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

[James Alexander]

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 at rochester.edu
jamesofur at 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 at 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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