I rarely take PR people to task for their tactics because I have a lot of respect for their profession and I understand the difficulty of generating good PR in this constantly changing media world. But I had an exchange with a PR person today (name withheld for obvious reasons) that provided a case study of what not to do in pitching a client.

I had posted an inquiry on PR Newswire’s very useful Profnet service seeking experts in corporate wikis. Of the many responses I received, one stood out as being completely irrelevant to the topic at hand. It was a pitch for a vertical market reseller. I responded to the PR person asking what the relevance of the pitch was to the topic at hand. Her response: “He is a software expert comfortable with addressing any tech topic.”

There are a couple of problems with that statement. For one thing, it’s an inherent contradiction. Anyone who believes that he or she is an expert in software is, by definition, not an expert in software. The field is far too vast, complex and specialized for anyone to be a general expert. On the contrary, this positioning makes the so-called expert look like an idiot because anyone who really knows software would know that general expertise is impossible to achieve.

Secondly, the response from the PR person made no attempt to relate the client’s expertise – whatever it is – to the topic I was writing about. In fact, it was clear to me that the PR person knew little, if anything, about wikis to begin with. In a situation like that, the PR rep should either research the topic or remain silent.

It’s very possible the client told his PR rep to position him as a general-purpose software expert. In that case, shame on the PR person. Her job was to help the client refine and focus his message, not spray it out to a general audience.