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Friday, October 13, 2006

Edelman and the one-sided conversation

The first inkling I had that Edelman PR had stumbled again in its social media efforts on behalf of client WalMart came early yesterday when Laurel English emailed me a copy of the MediaPost story. Shortly after that, Donna Simmons—past president of PRSA’s Inland Empire (California) chapter forwarded along the same story. I covered the story in yesterday’s FIR, and have since been following coverage in the blogosphere. There has been plenty, not surprisingly. (And that’s just a small sampling; there’s more here, here, and elsewhere.)

The one source from which we haven’t heard—at least, as far as I can tell—is Edelman.

In case you missed the story, a blog ostensibly authored by a couple traveling across America in their RV and spending nights parked in WalMart parking lots turned out to be a fake blog, the brainchild of WalMart’s PR counselors at Edelman. While fake blogs (and other fake social media) are nothing new, it’s dismaying to see it emerge from Edelman, which has some of the smarter new-media people on its staff (Phil Gomes, Michael Wiley, Steve Rubel and more), and which touts itself as the PR firm that truly gets social media. This is the third time (as Todd Defren noted in his post) that Edelman has botched the whole social media thing on WalMart’s behalf.

Those smart PR folks working for Edelman are among the members of the PR community who advocate participation in the conversation. Some of them have been brutal when, to their way of thinking, somebody else fails to understand what it means to be engage in the conversation. So where is Edelman in this particular conversation? Missing in action. As dismaying as this latest misstep is, it’s even more dismaying to see Edelman’s high-powered social media experts failing to walk the talk. Nothing from Richard in his vaunted 6 a.m. blog. Nothing from Steve, who blogs at the pinnacle of PR’s A-list. Nothing from anybody (based on a Technorati search and a survey of the Edelman blogs).

I was surprised when PRWeek issued its Agency Excellence Survey (PDF), where Edelman ranked pretty low in terms of its social media savvy. Today, it doesn’t seem so surprising at all.

Posted by Shel on 10/13 at 01:59 AM
Blogging • New Media • (26) Comments • (17) Trackbacks • Permalink
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