Flogging a Dead Blog

Late to this story. Sorry. Seemed a bit rumour-​​ridden earlier.

Richard Edelman has apo­lo­gised on his blog for Wal-​​Mart-​​gate. Edelman PR appears to have aided in creating a faked* blog [http://walmartingacrossamerica.com — now taken down] about a couple trav­el­ling across America, camping in Wal-​​Mart car parks along the way.

Edelman writes:

For the past several days, I have been listening to the blogging com­munity discuss the cross-​​country tour that Edelman designed for Working Families for Wal-​​Mart.

I want to acknow­ledge our error in failing to be trans­parent about the identity of the two bloggers from the outset. This is 100% our respons­ib­ility and our error; not the client’s.

Let me reit­erate our support for the WOMMA guidelines on trans­par­ency, which we helped to write. Our com­mit­ment is to openness and engage­ment because trust is not nego­ti­able and we are working to be sure that com­mit­ment is delivered in all our programs.

Richard

So (you are undoubtedly asking), what are these WOMMA (word of mouth mar­keting asso­ci­ation, as it turns out) guidelines? This is what the site says:

Word of mouth can’t be faked or invented. Attempting to fake word of mouth is uneth­ical and creates a backlash, damages the brand, and tar­nishes the cor­porate repu­ta­tion. Legitimate word of mouth mar­keting acknow­ledges con­sumers’ intel­li­gence — it never attempts to fool them. Ethical mar­keters reject all tactics related to manip­u­la­tion, decep­tion, infilt­ra­tion, or dishonesty.

So err… this is all pretty embar­rassing for all con­cerned, and probably for anyone who has anything to do with social media marketing.

Three ideas or challenges…

(a) Word of mouth can be faked — it’s easy. But only a fucking idiot would try it. You end up looking like dicks because people will find out. (sorry, language). Wal-​​Mart doesn’t seem to have a lot to lose on the repu­ta­tion front, as far as the Internet tells me. Yeah, I can see them trying that. After all, they tried The Hub: School Your Way (Ze Frank invest­ig­ates).

(b) This affair sets back cor­porate involve­ment with social media. You see, we always thought they were phonies. Then people at MS, Sun, Mozilla, Google, Yahoo, Guinness, Boeing and a load of others started to talk to us. They did it for a while, and after some time we started to think, ‘no — hang on — these guys are OK’. I think the people who’ve being doing it for a while are probably still OK, but new cor­porate blogs will fall under an even bigger spotlight.

© It probably wasn’t Edelman’s fault at all. Or if it was, there was a man­age­ment failure. They’re more likely to be carrying the can for some idiot some­where else, because they have to. They are the PR company; they bear the respons­ib­ility, it seems. In another era, Wal-​​Mart would have taken that role and it’s odd that people are saying ‘bad edelman’ rather than ‘bad wal-​​mart’. Maybe I don’t under­stand this cor­rectly, but it seems that the irony of social media cham­pions being caught under­mining their big play is far, far more inter­esting than a company with a bad repu­ta­tion con­tinuing to do bad things. Ultimately, I think a lot of people will react like me, so good call by Edelman for putting his hands up.

(* Was this a fake blog? In the blog’s final post Laura says of the intended trip:

…And, of course, I’d write an article about it and may be able to sell a story to an RV magazine, with photos, of RVing in America and only staying at Wal-​​Marts … we decided to get per­mis­sion from Wal-​​Mart to do so. So I called my brother, who works at Edelman and whose clients include Working Families for Wal-​​Mart, in order to find out if we’d be allowed to talk to people and take pictures in Wal-​​Mart parking lots … They didn’t just give us per­mis­sion. They said they would even sponsor the trip!

With no evidence either way, I believe this is probably true. It’s quite common for journ­al­ists to find an oppor­tunity and then sell the story. But of course, they didn’t say that up-​​front on the blog. Without getting meta­phys­ical on your arse (that doesn’t really work in an English accent), is it fake or true?

If they had said, in the first post, “we got spon­sor­ship for this trip from Wal-​​Mart”, none of this would have happened. The rest of the blog would have been exactly the same. If it was a good blog, people would read, oth­er­wise, they’d go elsewhere.

“We are sponsored by X” or, “I work for Y” doesn’t mean “I am a cor­porate whore”. It means “I am honest with you”.)

Share this post:

Possibly related:

• Large and white; clean and bright
• 2.0 is Dead. Long Live 2.0
• What I Learned About Word of Mouth