Edelman Posts Next Steps

Richard Edelman posted some next steps for his agency over at his blog. It's good to let folks know what they plan to do. However, a couple of the points seem rather vague.

• We are undertaking a thorough audit around the world to ensure we apply best practice guidelines to every program in every market and specialty area.
• We are requiring that all employees attend an Edelman University class on ethics in social media, hosted by members of me2revolution team as well as external experts. This will take place before the end of next week
• We are establishing a 24/7 hotline so our me2revolution team can review, provide counsel and apply best practice guidelines on social media programs before their implementation. This ensures that programs adhere to the WOMMA guidelines or best-in-class standards around the world.
• We are creating ethics materials that will be distributed to each office and all new hires.

These are some good first steps, but I think he ought to share what Edelman believes to be "best practices" and "ethics guidelines" so that we can see for ourselves whether or not we can expect transgressions concerning transparency in the future. It would also be nice to see whether or not Edelman still plans to execute client communications programs top down.

Interesting

"Edelman" is in the list of Top 15 Technorati searches at #4, while "Wal-Mart" didn't even make the list.

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...