Richard Edelman discusses the Wal-Mart blog

In late September, two bloggers set off on a trip in an recreational vehicle across America, stopping in the car parks of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. along the way and blogging about all the great Wal-Mart folks they met — or so we were meant to believe.

Within a couple of weeks of the “Wal-Marting Across America” blog going live, BusinessWeek reported that the RV, the gas and the blog entries were being paid by a Wal-Mart PR organization formed by Edelman, a global public relations company. When the blogosphere found out, it was none too pleased.

Edelman came in for perhaps greater criticism than Wal-Mart because its president, Richard Edelman, has spent the last 2 years writing his own blog, talking up the blogosphere and promoting it as an important medium to companies.

His PR agency even played a part in creating guidelines for the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA). Those guidelines state: “We stand against shill and undercover marketing, whereby people are paid to make recommendations without disclosing their relationship with the marketer.”

For several days, Richard Edelman made no mention of the Wal-Mart brouhaha on his blog but he broke silence on Oct. 16 with an apology and recommitment to the code of ethics.

On Tuesday, at the mid-point of a six-city tour of Asia, he sat down with IDG News Service in Tokyo to answer some questions about the incident. The following is an edited transcript.

IDG News Service: What happened with Wal-Mart?

Richard Edelman: We were insufficiently transparent about the identity of one of the two bloggers who went on that RV tour. And in a certain way, it’s not a failure of new media; it was a failure in all media. Which is to say, if they were talking to you in your IDG mainstream media hat, you would want to know the name of the spokesperson and what his background was and what his credentials were and we failed that basic test. We did it because we have people who are insufficiently experienced in this. And [here’s] my job. I have to make sure people have the training in basics of PR and also in the morals of new media and that’s what I’m totally focused on. We had mandatory training for all of our workforce this week in three different regions. Everyone gets the seriousness with which I take this and the profession needs to have that level of standard; otherwise, we are not going to be players in the blogosphere, forget it!

IDGNS: How did you feel when you first read about this and found out what had been going on?

Edelman: I was frustrated, I was unhappy, I was mad. And then I turned it all quickly to being constructive and said ‘OK, you’re CEO, grow up you’ve got a job to do.’ It’s not a matter of blaming individuals. It’s a matter of taking it as a team — responsibility to do better because it could have happened to any of our people and so that was a decision I took very quickly. As soon as I understood what had happened and why, I apologized and remade the commitment and reported on what we are doing to train and you saw those posts last week and we’ll be doing follow ups on those.

IDGNS: What have you learnt from this — beyond the obvious about using full names and being transparent because they were in these guidelines you drew up anyway so you already understood the importance of that?

Edelman: What I learned is that we’ve got to let the people who are quite expert in this area, the guys who run me2revolution (an Edelman subsidiary), be our counsel but also be in control in a certain way as to what is and what is not acceptable. We’re in a transition period here. These are always somewhat uncomfortable and we’ve got to make sure our PR people are doing best practice in this area as they make baby steps into it. I do believe that most of our people understood this and that this was an exception, but OK, let’s have it as a precautionary principle that it not happen again.

IDGNS: What do you think the hit to Edelman’s public image has been in this?

Edelman: Well, I don’t think it’s a substantial hit to Edelman’s image because people understand we’re decent. We’ve been in business 55 years and that I and 30 other people at the firm are blogging, that we get it. I know there was a lot of static in the blogosphere — why didn’t you say something sooner? — well, that’s possible, I should have said ‘Look, I’m on it, I’m looking at it but I can’t say anything until I have fully checked out what happened.’ That would have been the one thing I would have done differently. I still think there would have been some of the static because there’s a group of bloggers who don’t like PR people being in the blogosphere. I fundamentally disagree with them. I think we add value. I think we are a good bridge to companies who are either newbies or don’t want to be in it at all.