17:11
Speaker
engage with the wiki yeah Wikipedia community in a very credible, authentic way. Because last thing you want someone to call you out and go, brand x you're clearly trying to, you know, you're playing dirty pool here.
00:17:26
Speaker
How do you work with clients to make sure when they come to you as they, as it sounds like they are, and they say, though, listen, ah ah Wikipedia is not getting much attention right now. We know we need to be there.
00:17:36
Speaker
Help us. do better. What do you do with them to do better? And maybe you give me the example, if you can, of a client that you've successfully helped do better on Wikipedia.
00:17:48
Speaker
Absolutely. So there are two tracks for how we help clients. And the first one would be most people come to us asking to create new articles and we can't create all of them. So even though that's most of the interest, most of the actual work is in improving existing entries. So we work with a lot of large companies and they're like communications departments to improve the existing pages about them.
00:18:12
Speaker
So I'll focus on the latter just because that's a little more straightforward. And yeah, I can definitely talk about a good example of a client we've worked with a number times over the years. The first thing I to do is find out what it is that our client is looking to do.
00:18:26
Speaker
What is their problem? What is their gap they're trying to fill? Just to size it up, what's the scope of it? And then we will compare that to what is feasible according to Wikipedia's content guidelines and these sources that are available to verify information.
00:18:42
Speaker
Gotta have high quality sources to verify or Wikipedia doesn't want to have that information. So then my team will, with that all together, we will write. a new draft of maybe it's just a few sentences.
00:18:55
Speaker
Maybe it's a full section. Heck, maybe it's the entire article. Every topic is different because every company is different and the situation they're in is different and the sources about them say different things. it is every Every project we take on, we learn about it as we go along.
Case Study: Mayo Clinic's Wikipedia Strategy
00:19:12
Speaker
And so to the question of the engagement, which is very important, very good question. Wikipedia has a set of rules around paid editing, conflict of interest being the key term they use.
00:19:25
Speaker
Basically says if you are connected to a brand or a person, and you, especially if you have a financial connection, They kindly ask not to make direct changes to the page, instead to create an account and have this account be disclosed as being either an employee or contractor or a consultant for that for that brand And then instead of going in and making direct changes to the live article, go to the discussion section that's attached to every Wikipedia article has a talk page.
00:19:59
Speaker
Mark, have you been on Wikipedia talk pages before? No, I have not. No. Okay. Most have not. Like 1% of people ever go look at a talk page, but those are vitally important. And they are prominently linked at the top of every Wikipedia page.
00:20:11
Speaker
And right underneath the name, it says talk. There's a link to the talk page. And go in there. And you can see this is where Wikipedia editors... talk things out, so to speak. They hash out issues.
00:20:22
Speaker
They argue about this should be on there and this shouldn't be. This is where we are invited to come raise our issues. And we can say, hey there, I'm so-and-so. I'm representing brand ABC.
00:20:33
Speaker
And we have noticed that the new CEO's name is not there. hasn't been updated. Here is the name of the CEO. Here is the link verifying the fact. Will someone make this change for us?
00:20:44
Speaker
And that's kind of the stylized version of it. In in in practice, there's more, it can get fiddly in certain ways, but that's basically it. You out a gap and ask a volunteer to make the change.
00:20:57
Speaker
If it's a real issue, if you've made a good case, then they should make that change for you. What we do is to do that at a a a massive scale. don't know, massive scale, a very large scale for working for dozens of clients at a time.
00:21:08
Speaker
So you talked about a client that, that you worked with over the years. Yeah. That would be great just to get some sort of real world example of a client that has leveraged your services to improve their Wikipedia presence. What was their problem?
00:21:22
Speaker
How did you help them? What have been the results? For sure. the one ill The first one I'll mention, I guess, would be Mayo Clinic, well-known brand, large hospital system here in the United States, where I'm in the U.S. So we've worked with them for multiple times over the years, mostly on their primary article, Mayo Clinic, although being a large organization, there are multiple pages.
00:21:42
Speaker
In some sense, it is the same story every time. The existing article is missing key information. For Mayo Clinic in particular, it was their main article was missing information about research they had done, like how they had advanced the kind of medical field over decades.
00:22:00
Speaker
It's like that story just wasn't being told. Nobody had got around to it. Wikipedia editors, they focus on things they're most passionate about. And there were just no so Mayo Clinic stands ready to pile in. And it's not like the the Taylor Swift article is probably one of the most like perfect, detailed, up-to-date Wikipedia articles on the planet. Right.
00:22:22
Speaker
And know most brands can't hope to compete with that, or most artists can't either. So for Mayo Clinic, but just as I said, we figured out what were they missing and what things were inaccurate. We prepared new content with them and shared it with their communications team.
00:22:36
Speaker
And sometimes we will work with a client and help them to own a user account and go to Wikipedia and have a conversation with editors. Sometimes we will do that for them. It's a little faster if, say, we can represent the company organization using our own preexisting disclosed accounts that we use for multiple clients.
00:22:57
Speaker
And so I think that's what we did with Mayo Clinic was it was largely led by our team. And we followed all of the content rules in creating high quality, informative content that gave good information to Wikipedia's readers about Mayo Clinic.
00:23:13
Speaker
And then we posted, was a series of edit requests over Now, we worked with them on at least two or three occasions over the years. And so each time was a matter of a series of months.
00:23:25
Speaker
We never know how long something's going to take on Wikipedia because it is a volunteer-run platform. The editors just sometimes they're slow, and that can be frustrating. There's actually a page in Wikipedia, like a guideline called There Is No Deadline.
00:23:40
Speaker
And let me tell you, Corporate PR managers don't love to hear that, but it's just a thing that we have to work with. So the question a lot of marketers, the question I get asked my boss all the time is,
00:23:54
Speaker
How do you know that your efforts are being successful and how do you measure ROI? So someone comes to you, a client comes to you, the Mayo Clinic and says, listen, Bill, I want to spend X to improve my Wikipedia presence.
00:24:06
Speaker
Given the fact that everything moves at Wikipedia time, as opposed to real time, what are the metrics that you can, how do you justify or quantify your success? Like how does a client know that yes, working with Bill is great and I'm getting my money's worth?
00:24:22
Speaker
So I think the answer to this question is changing a bit right now, again, because we're in this LLM era. Like I will say, for the longest time, we have positioned our Wikipedia services, you know, actually more as public relations than as marketing.
00:24:37
Speaker
where it's a little more defensive in that if who is looking up information about you, it could be customers, it could be investors, it could be journalists, it could be your own employees, it could be prospective employees.
00:24:50
Speaker
And so when they go looking for you, you want to make sure that they're getting good information. So that's a little more PR than marketing. And so over in the PR world, the ROI is not so much the conversation because you're planning ahead for that future point where you got covered accurately in the news article because that journalist read Wikipedia. But now we are in this more marketing-oriented LLM world, and there are a crop of new tools that are popping up to show what citations are influencing the LLM answers.
00:25:23
Speaker
There's a whole bunch of these companies popped up overnight, practically. Right. And so they do show that Wikipedia is a big part of the part of that. Profound is one of the one of the best funded, best known of these firms, I think, right now.
00:25:37
Speaker
And they put out a study in June showing that GPT is cited in, i think, 48% or so. Wikipedia is cited in 48% of answers that include citations. So it's just, it's super relies upon it.
00:25:53
Speaker
So now it becomes more quantifiable. Whereas in the past, it was like having an article or not was a kind of a binary proposition. You do or you don't. And then if you had one, For most brands, it will show up in your top two, three results.
00:26:08
Speaker
That's the Google first world. In an LLM first world, it doesn't so much matter what exact position you are in a search results page so long as your information is helping to form the answer ah that the LLM is giving.
00:26:21
Speaker
So ah think the answer of your question would be, tracking, it's tracking Wikipedia's appearance in those. If you have such a tool found or X funnel, then they can tell you, they can tell you how much it's influencing.
Initiating Wikipedia Engagement Efforts
00:26:36
Speaker
Yeah. A lot of my biggest focus when I, when it comes to marketing, understanding how customers behave and how brands behave as triggers. and trying to get a handle on what makes someone or an organization do things. Because no one does things simply because, hey, this a good idea. though They do things for a reason.
00:26:56
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. A lot of the times it has to do with a problem that they want to solve or an opportunity that they want to seize. So when it comes to Wikipedia, and we'll go back to the beginning, Where the reality is a lot of markers aren't paying attention to Wikipedia, may not understand the influence that Wikipedia is having on AI and the LLMs right now.
00:27:17
Speaker
So what are the signals that a CEO or a marketing leader would get to suggest that, Hey, Wikipedia matters.
00:27:29
Speaker
We're not doing very well on Wikipedia. There's signs that there's red flags coming up, like whether that it's Ashford or anecdotally, but somewhere, somehow they wake up one morning and go, holy cow, we suck on Wikipedia. We better fix this. What are those signals? How do they know? And maybe it may be profound. It may be X funnel, as you say, what are some of the other sort of sources of trouble that they look at?
00:27:55
Speaker
So. The stylized story I like to tell, the anecdote that I like to imagine, and I've heard variations on this from clients over the years, is let's say the company's CEO was at Thanksgiving dinner with their family and their niece said to them, hey,
00:28:15
Speaker
Have you seen what Wikipedia says about your company? Is it true? Did that really happen that way? And the CEO, who themselves is not searching Google, searching Wikipedia, all of a sudden is motivated to go have a look themselves. and they're like oh, that's wrong.
00:28:30
Speaker
What can we do about this? And then they turn to their marketing or their communications team and be like, are you aware of this? And usually they'll be like, yeah, but it's just such a ball of wax. We don't know what to do about it. Let's figure this out. It's time to do it.
00:28:42
Speaker
ah So many times I hear from new inbound prospective clients, it's this thing that's been on the back of our mind for years. We just know it's there. There's always some inciting incident. And so NIS example is one potential like that.
00:28:55
Speaker
Also to say that very often it does tend to be driven from the C-suite. That somebody with the ability to drive an issue at the company, particularly the CEO, maybe the CMO, maybe the ah communications chief has decided now is the time to do it.
00:29:11
Speaker
And that could be driven by external events because Wikipedia is very much driven by what's in the news. If you need to have a good citation to add information and the news is a good citation, then what's happening the news tends to get reflected on Wikipedia.
00:29:28
Speaker
especially in the former journalists like us know the phrase, if it bleeds, it leads. It's not the happy stories that tend to get the most ink. It tends to be when you screwed up, when something bad happened. And so Wikipedia also tends to reflect that tendency that it's easier to get on Wikipedia for bad reasons than for good reasons.
Support and Consultation Services for Wikipedia
00:29:48
Speaker
Good reasons sometimes can be accused of being promotional. If a fact is too positive, that's too promotional. Oh, but if a fact is negative, and important public information, we must include this recall.
00:29:59
Speaker
So these are the challenges that we deal with. And I think they're fun to deal with, but they are a pain for those are working with. and So here's the self-promotional part of the podcast. If people are looking to do better on Wikipedia and they check out what your company offers, how do you help them what are the different ways that you can help them with Wikipedia strategically or tactically?
00:30:22
Speaker
I would encourage someone to look us up and drop us an email and just give us a quick summary of what their issue is. And someone from my team will reach out and have a conversation with you about what we've seen it all before. So we'll have a perspective on what it's usually and what the contingencies are.
00:30:38
Speaker
we just always have to have conversation in the first place to see what's really feasible. I will say this as well. If someone's just looking to get some more information, i would really recommend, again, going through our website, BuehlerInc.com, B-E-U-T-L-E-R-I-N-K.com.
00:30:55
Speaker
And we have on our site there what we call the Wiki Resource Library. It includes a very extensive f FAQ, just answering every marketing and PR related Wikipedia question under the sun.
00:31:08
Speaker
And then it also includes a series of DIY guides on things that maybe don't rise to the level of a good project for my team. But a common thing that people want to do is update the logo.
00:31:21
Speaker
From Wikipedia perspective, it is pretty simple. If you've never done it before, you don't know where to begin. And Wikipedia's like instructions on some of these things can be a little bit overwhelming, and they may not be written with a business audience in mind.
00:31:34
Speaker
So our Wiki resource library is written with a business audience in mind, focused on common issues that we see. And yes, if you want to change the headshot of your CEO on their page, we have a simple set of instructions for that.
00:31:50
Speaker
If you can get the thing solved by just reading what we have put out there, we are very happy to have helped make Wikipedia a little better and solve a small problem for a marketer who just needed to do this one thing.
00:32:03
Speaker
If your needs are bigger, if you have a more challenging problem, that's when I'd say reach out. Let's have a conversation. Great. Thanks, Phil. If you enjoyed this conversation, subscribe by Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you hear podcasts, and leave a review if you like what you heard.
00:32:19
Speaker
I'd love to hear from you if you're a CEO, entrepreneur, or marketing leader with a unique perspective or an interesting journey to share. You can contact with me on LinkedIn. Until next time, thanks for tuning it in.