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Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of Chats with Chip. I’m your host Chip Griffin and I am delighted to have with me a regular guest on some of my shows a good friend a really smart guy And I think we’re gonna have a great conversation Bill Beutler of Beutler Ink. Welcome to the show Bill.

Bill Beutler: Chip Thank you so much for having me.

It’s been it’s been a moment. I’m glad you think of me as a regular.

Chip Griffin: But I do because I’ve had you on at least twice on different shows, so you know, it’s, it’s, it’s always great to have you and, and you do have a lot of insight and today we’ll be talking about Wikipedia. Which is, you know, for those of us who are seasoned, shall we say, in the business have, have seen it evolve a bit over the years, but it’s, it remains a mainstay, but I think a lot of people with all the developments that are taking place out there with, with AI and the, you know, the, the birth of different kinds of sites and all that kind of stuff, you know, how relevant is it?

Is it a threat? Is it an opportunity? How should they be thinking about it? So we’ll get into that in a minute, but before we start talking about Wikipedia why don’t you just share a little bit about yourself first?

Bill Beutler: Sure thing. So as you said, I have my own agency. It’s called Beutler Ink.

We’re a strategic creative firm where Wikipedia is our primary service, although not our only. We also do content development and social media, and we have a really strong emphasis on visual design. We’ve been in business for about 13 years at this point, and we have a team of about two dozen spread across the contiguous 48.

We’ve never had an office in all the years we’ve been in business. The first person I wanted to work with was in a different state, and then we just kept hiring people where they were and never bothered to have an office. And you know, we’ve going strong and it’s been a blast.

Chip Griffin: Well, it’s great that you talked about how you go beyond Wikipedia.

Cause obviously that’s, that’s how you and I first met many years ago. And, and I always think of you as my go to Wikipedia expert whenever anybody asks, but you guys also do put out a tremendous amount of stuff that, you know, particularly the visual stuff that you guys put out. I really enjoy and think you guys do a bang up job of being able to you know, I, I hate calling them infographics because infographics is one of, it’s one of those terms that I think has been totally distorted over the years and I see these infographics that are really like, you know, 10 page reports that have just been converted into a giant long image. And, and so, you know, you guys do a much better job, I think, of, of turning them into what they, they, Could have or should have been and so I would encourage folks to, to check out the work that you guys are doing in that area as well, because it really is something that even if they don’t work with you, they can learn a lot from.

As far as how to do it the right way.

Bill Beutler: Absolutely. And our, our blog on our website at beutlerink.com there are plenty of posts about data visualization, different approaches. You know, at one point in time, we did think of the creative side of the business as being an infographic shop. And this was roughly 2013, 2014, back when that was the infographics were all the rage.

And they kind of got overdone. I actually met the great data visualization speaker Edward Tufte, and I asked him what agencies should know about infographics and his answer was stop. He just was over it. And this is the guy who is the go to on data biz. And I’m sorry, my cat has just knocked over a table. I thought that everything would be chill, but these cats are not so.

Chip Griffin: Well You know, you it’s what makes these, you know live to tape shows interesting because you never know what pets or children… You know, my, my regular podcast I do with Gini Dietrich her daughter makes an appearance quite frequently in the background on those.

So, you know, it just, it, it adds to the, the, the reality that this is. And, and so I appreciate that. For sure. So, so let’s, let’s let’s weave into Wikipedia a little bit here, though, because, you know, Wikipedia is one of those things, I, you know, I, I think a lot of people aren’t quite sure what to make of it, and so they, you know, some, some people you know, think of Wikipedia as this place where, you know, their, their organization, their business gets trashed, right?

You know, and, and, and particularly, you know I’ve done a lot of work in crisis comms over the years, and, You know, needless to say, any, any business that is involved in a crisis is probably going to have stuff on Wikipedia that they don’t enjoy seeing. It may be factual, right? Because that is the goal of Wikipedia, but they still don’t like it.

And they maybe think it doesn’t have appropriate context or something like that. And so, you know, so you’ve got that camp that just. you know, sees it as, as a fear. You’ve got another camp that sees it as an opportunity. Hey, you know, we want to promote our business. We w