Walmart uses bloggers, NYT says
Walmart is starting to use bloggers, this New York Times article says.
Um, I don’t condone this kind of work and if I find out a Microsoft employee is doing it I’ll publicly point it out.
For the record, here’s my best practices: always attribute where you got something from. Even if it doesn’t make you look good.
Second, for companies thinking of getting in this space: why don’t you just blog? That’s the best way to get your point of view out there. Hidden agendas will be found out eventually (and there are plenty of them, particularly in comment sections — how do you know that anonymous commenter wasn’t paid by a competitor of mine? You don’t.)
Another way to look at it? Join, don’t use. Ask yourself: are you communicating or trying to manipulate others into communicating?
Be skeptical! Even of me. Although I’ll always tell you where I am getting freebies, getting paid, or getting my back scratched.
Update: Richard Edelman, who runs the PR firm that was involved here, talks about this on his blog and gives good suggestions for both bloggers and PR agencies.
Update 2, Here’s some more news on this topic.
NYkette: No, I don’t blog for Walmart.
Joanna Lipari: but is it ethical?
Glenn Reynolds has a ton of links and analysis of this (must read for marketers and PR folks).
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March 7th, 2006 at 10:51 am
Astroturfing. I am so not surprised. WAKE UP WALMART.com There is nothing that I would put past these pirates. I can\’t wait until the coming global peak oil crash puts them out of buisness.
March 7th, 2006 at 11:26 am
What is it you don\’t condone? I agree that if you are quoting someone, you should cite - not only to be responsible but also because you can be legally liable if you don\’t!
But what\’s the problem with Wal-Mart or Microsoft using blog spaces to improve their image? Its clearly unethical (criminal?) if Wal-Mart logged onto anything with Target or K-Mart and \”commented\” on the poor service, price, etc. But why shouldn\’t a company use the blog world for its own purposes?
Your advice under item # 2 is spot on, however. Irrespective of ethics and legality, anything that smells bad will eventually come out and the company will suffer, even if they weren\’t the ones doing (or trying to do) something wrong.
Everyone should read stories on both sides with some skepticism. Don\’t you think that many anti-Wal-Mart stories are one-sided? If you listened to just one side of the argument you\’d either think Wal-Mart was the utopia of corporate world or the satan of employment. If Wal-Mart paid more cost for health care, etc., that\’s got to mean higher prices for me. But do they also have a better responsibility to their employees?
I don\’t want this to be a diatribe for or against Wal-Mart, I\’m just not sure what the delimma is.
March 7th, 2006 at 12:02 pm
I agree with you. I think Wal-Mart should have blogged itself and entered into an open dialogue with customers/critics. If they weren\’t willing to do that, stay away. Fairly or unfairly, every single person who blogs in favor of Wal-Mart is going to be questioned from here on out.
March 7th, 2006 at 12:52 pm
Mike: I don\’t condone trying to astroturf comments by using advocates who don\’t source their material (and who have the perception that they are getting paid by the company — we don\’t actually know the credibility of these people). It\’s made worse by not having a blog where people can link back to and have a direct communication with the company.
March 7th, 2006 at 1:29 pm
Your point about competitors posting negative comments is an important one. Comment fraud, I like to call it, and we\’ll see it more and more.
And whilst I agree that having your own blog is one of the best ways of communicating with the blogosphere, why shouldn\’t a company contact bloggers and say \”Hey, we think you\’re important. We\’d like you to play with our product/come to an event/listen to our point of view.\”?
It\’s exactly what Microsoft are doing very successfully with the launch of Windows Live in the UK, and you\’re using an external agency to do it.
March 7th, 2006 at 4:38 pm
Astroturfing? This wasn’t astroturfing. Not by a long shot. A PR person representing WalMart approached some bloggers who seemed sympathetic to WalMart’s message. He offered to send them some information from time to time. They agreed that they’d like to get his information, and he sent it. These pieces were just part of the mix of information and resources available to them. A newspaper reporter (that is, a TRAINED reporter) would have double-checked facts, interviewed people for alternative points of view, and ultimately dismissed or accepted the information based on this evaluation. There are undoubtedly bloggers who do the same. The PR rep in this case asked the bloggers NOT to reprint the material verbatim; some did anyway. That’s laziness, not astroturfing. In fact, if it IS astroturfing, then so is every press release ever created. God knows I wrote enough press releases in my corporate communication days that were reprinted word for word by trade publications and even some regular newspapers.
I wholeheartedly agree with Robert; developing their own blogs would have been great. At the same time, I’m untroubled by the approach taken, although I agree with someone (can’t remember who) who suggested the Edelman rep might have picked his bloggers more carefully.
I heard no complaints, by the way, about the Nokia n90 blogger relations program, which took pretty much the same thing.
March 7th, 2006 at 5:00 pm
Shel: probably cause when you get a free phone in the mail it’s pretty clear who is paying for that (and it’s pretty hard not to disclose). Saying a few words are your own when they aren’t is a lot easier.
It smells like Astroturfing, though. That’s what got them the attention.
Personally, I’m going to tell corporate types to think about this: are you joining in the blogosphere or are you just trying to use the blogosophere to manipulate?
If you just want to manipulate from the edge without joining in and doing the hard work, then you’ll get bashed and misrepresented.
I searched Google for “Walmart Blog” and didn’t find one. That’s a real problem.
March 7th, 2006 at 5:26 pm
There are plenty of Microsoft people using blogs for P.R. Many you know.
Start pointing them out!
March 7th, 2006 at 5:45 pm
Yes there are many MS folks using blogs for PR. I agree, start pointing them out. But more to the point, who elected you the blogging rule maker? Because you “wrote” a book? Let the market decide which blogs work and which don’t. Who cares what you think about how others blog? Again, let the market decide what works.
March 7th, 2006 at 5:46 pm
Robert, I just don’t see why providing information is manipulation. Richard Edelman made his rules clear: be 100% factual and accurate and without spin (all evidence suggests the emails were just a couple lines with links); disclose your relationship with the client and the goal of the campaign (the alternative to giving ‘em a free phone); ask the blogger’s permission to participate in this manner (they did); reveal any financial relationships with the blogger (there were none). Edelman’s post is quite instructive.
I’m pitched all the time with access to beta services in the hopes I’ll blog about it. Is that unethical? Is it appropriate to suggest the company should just blog?
And, by the way, does anybody honestly think the unions and anti-WalMart forces aren’t feeding information to anti-WalMart bloggers?
Still, at the end of the day, employees of Wal-Mart blogging would have been a superior approach.
March 7th, 2006 at 7:11 pm
Blog Relations
To me, however, it seemed that the Edelman folks were upfront and honest about their client. No Karen Ryan here! This is good. In fact, it was those citizen journalists who erred by not divulging their sources. Amateurs!
March 7th, 2006 at 9:04 pm
Anonymous: one big difference. I don’t remember any of our words getting out without being marked as such. Second, we have more than 2,000 blogs here. How many does Walmart have?
Dmad: >But more to the point, who elected you the blogging rule maker?
I am not the rule maker. I’m a rule NOTICER. Why am I in that role? Name one person who talks with more bloggers than me? There might be a couple, but not many. So, I get around, figure out how bloggers think, and learn from them.
So, when I say something I’m communicating about what will get companies in trouble.
And, yes, I wrote a book where we interviewed 188 businesses about how they are using blogging. No one else has done that many. So, yes, I AM an authority on corporate blogging.
Who elected you snarky naysayer?
March 7th, 2006 at 9:29 pm
Shel: you’re right. But big companies have a thumb on the scale working against them. They must do even better than smaller companies. Be even more transparent about what they are doing. We learned that the hard way and are still learning it.
March 7th, 2006 at 11:59 pm
I’m still a bit confused about your stance, Robert.
Do you think companies should be contacting bloggers to tell them about their products/invite them to events/send them information or not?
March 8th, 2006 at 12:14 am
Niall: yes, but carefully.
Sounds like they didn’t communicate with their bloggers very well (or didn’t track them very well).
If I give a set of bloggers some information (for instance, we have a popular Search Champs program which is mostly bloggers) then I will want them to explain how they got that information. I also watch how they use that information and make sure I engage myself too and let people know who I work for.
Walmart used the bloggers, but didn’t appear in the community itself. It also didn’t watch to make sure that bloggers were explaining where that information came from. That gave the perception that it was astroturfing.
Without a transparent conversation (er, Naked Conversation) people start expecting the worst. If you don’t understand that, you’ll get into PR trouble.
Think about it another way. If someone keeps coming up to you saying “can you tell your friends that we don’t suck” but they aren’t willing to say that themselves, doesn’t that look a little weird? Wouldn’t you get tired of that kind of behavior?
I far prefer talking to companies who actually want to have conversations rather than ones who just want me to feed messages to my friends.
March 8th, 2006 at 12:36 am
OK. That last point is the important distinction, I think.
I just read the PDF transcript of the conversation that Edelman had with Rob Port. I don’t see that they were trying to get him to “feed messages to his friends”, but they definitely could have been more transparent.
March 8th, 2006 at 12:40 am
Is that PDF out on the Net somewhere? I haven’t seen that yet. Thanks!
March 8th, 2006 at 1:08 am
Yup - it’s linked to from the NYT article now. http://sayanythingblog.com/wal-mart.pdf
March 8th, 2006 at 8:01 am
I think the issue really is about Wal-Mart’s transparency and I do agree that in order for a company big/small to most effectively engage bloggers, they need to be publishing a blog themselves.
There’s nothing wrong with reaching out to bloggers with information but there are consequences if what those bloggers do with the information is not monitored.
Some of the bloggers who were involved left some interesting comments over at BusinessBlogConsulting.com that may provide additional insight.
March 8th, 2006 at 8:43 am
It’s important for anyone commenting on this topic to read the e-mail exchange between the PR representative and the blogger, and then decide whether it is both transparent and professional.
Until you see how the program is represented and the types of information that is exchanged, it’s impossible to draw an accurate conclusion.
The key here is that Wal-Mart should have engaged these bloggers directly if they were so inclined. Better still, put this information up on a blog or website and let the bloggers find it themselves.
March 8th, 2006 at 9:49 am
Shel mentions someone questioned Edelman’s choice of bloggers to target: that was me, and I’m quite startled that this entire discussion, both here and elsewhere, overlooks that Edelman’s blogging work seems to reinforce the philosophical divide between pro and anti-Wal-mart groups.
It’s not really about conversations or even sharing information: their work concentrates on providing ammo to pro-groups and denigrating anti-groups.
Is there any room for conciliation or discussion in an environment like that?
March 9th, 2006 at 1:14 am
My comment posted at Edelman and Kami’s blog:
[QUOTE]
Here I come patting Richard Edelman on the back, as my arms sally forth. Edelman is a genius gentleman of the highest moral caliber, and a marketing mind of great impact.
I consider Edelman an ally, a friend, and a collaborator. He has contributed material to my blogs and to at least two of my upcoming books on social media topics.
Now I have not looked into all this Walmart fussiness. I am against all “buzz agenting”. I am against Paid Opinion Blogging, in posts or comments.
But I go to another extreme.
I have begun to launch the lurching New Reformed Insane Blog Media Network.
Brains, blogs, and castration blades at your service, sir (or ma’am)!
Highly trained psycho “buzz agent destroyers” will flame mercilessly those sissypants flamers and trollers who try to damage your corporate reputation and mission.
GUARANTEED Nervous Breakdowns: one flamer at a time.
{END QUOTE}
March 9th, 2006 at 4:15 pm
[...] Colin McKay: I’m quite startled that this entire discussion, both here and elsewhere, overlooks that Edelman’s blogging work seems to reinforce the philosophical divide between pro and anti-Wal-mart groups. [...]
November 27th, 2006 at 4:31 am
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December 8th, 2006 at 1:52 pm
[...] Web 3.0 wpłynie również bardzo mocno na reklamę i podejście do sprzedawania produktów. Zanim kupimy, możemy porównać ceny i przeczytać opinie. Po dokonaniu zakupu możemy nasz produkt sfotografować, nagrać video, opublikować te informacje na blogu, na YouTube, a jeśli nasza opinia będzie ciekawa i zdobędzie popularność, możemy również w ten sposób zarobić. Przekaz dla firm jest prosty – przestańcie starać się wpływać na opinie poprzez reklamy, a zacznijcie się komunikować. Nie uciekajcie się do sztuczek w stylu WalMart i Edelmana – wystarczy jeden konsument, który zorientuje się w podstępie, a za chwilę głośno o tym będzie w całym internecie. Starajcie się stworzyć lepsze produkty. Dobry produkt sam się sprzeda za pomocą kampanii wirusowej, której koszt może nie przekroczyć $100. A poza tym – klienci sami będą reklamować produkty, które uwielbiają. [...]
September 30th, 2007 at 3:11 pm
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