[WikiEN-l] PR consultants: perhaps Wikipedia is not the ideal promotional medium

[Carcharoth]

They may presume that the presence of stuff that hasn't yet been
de-pufferied (I made that word up) means that what they write will
stay. But the key point is lack of control. If you put something on
Wikipedia, you cannot control the content and that is what a lot of
people fail to understand. It becomes part of the wiki-editing
process, which at its best produces great stuff, and at its worst
produces some rather bad stuff.

Carcharoth

On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 7:18 PM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net> wrote:
> That's right. It isn't that we don't want an article and a skilled PR
> editor ought to be able to write an article the average editor could not
> tell was written by a PR person. The clue to bad work is lifting stuff
> from the company's website. And, of course, the complete absence of any
> negative information, however notorious.
>
> Fred
>
>> A PR agent should be able to learn how to write a neutral article, if
>> they see one aspect of their role as to provide information about
>> their client, not necessarily to directly promote them. In the fields
>> I work in, I have frequently worked with PR staff, and about half of
>> them have proved open to learning a new medium.  (The basic
>> instruction I give them is to write a dull an article as possible,
>> remove all possible adjectives, use the minimum number of words, give
>> the name of the company only once, list nobody but the successive
>> CEOs, provide specific sourced numbers about market share,  and give
>> no contact information beyond the principal web site.) And when I see
>> a promotional article for a notable company, if I have the time i
>> neither delete nor blank it, but rewrite it according to my just those
>> instructions.
>>
>> And if we had a systematic campaign to provide basic information about
>> all companies that meet our notabiliity requirements, the way we do
>> for populated places, it would greatly diminish the tendency for
>> people to think they needed to write their own article.
>>
>> David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 5:34 AM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> This article makes my week.
>>>
>>> I generally feel we should blank articles more and delete them less,
>>> but this is an area where the explicit rebuff of deletion has its
>>> advantages.
>>>
>>> SJ
>>>
>>> On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 8:41 PM, Durova <nadezhda.durova at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>> Excellent piece.  Especially the close about how it's a difficult
>>>> position
>>>> for PR professionals to report to the client that the article was
>>>> deleted.
>>>>
>>>> -Durova
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 1:35 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> http://rushprnews.com/2010/03/31/pr-consultants-should-think-twice-before-using-wikipedia-to-promote-clients
>>>>>
>>>>> PR consultants should think twice before using Wikipedia to promote
>>>>> clients
>>>>> March 31, 2010
>>>>>
>>>>> Leicestershire, UK (RPRN) 03/31/10 — PR consultants are being advised
>>>>> to think twice before incorporating Wikipedia entries into campaign
>>>>> strategies after the site started cracking down on articles submitted
>>>>> by any public relations agency it considered to be using its resource
>>>>> to promote clients.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> (muwahaha. Spotted by Mathias Schindler. The article sets out en:wp's
>>>>> rationales and likely actions very well indeed.)
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> - d.
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> WikiEN-l mailing list
>>>>> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
>>>>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> http://durova.blogspot.com/
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> WikiEN-l mailing list
>>>> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>>>> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
>>>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> WikiEN-l mailing list
>>> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>>> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
>>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> WikiEN-l mailing list
>> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>