Learning from Wal-Mart: How NOT to blog

The blogosphere has a distinct culture, and as in any case of trying to acclimate yourself to a new cultural environment, one needs to learn and understand the culture before trying to dive right in and risk being branded as an outsider.

I've been in London for just over a week; it's my first time here in the UK and even though they speak the same language, there is quite a bit of a culture shock. Although there's no hiding the fact that I'm an American (next time, I'll leave the trainers and baseball cap at home), I've had to quickly learn about some of the different customs and different words used here and try to embrace them as well as possible in order to avoid sticking out like a sore thumb, or in this case, the dreaded loud, obnoxious American tourist.

The New York Times reports on how one of Wal-Mart's public relations is utilizing the blogosphere to enhance the company's image:

Wal-Mart Enlists Bloggers in Its Public Relations Campaign

As Wal-Mart has come under increasing attack from various special interest groups and social activists, they've gone on the offensive in trying to defend their image in the public sphere. On the one hand, they've correctly recognized the impact that bloggers can have in shaping public opinion. However, the way they are going about leveraging blogs is contrary to the spirit of blogging and shows a lack of understanding of blog culture.

According to the article, this particular public relations firm hired by Wal-Mart maintains a list of bloggers who they consider to be friendly to their cause. They regularly send out emails to this mailing list offering "suggestions" on what to write about to promote Wal-Mart's image. The article states "In the messages, Wal-Mart promotes positive news about itself, like the high number of job applications it received at a new store in Illinois, and criticizes opponents, noting for example that a rival, Target, raised "zero" money for the Salvation Army in 2005, because it banned red-kettle collectors from stores."

The problem, in my opinion, is not that they ask bloggers to help promote their image. If these bloggers are truly fans of Wal-Mart, there's nothing wrong with a company providing them with facts to help support their arguments as to why Wal-Mart is praiseworthy. The problem is when bloggers take those messages and repost them verbatim, as if they were written by themselves.

To be fair, the article states that Wal-Mart does warn bloggers about posting these messages verbatim. However, they have also not made clear to them that they should be forthright about the source of their information. Wal-Mart could also help prevent bloggers from posting their messages as-is by formatting the emails as a bulleted list of "talking points" or some other non-post-friendly format instead of formatting them as "typical blog postings, with a pungent sentence or two introducing a link to a news article or release" as the article reports.

It is a good idea for companies to embrace the blogosphere, but they must respect the culture of the blogosphere. Blogs must be completely independent and brutally honest. Bloggers resist those who are disingenuous and not completely forthright. Whether you are pro-Wal-Mart, anti-Wal-Mart, or completely indifferent, we should all hope that Wal-Mart will learn from this experience and become a respectable citizen of the blogosphere.

wal-mart blogging