Has Working Families for Wal-Mart Gone the Way of the Dodo?
Mark Rose has yet another interview with Richard Edelman at PR Blog News. His answer to the inevitable Wal-Mart question is really interesting:
Edelman overshadowed its clients Wal-Mart and Microsoft when its blog practices were questioned prominently in mainstream media. What lessons did you learn from that experience?
I am proud of our blogging work on behalf of Wal-Mart and Microsoft. In fact, Wal-MartFacts.com has been a terrific contributor to the knowledge about the company, with 150,000 people going each week to the site to learn about environment, health and other aspects of the company.
Um . . . Richard, Walmartfacts.com is not a blog. Indeed, even the one blog available on Walmartfacts.com, Life at Wal-Mart, is not really a blog. Posts are infrequent. There are no comments enabled and it sure looks like they just print positive letters from whoever the heck sends Wal-Mart one.
Yet what I find most interesting about this answer is that Edelman completely leaves out Working Families for Wal-Mart. While not a real blog either, its homepage is at least in bloggy format. However, going from Miranda’s last link, it seems that she hasn’t posted in almost two weeks – before that now infamous New Yorker piece came out.
We know Paid Critics is dead. Is their faux sponsor extinct too? Come on Mike, give us the scoop.
I was disappointed by Richard’s response to my question about Wal-Mart because he did not admit any past errors and he took no responsibility for mistakes. You are right, the two examples he gives of blogging work he is proud of are not blogs. There is no response/feedback/engagement mechanism on those sites. Those sites are essentially digital propaganda sites, a smart SEO (search engine optimization) move to counter the other side and seed the search engines with their story. It’s a PR war.