What about Wikipedia editors who change career to become PR people? :-)
Carcharoth
(Who nevers wants to be a PR person, ever)
On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 5:00 PM, William Pietri <william(a)scissor.com> wrote:
I think we are pretty much in agreement.
If there is gray area, it is the PR person's job to maximally exploit
that without ever getting caught. It's our job to minimize the gray area.
I think the reason people feel that we can generally detect PR spin in
the wiki environment is that PR people aren't used to dealing with us.
Their habits are mainly tuned for broadcast media and the general
public, so their attempts at manipulation often look clumsy and obvious
to us.
However, it is still early days. The first step will be them learning to
stop being obvious jerks, and this article is a fine example of that.
But if Wikipedia is actually important to them, they will learn how to
play the game like any other skilled POV pusher. And unlike the hobbyist
POV pushers we have now, these people will be professionals, ones
playing a long game. They'll have a number of advantages, like a steady
paycheck and an information asymmetry that strongly favors them.
Having watched skilled PR people totally play professional journalists,
I'm sure that they'll learn to play us just as well. For us, that will
mean appearing earnest, helpful, concerned about a balanced article,
etc, etc. It will mean knowing about our policies and culture. It will
mean providing useful references, building good articles, and generally
being a good citizen. They'll learn how to build trust with us in the
same way that they have learned how to build trust with journalists, and
then they will use that trust to the benefit of their clients, because
that's their job.
Like you and DGG, I think their interests and ours coincide about 90% of
the time, so I don't have a big problem with that. If they are pros, the
good ones won't cause the trouble that blatant POV pushers cause. I just
wouldn't want people to forget that PR people are paid POV pushers with
an ineradicable conflict of interest, no matter how nice and helpful
they learn to become.
William
On 04/03/2010 07:29 PM, James Alexander wrote:
I'm don't think that is always true which
is what DGG was getting at. You
are right you CAN run the risk of them being "so good" that you can't tell
it's spin but to be honest you usually can in the wiki environment. A good
PR group is going to know that just getting a well written article on
Wikipedia (even with bad things in the article) can increase the information
and exposure out there for the company and in the end be much much better
then an article with spin that gets deleted :). The biggest problem is
making sure that
1. The PR people see that there is a difference and that they and the
company they represent our better served by a good Wiki article.
and
2. That the COMPANY realizes they are better served by a good Wiki article
so that they let the PR company do it.
James Alexander
james.alexander(a)rochester.edu
jamesofur(a)gmail.com
100 gmail invites and no one to give them to :( let me know if you want one
:)
On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 12:58 PM, William Pietri<william(a)scissor.com> wrote:
On 04/02/2010 12:51 PM, Fred Bauder wrote:
Here's the question: If you can't tell
it's PR, is there anything wrong
with it?
Possibly, which is the problem. The main function of PR is to put the
best spin on things in a way that everybody accepts that as the truth.
By its nature, it's unavoidably POV and COI. Bad PR gets caught doing
this; good PR doesn't.
Wikipedia has shifted the balance of power some: there are new ways for
PR people to get caught, and importing their broadcast-media habits
makes them look dumb. But I have every reason to expect that PR people
will adapt. Even so I think they'll have a hard time shifting the tone
much on articles that get a lot of attention; the room to spin there is
small. But for more obscure topics, I think there's plenty of gray area
within which they can construct an article that suits their purposes.
Purposes that are necessarily different than ours.
William
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