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@rochester.edu jamesofur@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@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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