Wal-Mart Edelman Blog Blunder
Very nice of someone to write a blog about how you can travel across the USA and always park overnight in a Wal-Mart car park for free - nice for Wal-Mart that is.
I started thinking about all the other amazing things there are to see in this vast country of ours. And then I started thinking about how Wal-Mart — one in every town, practically — lets you park overnight for free.
Pity it reads just like typical PR rubbish. Hold on a minute, it is PR rubbish! It turns out that this idea was cooked up by the Edelman agency - the same Edelman whose boss writes a blog, and that hired a slew of PR bloggers.
Interesting to hear the take on this in the For Imediate Release Podcast. It gives an impression of the confusion this debacle has sowed in the PR World. Presenter Shel Holtz rightly expresses sorrow and regret that Edelman should cock-up like this, then co-presenter Neville Hobson reports on how nice it was to meet Richard Edelman at a blogger meet-up in London last week. Presumably Neville recorded his piece before this news broke.
Edelman reminds me of running journalism courses in various parts of the world. The students nod and say lots of intelligent things in the discussion, but when they go out and do their stuff, they come back with material that does the opposite of all that we talked about. This is exactly what Edelman does in the blogosphere.
13. October 2006 at 20:11
[…] Blog relations: Edelman reminds me of running journalism courses in various parts of the world. The students nod and say lots of intelligent things in the discussion, but when they go out and do their stuff, they come back with material that does the opposite of all that we talked about. This is exactly what Edelman does in the blogosphere. […]
13. October 2006 at 21:25
[…] What brought this story to my immediate attention was a post earlier today by Hugh Fraser in which he noted: […] Interesting to hear the take on this in the For Imediate Release Podcast. It gives an impression of the confusion this debacle has sowed in the PR World. Presenter Shel Holtz rightly expresses sorrow and regret that Edelman should cock-up like this, then co-presenter Neville Hobson reports on how nice it was to meet Richard Edelman in London last week. Presumably Neville recorded his piece before this news broke. […]
13. October 2006 at 23:11
It’s a pity Neville learned about this minor-hickup on the FIR podcast from me. He’s a true gent among bloggers and podcasters, and I admire the podcast that he and Shel do tremendously.
2. November 2006 at 20:59
[…] I’m finding the various RSS feeds, blogs about Social Media, White Papers from Edelman on how to manage and use Corporate Blogging (yeah, their WalMart thing was useful to their reputation in this arena) interesting reading. Thinking of re-naming this blog “JOHNNY COME LATELY” or “BANDWAGGONER”. […]
11. May 2007 at 11:20
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3. October 2007 at 02:22
[…] PR and Blogs One of the things that struck me as I read Scoble & Israel is how well blogs worked in the PR world. And then I was reminded of recent incidents involving Edelman and Wal-Mart. […]
3. March 2008 at 21:44
[…] since their blog at the time didn’t even allow commenting, not to mention their fake blog/Edelman PR disaster. Despite their record, it turned out their PR guy was right when he asserted Wal-Mart’s […]
5. March 2008 at 16:39
[…] Communications.” I guess “authentic communications” is the opposite of the work it did for Wal-Mart. […]