5 responses to “Edelman blog tactics come under scrutiny”
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It’s hard to see this as anything other than a textbook example of how to do it. And you wouldn’t really expect anything less from Edelman, who very clearly ‘get’ the whole blogging thing. (Even to the point of hiring Steve Rubel, the king of PR blogging!)
It’s not as if this is a new phenomenon. I can think of plenty of instances where briefing material I’ve written (or helped write) has been reprinted, virtually verbatim, in newspapers. And of course, we considered that a success. What’s the point of a ‘press release’ otherwise? (Oops, a whole other can of worms, that one!)
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Couldn’t agree with you more. Many of us talk about how we can use the blogoshpere to listen for feedback on our companies and how we can make our copmany and our products more consumer-focused but few how many of us really think IN-DEPTH about how we would actually do this?
Blogging is about freedom of speech as much as anything, but when our views represent other people, we need to ensure that certain guidelines are followed to ensure that nothing illegal or immoral is posted.
By managing a group of bloggers and getting them to sign-up to an agreement Wal-Mart are simply able to more easily measure the response those posts get NOT restrict the content.
Some of the group may simply decide NOT to post something on a particular topic that Wal-Mart have emailed them. After all, their reputation may extend way beyond Wal-Mart so they have to retain SOME credibility!
How is this any worse to the guinness blog which is actually RUN and POSTED ON by the people who work there?!
At least Edelman has enlisted REAL neutral people!
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Indeed – good job, and one to learn from. Very kind of the NYT to unpick the campaign for us… usually people have to write their own case studies ;-)
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Nice summary Antony. It would be good now to see which of the Edelman celeb bloggers are in the Walmart war room!
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I was one of the persons who ran into this PR firm. The people that received information from a PR firm were not paid nor did they receive anything other that some links to some stories and at most a sentence or two. Though I received many correspondences, I only created a post about one of them. I do however have many posts about free markets, capitalism, and the such dealing with Wal-mart long before I knew about Edelman.
What is missing from this story is the corporate campaign by the unions against Walmart. If they can’t get the Wal-mart employees to unionize they are trying another old strategy of propaganda, regulation accusations, along with the help of the pro-union media (which the NY Times author is a member of). What people fail to realize, is that this doesn’t hurt Wal-mart. It hurts the hundreds of thousand of employees trying to earn money for their families.
And the Times preaching about ethics…? LOL
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