Several days on from the original debate around “Wal-marting across America” Richard Edelman and Steve Rubel have posted about Edelman’s involvement.

There’s already been much debate around the length of time it’s taken for the company to post a response. Things travel fast in the blogosphere with the pace driven by bloggers, but as a professional communicator I’m only too aware that if a company wants to communicate in this space its responses need to be more considered.

Sensitive content does need checking before publication, regardless of whether it’s on a blog or a newswire. Yes it would have been better if Edelman had entered the fray quicker, but I’m realistic about how much work must have been going on behind the scenes at Edelman to identify what happened.

The responses were pretty clear – and I think the blogging community needs to accept it’s happened, and take the view that these things can happen to anyone operating in the fast-paced, experimental world of the internet.

All of us working in this space should take a lesson in corporate transparency from Edelman’s experience, and make sure we don’t fall into a similar trap ourselves. With this in mind it would be useful to find out more about how it actually happened, and I suspect we may see this over the next few days.