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What a scandal. I think people have the right to know if they are exposed toi propaganda. I think wallMart is going too far.

Thank you for sharing this story with me !

Totally transparent marketing is call advertising.

PR without the words "influence" and/or "strategy" is called "out of business."

- Amanda Chapel

I felt equally uncomfortable blogging about this, but in the end I decided I would be remiss not to - I can't self-censor just because of my own relationship with Edelman and JCPR here in London.

I do think that Edelman are trying, but this screw up indicates that they have a long, long way to go. And Richard's comment on my blog that it was a publicity stunt doesn't really cut the mustard for me.

http://strange.corante.com/archives/2006/10/21/edelman_must_try_harder.php

i wish i was wrong last year, but i wasn't.

"erode the trust that makes the Blogosphere valuable"

True. But, the "blogosphere" hasn't had a rightful claim to that kind of trust since mid-2004, or easlier.

In other words, since 2004, a way-more-than-insignificant number of blogs has been developed with commerical motivations. Similarly, the idea of the "blogosphere" itself has become a largely commerical one--it's the blog industry's name for the online activity through which it earns profits.

From this perspective, I'd suggest that Edelman's misstep was doing something too centralized, e.g., using a single "big broadcast" blog for their message, rather than distributing the message in smaller doses through lots of blogs.

Of course, I think it's unfortunate that so many personal websites get lured into being vehicles for commerical uses. Forunately, blogging--the act of a person posting stuff from their personal point of view, isn't stuck in the "blogosphere".

David, I appreciate your candor and agree with your assessment of the situation. This was a real error in judgment by our team and it has spurred us to review every one of our programs that are in any way connecting with the blogosphere. I would suggest that there is a useful area for further discussion, which is the ability of PR firms to connect with bloggers in a respectful manner when promoting what Suw Charmin calls a publicity stunt. Or to have a spokesperson, clearly identified as paid by a company, be able to blog. It may reduce the utility or credibility of the content but with the proper sense of humor, could be effective. Or perhaps this kind of content ought to rely more on video than words. More on that later this week in my blog post.

David, this comment probably won't do any good, but ...

Your hope is to have relationships humanize marketing.

Why are you so surprised when it turns out marketing is corrupting relationships?

This incident, I think, highlights the difference between organizations and the people within the organizations, and how the former entangles and ensnares the latter.

Resisting the impulse to take a deep dive into my research which theorizes this sort of stuff, I would say that the imperative of the organization (Edelman PR cum WalMart) is in tension with what I am willing to believe are the honest intentions of the people involved. The outcome is clearly not what the people intended (although it might well be what the organization as a distinct entity intended; viz. the cliche: "there's no such thing as bad publicity").

It's clearly Richard Edelman's responsibility to systemically address the tension between what his organization espouses and what they actually put into effect. However, it cannot be done simply by means of directive or executive fiat. What is needed, I think, is in the realm of a change in organizational culture, and that is a far more complex challenge.

Glad to hear your voice on this, David. Needless to say I hadn't ever visited a walmart site, nor -- being fully stocked in the areas of ammunition and NASCAR paraphernalia -- was I likely to do so, but when this story emerged I went over there to check it out. I found the "Paid Critics" site to be far more egregious than the "road-tripping for Sam's kids" thingee. Paid Critics is a gloves off assault on the truth, and it is viciously disinformative.

The road trippers have gone back to their day jobs, but "Paid Critics" continues to dish out the bile.

Pshaw. You folks are going to have to ask for some tutelage from US congresspersons, who have perfected the capacity to take in loads of money without allowing it to affect them one iota, in word, deed or practice.

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David,

I hesitate to write this as I have a great deal of respect for you and your work, but I think your ethical meanderings on PR sound a little Woddy Allen-ish.

PR and PR agencies are about exploiting the media illiteracy of "consumers" to cloak their own pitch with the apparent credibility of experts, or campaign groups or ... blogs. It is fundamentally opposed to the culture that you and the cluetrainers have been so instrumental in encouraging, in my view.

The best that can be said of PR is that it is a necessary evil in terms of how we handle mass communication; but that does not mean that we need PR agencies any more. We should be trying to help organisations take on their own communications - how else can they achieve authenticity, openness and responsiveness?

"Working Families for WalMart" and "Paid Critics" are truly disgusting - let's be honest about that. Edelman (the org) can talk about errors of judgement, but that is missing the point. This is what they do, and it stinks. It is not a million miles away from Exxon's attempts to muddy the waters over climate change, as discussed on Crooked Timber: http://crookedtimber.org/2006/10/22/exxon-believes-in-global-warming-but-pays-shills-to-lie-about-it/

Rather than wait until the old PR industry retrains its underpaid young wannabees to become fakes bloggers rather than fake conference hosts or fake writers, I think we should be spending our time teaching companies how to have open and honest conversations with their stakeholders.

I am not trying to blame you for this. You have been commendably open and self-critical as usual; but I think we need to apply the same rules to Edelman as we do to others who are jumping on the blogging bandwagon to find a new market for out-dated practice.

Mark, I agree that the change in PR's role and means requires a change in corporate culture, for both the agency and the client. It's a fundamental redrawing of the most basic business relationships.

fp, I love and respect you, but I have a different attitude about the role of Paid Critics. I'm no fan of Wal-Mart's policies overall, but I don't have a problem with Wal-Mart engaging in what is in effect a political campaign. Obviously, Paid Critics should have made clear from the beginning that it's an arm of Wal-Mart, and of course its content should be true and well-sourced. But I think Wal-Mart is within its rights to engage in flat out and transparent political advocacy. In fact, I like it.

Lee, you raise a whole bunch of important issues so please forgive a response with too many parentheses.

I do think there's a place for public relations in the new world, although it may change its role and name, in which case maybe we agree. There will be external companies and internal departments that help organizations engage directly and indirectly (I think there's room for both) with customers and media and blogs (it's hard even to sort those three into bins any more, I'm happy to say) in honest and useful ways. (I'm increasingly uncomfortable with the notion of authenticity, so I'm leaving that out of the mix for now.) New PR companies are emerging, with a native sense of what PR can and should not be in the new world. That's great. I'm excited by what they're saying and how they're proceeding. But the old PR companies are not simply going to vanish. (They may vanish, but it won't be simple.) So, when one of the established agencies realizes it has to change because the world has changed, it ought to be encouraged and helped. I know enough about Edelman at this point to think that their transgressions are not revelations of an inner, unalterable evil, but were serious missteps by a complex organization in the midst of a culture change. (That doesn't minimize the damage they've done to the trust that holds the Blogosphere together.)

Maybe incumbent PR companies can't change. But I have not given up hope yet. I simultaneously have hope in the new PR companies that are so different that they're hesitant to call themselves PR companies.

As for my sounding "Woody Allen-ish," I'm not sure how to take that. Woody Allen who was neurotically self-entangled or Woody Allen who married his step-daughter?

Woody Allen, the dixieland clarinet player?

Edelman has 3+ big bloggers doing consulting, yet *none* knew about this in advance?

"Any sufficiently advanced cluelessness is indistinguishable from malice."

I'm still wondering how PaidCritics.com fits into Edelman's oh-so-open embrace of openness on October 20. Here is a site paid for by Wal-Mart and written by three paid Edelman staffers (Miranda Gill, Brian McNeill and Kate Marshall, according to PR watch. www.prwatch.org/node/5317 )

Yet on October 24, nowhere on the front page of PaidCritics.com do "Miranda", "Brian", and Bill" disclose their "blog's" connection to Wal-Mart or Edelman, as they go about slamming critics of Wal-Mart in categories like "Hypocrisy" and "Motives." The "openness" (since October 19) consists in a hyperlink from each author name to a one-line page that names Edelman and "Working Families for Wal-Mart" but fails to disclose the Wal-Mart funding behind them.

Hi David,

I agree with pretty much everything you lay out above, including I should add some doubts surrounding the over-use of the word 'authentic' (mea culpa!).

I don't think Edelman are bad (you obviously feel they are good, and I respect your opinions, so that's good enough for me), but like most people I simply don't care whether they get it or not, or indeed whether they exist or not. I am more interested in the PR agencies who are dropping the 'PR' label, as you allude to.

But I do think that there is a basic conflict between the notion of mediated agency-run PR and the kind of communication and conversation we are trying to promote in the post-cluetrain world. You simply cannot have a conversation with somebody via a PR agency - all you can do is try to monitor, influence, change, derail or discredit (as in the Edelman/Walmart example) an existing conversation. As you say, Walmart is essentially a political campaign.

From what you say, people in Edelman understand this and are trying to change the culture of their company to meet the challenge. That's good for them, I suppose. But just as blogs have given us a way to reach people directly without going through broadcast media, I think we will also see companies gear up to handle more and more of their own communications rather than rely so much on external agencies, who are becoming something of a risk factor in a world of increasing media literacy.

PS: I meant neurotically self-entangled, of course; but on second thoughts, recognising complexity and being open about it is a good thing, not a sign of neurosis :-) There's actually a Zelig joke in there somewhere, about the future of PR, but I don't want to continue the Allen theme...