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Selling Inside the Blog: The Story of Wal-Mart, Conservative Bloggers, and the New York Times

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March 14th 2006

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by Douglas MacMillan  |

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On Tuesday, March 7, New York Times published an article entitled “Wal-Mart Enlists Bloggers in PR Campaign.” Times business reporter Michael Barbaro, a documentedwhistleblower on some of Wal-Mart’s potentially questionable business practices, happened upon the story idea while reading a number of conservative blogs which appeared to use very similar language in support of the retail giant. What looked like a coincidence at first soon revealed itself to be a full-fledged PR campaign catered specifically for the blogosphere. Wal-Mart, it became evident to Barbaro, was going way beyond any traditional interactive marketing campaign; it was trying to control the very language of the Internet to spark a turnaround in its battered image.

What Barbaro found was that Wal-Mart had tapped the PR management services of Edelman to target a number of bloggers throughout the Internet. Beginning in late 2005, Edelman’s Marshall Manson located about a dozen bloggers who had previously pronounced some kind of support for Wal-Mart, and with their consent mailed them regular updates on stories slanted in favor of the corporation. Several times a week, Manson continued sending them web URLs to national news stories and statistical data annotated by his own brief comments. All he had to do was log on to a few different blogs to confirm that his press was being fed almost instantly into publication and circulation. Wal-Mart and Edelman were on to something big, and Barbaro was determined to spot their ethical breach.

Try as he may, Barbaro could not villanize Wal-Mart in this case. They followed in the wake of a number of companies who have used interaction in the blogosphere to promote the advantages of their product, such as General Electric, Cingular Wireless, and Microsoft with the Xbox 360, simply carrying the strategy a bit further to encompass the promotion of their entire brand image. Edelman must be credited with both the effectiveness of the campaign as well as an uncompromising compliance with ethical standards. In response to Barbaro’s article, and in anticipation of a backlash against his company, CEO Richard Edelman posted in his personal blog the tenets which he believes a successful and ethical PR campaign must adhere to:

First, we must always be transparent about the identity of our client and the goal of the PR program. Second, we should ask permission to participate in the conversation, and be comfortable with any communication being made public, whether by the blogger or an investigative journalist. We should support bloggers’ transperancy re. the source of their information. Third, we must reveal any financial relationship with bloggers, whether consulting or even reimbursement of trip expenses. Fourth, we must ensure that the information we provide is 100% factually correct and not “spin.”

There is no doubt that Marshall Manson complied with these standards completely, asking permission to initiate communication, being transparent about who he works for and what his goal is, and refraining from offering any compensation to the bloggers. Though they are still tentative and by no means legally binding, Manson also complied with the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s “Code of Ethics” by all practical accounts, which states:

1. Consumer protection and respect are paramount

2. The Honesty ROI: Honesty of Relationship, Opinion, and Identity

3. We respect the rules of the venue

4. We manage relationships with minors responsibly

5. We promote honest downstream communications

6. We protect privacy and permission

By these standards, we must assume, as Barbaro does reluctantly, that the mega-corporation and its PR firm is in the clear. But something still feels wrong about all of it. The blogosphere should exist as a forum for public discourse outside the influence of corporate greed, one would think. We should be able to criticize and express our true beliefs about the world we live in without having a salesman sitting next to us on the bench, overhearing our every word and whispering corporate spin into the ear of our neighbor. If we can’t blame the salesman, thinks Barbaro, we must blame our neighbor.