One of life's great challenges for PR professionals is contending with corporate co-workers who are uneducated about the merits of PR. Miss Manners, who is now writing a
regular e-column for eCompany Now, recently received a letter from a maligned PRpro, lamenting that a group of engineers were making fun of PR ideas. The letter writer
further whined that engineers consider PR practitioners "stupid" for not understanding technology. And although morale was suffering, the engineers' manager has dismissed the
problem because "that's the way programmers are."
Miss Manners' take on the situation? Ever the diplomat, she suggested the writer retaliate by pointing out to the engineers' boss that while they might be talented, their
communication skills were lacking.
"Their ideas are good, but they have difficulty expressing them, and when attempts are made to help them, they turn defensive," Miss Manners hypothesized. "Sometimes, when
their efforts to articulate fail, they act childishly. Notice that this not only flips the question of who seems slow, but also heads off the response from the engineers that the
marketing department is at fault for not understanding (because that sounds defensive) or is deserving of ridicule (because that has been defined as childish)."
Our suggestion would have been to throw spitballs during staff meetings, prank call their houses at 3 a.m. and clog their CAD keyboards with gum.