The Rules Are Pretty Obvious

There are a quite a few folks willing to give Wal-Mart, Edelman and others that have deliberately been opaque in the blogosphere a pass. I'm not as willing. I think folks want to believe in Edelman, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. They've been at the forefront of the blog marketing movement for quite some time now, especially since Steve Rubel started working there. It's natural to want to root for the first mover. Even I want to root for them, and I have some service offerings that some people might consider competitive.

But I'm not quite ready to give Edelman a pass. Yes, I do think some of the things they've done in the past few days have been good. Yes, we need some work on ethics guidelines. Yes, it's good to admit it when you screw up.

I think, though, that there's a big difference between a screw up and knowing you're committing flagrant sins in the blogosphere and continuing to do it until you get caught. That's my big problem here. Yes, we can be expected to foul certain things up while we figure out how to market in the blogosphere and in social media.

But we can't be expected to screw up on the most basic part of it, where the rules are obvious to anybody who's spent more than a couple hours surfing blogs. The values of transparency, honesty and commitment to the discussion are core values of the blogging movement.

These values are shared almost universally in the blog, which is why it's tough for me to give Edelman a pass. I have a tough time with the notion of somebody not spotting this from the get-go and saying, "Hey, we're not being transparent here. We need to do something about that." It had to have come up at some point in the process.

The cornerstone values pretty much boil down to the Golden Rule - treat others how you want to be treated. Obscuring agendas is both disrespectful and dishonest. I can't see how that wasn't debated when putting the programs for Wal-Mart together.

Conversational Marketing - Keep it away from the WOMers

Today's column in iMedia is all about what Conversational Marketing isn't. I'm sure I'll hear from all the companies that belong to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association about how they're different, but truth be told, I don't see too many WOMMA members working with a bottom-up approach. Most of the stuff I've seen allows marketers to continue to sit in their ivory towers while paid agents (PR agencies, incentivized brand advocates, etc.) do the work of connecting with the market on their behalf. This ain't right. The best folks to talk about a product or service are the people who developed it, or who are in the trenches everyday improving, selling and living it. People want to talk to the guy who designed the drivetrain for the Ford Mustang, not some PR hack or agency schmuck who is a few degrees of separation from the authentic story.

It was as I feared - a bunch of companies rushed into the space with the top-down approach, and they'll likely screw it up for the rest of us. Maybe we'll re-learn one of the big lessons of the dot com boom and have to go through a period of "Conversational Marketing doesn't work" before we can pick up the pieces and popularize the model that does work. I hope not. I hope that companies start listening now and realizing that some tough and unpopular choices are going to have to be made.

More Flogs

Tom Siebert at Mediapost writes that Edelman has added bylines to posts on "Working Families For Wal-Mart" and "Paid Critics." Add this to the pile. While it's admirable that Edelman is coming clean, they've just accomplished three things, none of them good.

1) They've just sent the message that Wal-Mart doesn't care enough about its business to connect directly with the market itself.

2) They've not gone as far as they should with respect to transparency on either site. The "About Us" section on WFFWM doesn't make any mention of Edelman. In fact, it maintains that it's "a group of leaders from a variety of backgrounds and communities all across America." Umm, no. It's a group of PR guys with access to Wal-Mart's ivory tower. Paid Critics apparently doesn't even have an "About Us" section, though it does describe itself as a "project" of WFFWM. Disclosures should be front and center, not buried somewhere where the casual observer won't see them.

3) They've buried the irony meter by using paid critics to expose paid critics. It completely blunts the impact of what they're trying to do. Rather than a frank discussion of the issues between Wal-Mart and the rest of the world, the whole thing has escalated into a bullshit PR war between paid operatives.

See subheading number one on my column from yesterday. This cannot be faked. Wal-Mart should start speaking directly to its customers and Edelman should get a set and make a choice between the following:

1) Sell out - Be paid agents and embrace it. 2) Go completely transparent - Start over and begin to rebuild trust if any can be salvaged.

As of this posting, there's nothing on the new disclosures on either Micropersuasion or Richard Edelman's blog.

Outlook Smells

This morning, Outlook decided it didn't want to start. I've been plagued with problems since moving to this HP laptop, which seemed like a good machine for the price. It's been running like a dog and taking 10 minutes to boot in the morning. A full reformatting, reinstall of XP and all applications seems in order. Thankfully, the machine works once it gets booted up, so I'm backing up everything now.

But it looks like this reformat/reinstallation will likely kill most of the day. Grrr...