In spite of the ever growing echochamber the blogosphere lives in, it never astounds me what gets missed from time to time; in particular, there’s a leading story in Businessweek about how a travel blog about Wal-mart (that is unabashedly positive about Wal-Mart), has in fact been sponsored by Working Families for Wal-Mart. What’s wrong with that? Well, it turns out that WFWM is an organization that was launched by Edelman about 10 months ago, as a PR move to counter negative press about Wal-Mart.
Edelman is no stranger to blogging and controversy (and Wal-Mart). In March of this year, Edelman, a huge PR firm which has evangelized blogging to a certain degree, established its initial relationship with Wal-Mart, using bloggers to improve their PR given the Katrina disaster.
However, to counter criticism about using blogs for this pragmatic concern, it seems that, in Richard Edelman’s own words:
Bloggers can take care of themselves in this evolving world. They should be careful to disclose receipt of product samples, membership on advisory boards or any other financial consideration that might affect their impartiality.
I guess what he meant to add “… unless they’re sockpuppets hired by Edelman”. Lo, how one’s words can come to biteth one on one’s ass.
Now, in all fairness, its hard to know what involvment Edleman continues to have in the matter; however, its hard to imagine that they wouldn’t know of this element of Wal-Mart’s PR strategy — particularly because it involves blogging.
And sure, “sockpuppets” is a bit cruel; after all the authors are in fact real people, and not digital paper men created for the express purpose of inflating some bottom line number. However, what is contentious is how the blog was entirely sponsored by WFWM without any obvious disclusore:
Working Families decided to sponsor the couple’s entire trip, although that meant a change in the itinerary from the short Pennsylvania/North Carolina trip to something more grand. The group paid to fly the couple to Las Vegas, where a mint-green RV would be waiting for them, emblazoned with the Working Families for Wal-Mart logo.
In light of the grumblings in the blogosphere about the payperpost pox virus business model begetting reviewme and creamaid, and the whole notion of disclosure and transparency — well, it was all an issue with Edelman seven months ago, when it had to tackle the spotlight put on it by the New York Times. Richard Edelman after all mentioned — Whoops!
That’s right, he already mentioned how important it was to disclose information that might affect impartiality!
I suppose the take home message is that if you’re going to sponsor a blog either be completely transparent all the way — risking the authenticity of the message, but perhaps done in a “wink-wink” fashion.
Or, just be better at hiding spinning masking the dastardly deeds underpinnings of the blog.
I mean, who cares if Joe Blow D-list PR0 rank blogger catches wind of your story. But Businessweek? After went off on how important disclosure was?
Come on.
PS. Steve “Edelman” Rubel is noticably silent on the issue; makes one wonder if he was also kept in the dark about this one.
5 Trackbacks
[...] The issue has to do with Edelman, the PR firm that Steve Rubel works for, and Wal-Mart. Tony’s post lays out it pretty well, as far as I can tell — as well as a story in Business Week, and posts from Shel Holtz and Biz Hack. In a nutshell it has to do with Wal-Mart paying for a couple of bloggers to drive their RV across America and write about how great Wal-Mart is. [...]
[...] Tony Hung – also calls Edelman of “do what I say, not what I do!” via… [...]
[...] BusinessWeek reports how a blog about two people RVing from Las Vegas to Georgia has turned out to be a fakish blog called Walmarting Across America. The blog was backed by Wal-Mart and its PR firm Edelman. The Walmarting RV parked at Wal-Mart stores and the bloggers took photographs of ever-happy Wal-Mart employees. Every Wal-Mart employee that Laura and Jim run into, from store clerks to photogenic executives, absolutely loves to work at the store. Sound like a great Wal-Mart publicity campaign? Anyone familiar with Wal-Mart and its reputation for being quite stingy with wages and benefits will roll their eyes at such a rosy picture. In fact, some critics are so skeptical that they wonder whether Jim and Laura are real or whether they were concocted at the company’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. “Wal-Mart has hired fake people,” says Jonathan Rees, a labor historian and associate professor at Colorado State University at Pueblo, who has also worked as a staff researcher at the AFL-CIO. In a blog posting for the Web site The Writing On the Wal, Reese published an open letter to Laura and Jim challenging them to reveal themselves and asking who paid for their RV and gas. It turns out that the blog was sponsored by Working Families for Wal-Mart, an organization launched by Edelman. Deep Jive Interests explains. In spite of the ever growing echochamber the blogosphere lives in, it never astounds me what gets missed from time to time; in particular, there’s a leading story in Businessweek about how a travel blog about Wal-mart (that is unabashedly positive about Wal-Mart), has in fact been sponsored by Working Families for Wal-Mart. What’s wrong with that? Well, it turns out that WFWM is an organization that was launched by Edelman about 10 months ago, as a PR move to counter negative press about Wal-Mart. Deep Jive Interests also notes that Edelman and Wal-Mart have generated unfavorable blogosphere buzz before — see here and here. In Edelman’s defense at least they didn’t launch that horrid social network for Walmart.com. Robert Scoble writes that blog integrity is important and relates the Wal-Mart RV blog incident to PayPerPost allowing bloggers to get paid for blog posts without disclosing it. Shel Holtz wants to know where the Edelman bloggers are? “So where is Edelman in this particular conversation? Missing in action. As dismaying as this latest misstep is, it’s even more dismaying to see Edelman’s high-powered social media experts failing to walk the talk. Nothing from Richard in his vaunted 6 a.m. blog. Nothing from Steve, who blogs at the pinnacle of PR’s A-list.” The final word from the Walmarting Across America blog blames the anti-Walmart crowd, as Mathew Ingram notes. The Walmarting Across America bloggers are also steadfast in their love of Wal-Mart. Even these personal attacks won’t sour my feelings about Wal-Mart. I’ve met too many great people in Wal-Marts across the county. I’ve met too many people – real people, not imaginary Internet people – who’ve told me about all the good Wal-Mart has done. I’ve camped in Wal-Mart parking lots. I’ve met these people and heard their stories firsthand. Which is something the people who attacked Jim and me haven’t done and don’t care to do. So I’ve made the trip. I had a great time. I loved meeting the people we met, listening to the stories we heard. After everything that’s happened, I even loved blogging about it all. And if I had the chance, I’d do it again. In the end, that’s all that really matters. AdPulp reports that the photographer of the flog, who also works for the Washington Post, is in trouble because the Wal-Mart photographs violate his freelancing policy with the Post. The other problem with the blog is there are not many links to it from other blogs and some of the inbound links are just bloggers complaining about it. There must not have been much interest in watching people travel from one Wal-Mart to another. [...]
[...] It turns out that the blog was sponsored by Working Families for Wal-Mart, an organization launched by Edelman. Deep Jive Interests explains. In spite of the ever growing echochamber the blogosphere lives in, it never astounds me what gets missed from time to time; in particular, there’s a leading story in Businessweek about how a travel blog about Wal-mart (that is unabashedly positive about Wal-Mart), has in fact been sponsored by Working Families for Wal-Mart. What’s wrong with that? Well, it turns out that WFWM is an organization that was launched by Edelman about 10 months ago, as a PR move to counter negative press about Wal-Mart. [...]
[...] And let’s not forget the great astroturfing flogs that Edelman was behind earlier this year on behalf of Wal-Mart. [...]