Handshake With Sam
While Wal-Mart’s founder, Sam Walton, steered his company’s growth over its first thirty years, he never let anyone forget that with such tremendous success come certain moral responsibilities. He led by example, and he did business with a handshake.
Today’s Wal-Mart has lost Sam’s way. That’s why we’ve proposed a new contract with Wal-Mart’s current leadership—to help Wal-Mart take its place as a responsible business leader for the new century.
Wal-Mart’s PR Firm Straddles the Enviro Fence
Posted by Russ Fagaly
Edelman is leading a $100 million advertising and lobbying campaign for the oil and gas industry. From National Journal via Potomac Flacks:
API’s Well-Oiled PR Drive
With congressional Democrats readying probes into oil companies’ profits and eyeing legislation aimed at curbing global warming, the American Petroleum Institute and its K Street allies are looking to assemble a $100 million war chest to rally policy makers and public opinion to their side, according to lobbyists.
The image and education effort, much of which will be coordinated by the PR firm Edelman, will include expensive television, radio, and print ads, tours of oil patch facilities for lawmakers and opinion elites, and financial contributions to sympathetic think tanks and industry-friendly organizations.
The API is asking the Independent Petroleum Association of America, the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, and other oil and gas trade groups to participate in the multiyear effort. “Field trips to educate members [of Congress] may be the single most important thing to do,” says one lobbyist who calls the API’s plan “an industry-wide image program.”
PR Week on Working Families For Wal-Mart
Posted by Russ Fagaly
From PR Week:
Edelman’s recovery from its Working Families for Wal-Mart (WFWM) blog imbroglio hit an embarrassing snag when an anti-Wal-Mart group started posting disparaging information at the Web domain workingfamiliesforwalmart.com.
Wal-Mart Watch, a union-supported anti-Wal-Mart group, registered the domain name in April 2006, but started posting after Edelman’s blog troubles, according to Wal-Mart Watch spokesman Nu Wexler.
Its appearance resembles that of WFWM’s actual site, forwalmart.com, but the content is critical of the company and its firm.
Donna Lewis-Johnson, media spokesperson for WFWM and Edelman VP, said that forwalmart.com traffic has been consistently rising. She called the other site “a PR stunt. Its real world impact is nil.”
She added that the gaffe hadn’t affected Edelman’s relationship with Wal-Mart.
Meanwhile, Edelman chief of staff Derek Creevey said the firm is on track with all of its reforms promised after news of its blog mishap broke. He said that all staff has attended social media training classes, and that a review of the firm’s past work for errors is “more than 50%” complete.”
Creevey didn’t know whether results of the review would be made public, or not, but he said that no problems have been unearthed so far.
- Click here (PDF) to learn more about the Wal-Mart Fake Blog Controversy.
- Click here to visit Working Familes For Wal-Mart.
You Can’t Download A Good Wage
Posted by Russ Fagaly
Wal-Mart recently announced it was moving into the area of online downloads. While this may be breaking new ground for the world’s largest retailer, the company continues to avoid addressing its old problems.
From the New York Times:
The decade-old DVD moved two small steps closer yesterday to technology’s endangered-species list. Wal-Mart, the country’s largest seller of movies, announced that next year it will begin testing a video download service on its Web site.
From Bloomberg News:
Wal-Mart’s entry into video downloading pits it against Amazon’s Unbox service and Apple’s iTunes Music Store, which already competes with the retailer in online music sales. The market will expand further next year, when video-rental companies NetFlix Inc. and Blockbuster Inc. may start their own services.
“This isn’t Wal-Mart’s expertise,” said Edward Woo, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities in Los Angeles. “They had a chance to wipe out iTunes, and that obviously didn’t happen. I can’t tell you the last time someone said, downloading music, go to Wal-Mart.”
From the Wall Street Journal:
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. unveiled a long-anticipated service allowing customers to download movies, a key step in what has been an uneasy transition for studios and for brick-and-mortar retailers.
- Click here to learn more about Wal-Mart’s business practices.
Working Families For Wal-Mart?
Posted by Russ Fagaly
In December 2005 Wal-Mart launched “Working Families for Wal-Mart” to much fanfare. They retained one of the fanciest PR firms around — Edelman — to make sure that the site was a success and content on the site has been developed by Edelman employees since then.
I’ll give them credit: it’s a pretty daunting task to pull off a so-called grassroots campaign to claim working families are super-pumped about a company that keeps nearly half of its employees’ children off of health insurance and pays an average of $14,000 a year — $1,000 below the poverty line for a family of three. But they needed to please the client, I guess.
Too bad they forgot to register the domain name.
http://workingfamiliesforwalmart.com
Behind the satire, you’ll find something at this new site that you won’t find at Edelman’s forwalmart.com: the truth about Wal-Mart and working families.
Wal-Mart Pulls T-Shirt With Nazi Logo
Posted by Laura Jack
From Associated Press via International Herald Tribune:
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is pulling a skull-and-crossbones T-shirt from its shelves after a Maryland blogger complained that the image was identical to a Nazi SS emblem from World War II.
Rick Rottman, who runs an online journal called Bent Corner, posted a picture of the shirt late last week next to an image of a divisional insignia he said was used by the 3rd SS Division, a unit of Adolf Hitler’s Waffen SS. The design is a distinctive image of a squat-looking human skull slightly angled to the side.
Wal-Mart said Monday was not aware of the origins of the image until Rottman’s post and is working quickly to get the T-shirt out of stores, spokesman David Tovar said.
“Respect for the individual is a core value of our company and we would never have placed this T-shirt on our shelves had we known the origin and significance of this emblem,” Tovar said.
Wal-Mart is also reviewing its processes among suppliers for checking products in an effort to ensure this never happens again, Marshall Manson from Wal-Mart’s national public relations firm Edelman wrote in an e-mail to blogs that carried the story.
Rottman told The Associated Press by telephone Monday that he had seen the shirts in three Maryland Wal-Mart stores during the weekend. Rottman, 42, an electronics technician and a Navy veteran, said he noticed the shirt at a Hagerstown, Maryland, Wal-Mart on Thursday.
“The image kind of struck me. I used to read a lot of books about World War II and the skull is really distinctive,” Rottman said. He took a photo with his cell phone and checked the image at home, he said.
The Waffen SS was the fighting arm of the notorious SS (Schutzstaffel), founded in 1925 as the personal bodyguard for Adolf Hitler and other Nazi leaders.
Waffen SS divisions have been implicated in murder sprees in German-occupied countries on the eastern and western fronts in World War II. Some guarded concentration camps.
Highlights From Edelman’s Ethics Podcast
Posted by Russ Fagaly
Recently Edelman took on the question of ethics and social media in a podcast. Click here to listen to the podcast. And click here for a run down. Some key quotes and clips:
“We’re being held accountable to standards that may not even exist yet by people who are sort of, are very idealistic of standards that are out there.”
- MediaDaily: WOMMA Puts Edelman On Probation
Following public relations firm Edelman’s acknowledgment that it was behind a series of flogs, or fake blogs, for its client Wal-Mart, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association has placed the agency under a 90-day review. In a statement posted with little fanfare on its Web site last week, WOMMA said it had “determined that the company has breached the WOMMA Ethics Code--a code that Edelman helped write.”
- A Shel of My Former Self: Richard Edelman goes on the record
In the interview, published yesterday, Edelman admitted that his company failed the basic transparency test that applies to all media, not just new media, noting that the failure occurred because “we have people who are insufficiently experienced in this.”
“It’s basically the entire premise of this can be tolled up into those three words: simply telling the truth. Now before I get into any sort of, what the WOMMA code is, and how we’re acting, I want to sort of look at what our guiding principles are as a firm.”
- The Writing on the Wal: Who wants to be Dorothy?
Sock puppet actually strikes me as the perfect term for them, but I mean that in the literal sense of the word. Wal-Mart is literally holding “Working Families” up financially and speaking its words through their mouths. Scratch the surface of Working Families for Wal-Mart and it’s Edelman and Wal-Mart all the way down. Indeed, there is hardly a working family in sight in anything they do. “Wal-Mart for Wal-Mart” would be a better name for them.
Read the rest of this story ...
Edelman Membership Put on Review
Posted by Russ Fagaly
From the Word of Mouth Marketing Association:
Edelman Membership Put on Review
WOMMA has responded this week to issues of disclosure and ethics surrounding Edelman’s recent blogs for Wal-Mart by placing Edelman’s membership on review. The following letter was forwarded to Richard Edelman and Rick Murray on Monday:
Based on Edelman’s publicly stated actions regarding the Wal-Marting Across America blog, WOMMA has determined that the company has breached the WOMMA Ethics Code — a code that Edelman helped write.
Although you have publicly re-committed to WOMMA’s Ethics Code and have outlined a series of action steps going forward, the WOMMA Board of Directors believes it is necessary to put your membership under a 90-day review.
We ask that you take the following corrective actions, some of which already appear to be in progress:
1. Provide assurances that all inappropriate programs have been stopped.
2. Provide a briefing to the WOMMA Executive Committee to fully explain the details of the incident.
3. Implement a training program to educate all employees on ethical practices and disclosure requirements.
4. Institute systems to prevent violations from happening in the future, and to correct them if they do.
5. Formally participate in upcoming WOMMA ethics programs and comply with all new ethics requirements for members.
6. Please provide detailed documentation of your compliance with the above requests.Assuming that we see satisfactory progress, we will end the administrative review and restore your membership to full status in 90 days. If we are not satisfied, WOMMA reserves the right to implement additional penalties, including but not limited to: demanding additional corrective action, removal of Governing Member status, removal from the Board of Directors, or expulsion.
Richard Edelman Discusses The Wal-Mart Blog
Posted by Laura Jack
From IDG News Service via ITworld.com:
In late September, two bloggers set off on a trip in an recreational vehicle across America, stopping in the car parks of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. along the way and blogging about all the great Wal-Mart folks they met—or so we were meant to believe.
Within a couple of weeks of the “Wal-Marting Across America” blog going live, BusinessWeek reported that the RV, the gas and the blog entries were being paid by a Wal-Mart PR organization formed by Edelman, a global public relations company. When the blogosphere found out, it was none too pleased.
Edelman came in for perhaps greater criticism than Wal-Mart because its president, Richard Edelman, has spent the last 2 years writing his own blog, talking up the blogosphere and promoting it as an important medium to companies.
His PR agency even played a part in creating guidelines for the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA). Those guidelines state: “We stand against shill and undercover marketing, whereby people are paid to make recommendations without disclosing their relationship with the marketer.”
For several days, Richard Edelman made no mention of the Wal-Mart brouhaha on his blog but he broke silence on Oct. 16 with an apology and recommitment to the code of ethics.
On Tuesday, at the mid-point of a six-city tour of Asia, he sat down with IDG News Service in Tokyo to answer some questions about the incident. The following is an edited transcript.
IDG News Service: What happened with Wal-Mart?
Richard Edelman: We were insufficiently transparent about the identity of one of the two bloggers who went on that RV tour. And in a certain way, it’s not a failure of new media; it was a failure in all media. Which is to say, if they were talking to you in your IDG mainstream media hat, you would want to know the name of the spokesperson and what his background was and what his credentials were and we failed that basic test. We did it because we have people who are insufficiently experienced in this. And [here’s] my job. I have to make sure people have the training in basics of PR and also in the morals of new media and that’s what I’m totally focused on. We had mandatory training for all of our workforce this week in three different regions. Everyone gets the seriousness with which I take this and the profession needs to have that level of standard; otherwise, we are not going to be players in the blogosphere, forget it!