When it comes to blogging, nobody talks the blah-blah-blog talk like Edelman Public Relations. Now Edelman has but one more strike before their new media credibility is shot forever....


Their client, Wal-Mart, the ethics-challenged biggest employer in America, has just been caught -- for the second time -- in an unethical and entirely dumb fake blog (flog) scandal. And, ironically, it's mainstream media that outed them.
BusinessWeek and MediaPost report that the pro-Wal-Mart blog,

"Wal-Marting Across America" is nothing but "a promotional tactic engineered by Working Families for Wal-Mart (WFWM), an organization launched by Wal-Mart's public relations firm Edelman."

"Wal-Marting Across America," ostensibly launched by a pair of average Americans chronicling their cross-country travels in an RV and lodging in Wal-Mart parking lots, has been ended with a farewell entry. And one of its two contributors was revealed to be Jim Thresher, a staff photographer for The Washington Post. That's "a violation of the paper's policy for freelancing for special interests," according to his editor. The other is Laura St. Claire, whose brother happens to work at Edelman.
Edelman, you may recall, also helped Wal-Mart enlist right wing bloggers to whitewash Wal-mart's extremely tarnished reputation.
To quote George Bush, "fool me once......"


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Social Media Strike Two for Edelman PR and Wal-Mart

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

B.L. Ochman is a social media marketing strategist for S&P 500 companies, including McGraw Hill, IBM, Cendant, and American Greetings. She publishes What's Next Blog and Ethics Crisis, where readers can confess their worst ethics transgressions and others can rate them on a scale of one to ten. She also blogs for MarketingProfs Daily Fix Blog.