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

[Carcharoth]

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 at 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 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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