Simon Wakeman - marketing, public relations and digital communications

Edelman goes public on Wal-mart

Monday, October 16th, 2006 at 11:01 pm

Welcome to my website. On my blog I write about marketing, public relations and digital communications. To keep up-to-date with my posts you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or sign-up to receive blog posts by email.
Thanks for visiting and I hope you enjoy my site.

Several days on from the original debate around “Wal-marting across AmericaRichard 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.

Tags: , , , ,
Categories: Blogging, Public relations, Social media

Comments on “Edelman goes public on Wal-mart”

  • PRspeak

    Edelman, Rubel, Wal-Mart: “Let’s wait and see what the facts are before we post”…

    Good PR schools were teaching the value of quickly and honestly communicating with audiences long before the spotlight of blogs forced people to think about responding to a situation in immediate terms.  It’s not a new or…

Leave your comment



Check out my rules for posting comments on my website.

About my blog

I blog about marketing, PR and communications, with a focus on new media and how technology can help organisations communicate more effectively.

The content and opinions expressed on this blog are not endorsed by nor reflect the views of any company or organisation I work with.

Recent posts

Tags

Marketing Public relations social+media public+relations Blogging Social media Branding RSS Podcasting statistics web+development News Wordpress CIPR -research-and-analysis General Events Web strategy Careers personal+development

Archives

Blogroll

Check out the blogs, podcasts and vidcasts I'm following on my blogroll page.

Keeping fit

In my spare time I like to run and cycle. I track my runs and bike rides using the superb RunningAHEAD website: