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?

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