{"id":85,"date":"2006-02-15T09:28:00","date_gmt":"2006-02-15T16:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paulgillin.com\/2006\/02\/clueless-clients.html"},"modified":"2006-02-15T09:28:00","modified_gmt":"2006-02-15T16:28:00","slug":"clueless-clients","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/2006\/02\/clueless-clients\/","title":{"rendered":"Clueless clients"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/span> to do in pitching a client.<\/p>\n

I had posted an inquiry on PR Newswire’s very useful Profnet <\/a>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.”<\/p>\n

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<\/span> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pTy95-1n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}