I’ve been thinking about Edelman and the “Walmarting Across America” blog again, in part because the topic came up — not surprisingly — at the Third Tuesday PR blogger event I was at last night (more info here) and also because I came across a post at John Koetsier’s blog BizHack in which he went over the entire chain of events and said how he felt dissatisfied with Edelman’s response.
As John notes, many people seem to feel the same way, judging by the comments on my previous post as well as those on Richard Edelman’s post and Steve Rubel’s post. And I must admit that I share some of that frustration, as highly as I think of Edelman. So I wanted to kind of summarize my thoughts on it, in part because that’s what I tried to do last night but I’m not sure I got them all across in the right way.
Here’s my position in a nutshell:
- Edelman screwed up, big time. Not just because of the blog and the lack of full disclosure — which may have happened because Wal-Mart ignored their advice, or didn’t ask for it — but because of their lack of response, and the relative inadequacy of that response when it did come.
- Edelman is being held to a somewhat higher standard than another run-of-the-mill PR shop might be in a similar situation, but that is only fitting because they have put themselves out front on the blog transparency and “being part of the conversation” issue and they failed to uphold those commitments.
- Richard and Steve have done an admirable job of responding not just to comments but to emails and other requests, and they should be congratulated for that. But as BizHack and others point out, we still haven’t gotten anything close to an explanation of how they dropped the ball and how they plan to ensure it won’t happen again.
- The fact that neither Steve nor Richard has discussed the matter since they posted their extremely brief comments only makes the inadequacy of those comments even more obvious. Like it or not, being part of the blogosphere in such a public manner means you have to take the good with the bad.
- My sense is that Edelman’s failure in this case — and at least one other case involving Wal-Mart, as John points out — has done a lot to make people even more pessimistic about the ability of PR companies to be transparent at all, at least in any meaningful way, and that is a shame.
On that last point, check out this post from PaidContent on the whole fiasco.