Richard Edelman has apologised on his blog for Wal-Mart-gate. Edelman PR appears to have aided in creating a faked* blog [http://walmartingacrossamerica.com - now taken down] about a couple travelling across America, camping in Wal-Mart car parks along the way.

Edelman writes:

For the past several days, I have been listening to the blogging community discuss the cross-country tour that Edelman designed for Working Families for Wal-Mart.

I want to acknowledge our error in failing to be transparent about the identity of the two bloggers from the outset. This is 100% our responsibility and our error; not the client’s.

Let me reiterate our support for the WOMMA guidelines on transparency, which we helped to write. Our commitment is to openness and engagement because trust is not negotiable and we are working to be sure that commitment is delivered in all our programs.

Richard

So (you are undoubtedly asking), what are these WOMMA (word of mouth marketing association, as it turns out) guidelines? This is what the site says:

Word of mouth can’t be faked or invented. Attempting to fake word of mouth is unethical and creates a backlash, damages the brand, and tarnishes the corporate reputation. Legitimate word of mouth marketing acknowledges consumers’ intelligence – it never attempts to fool them. Ethical marketers reject all tactics related to manipulation, deception, infiltration, or dishonesty.

So err… this is all pretty embarrassing for all concerned, and probably for anyone who has anything to do with social media marketing.

Three ideas or challenges…

(a) Word of mouth can be faked – it’s easy. But only a fucking idiot would try it. You end up looking like dicks because people will find out. (sorry, language). Wal-Mart doesn’t seem to have a lot to lose on the reputation front, as far as the Internet tells me. Yeah, I can see them trying that. After all, they tried The Hub: School Your Way (Ze Frank investigates).

(b) This affair sets back corporate involvement with social media. You see, we always thought they were phonies. Then people at MS, Sun, Mozilla, Google, Yahoo, Guinness, Boeing and a load of others started to talk to us. They did it for a while, and after some time we started to think, ‘no – hang on – these guys are OK’. I think the people who’ve being doing it for a while are probably still OK, but new corporate blogs will fall under an even bigger spotlight.

(c) It probably wasn’t Edelman’s fault at all. Or if it was, there was a management failure. They’re more likely to be carrying the can for some idiot somewhere else, because they have to. They are the PR company; they bear the responsibility, it seems. In another era, Wal-Mart would have taken that role and it’s odd that people are saying ‘bad edelman’ rather than ‘bad wal-mart’. Maybe I don’t understand this correctly, but it seems that the irony of social media champions being caught undermining their big play is far, far more interesting than a company with a bad reputation continuing to do bad things. Ultimately, I think a lot of people will react like me, so good call by Edelman for putting his hands up.

(* Was this a fake blog? In the blog’s final post Laura says of the intended trip:

…And, of course, I’d write an article about it and may be able to sell a story to an RV magazine, with photos, of RVing in America and only staying at Wal-Marts … we decided to get permission from Wal-Mart to do so. So I called my brother, who works at Edelman and whose clients include Working Families for Wal-Mart, in order to find out if we’d be allowed to talk to people and take pictures in Wal-Mart parking lots … They didn’t just give us permission. They said they would even sponsor the trip!

With no evidence either way, I believe this is probably true. It’s quite common for journalists to find an opportunity and then sell the story. But of course, they didn’t say that up-front on the blog. Without getting metaphysical on your arse (that doesn’t really work in an English accent), is it fake or true?

If they had said, in the first post, “we got sponsorship for this trip from Wal-Mart”, none of this would have happened. The rest of the blog would have been exactly the same. If it was a good blog, people would read, otherwise, they’d go elsewhere.

“We are sponsored by X” or, “I work for Y” doesn’t mean “I am a corporate whore“. It means “I am honest with you“.)