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

[William Pietri]

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 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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