Wal-Mart have launched a group on Facebook designed to harness the decorating needs of students returning to college.

Edelman have been famously effective in advising their client Wal-Mart in how to cope with an avalanche of negative press from unions, media and local pressure groups. My colleague Flemming Madsen even credits them with turning round sentiment about Wal-Mart.

All the more surprising then that Edelman should do something as dumb as a blog which purports to be from a member of the public, but actually is from their own team. Richard Edelman has now apologised. This kind of trick is really damaging to a brand, because it erodes the very thing they are trying to reinforce, which is the value of their word. How can I believe you on what you say about your policy on employment, or local sourcing, or whatever it is I am sceptical about, if you are capable of this kind of thing? Ouch.

Like Antony Mayfield (whom I have to thank for the link) one has some sympathy for Edelman. It is difficult to get this right, but if anyone should know how to do this, it is Edelman, with their payroll of A-list bloggers like Steve Rubel. The web is so unforgiving about this kind of mistake. Edelman phoned Robert Scoble to apologise.

[Update] Here is an excellent summary of the issues raised by Matthew Ingram. Some commenters claim that PR and blogging don’t mix. Constantin Basturea’s comment mentions a couple of successful blogs engineered by PRs at MS&L - Fastlane - and Hill & Knowlton - LG Chocolate phone blog.

The Whole Foods blog

A call from Dominic Rushe of the Sunday Times who is writing about business blogging. I talked as plausibly as I could about what is going on in the UK, but in truth there has not yet been a lot of movement by corporates towards setting up blogs. I recently reviewed Suw Charman’s suggestions as to why. I am convinced it will happen, though it may take the word “blog” losing some of its negative and/or cranky overtones. For all of my excitement about David Weinberger’s vision of what blogging can do for society and for business, real benefits will come when people see blogging as a neutral technology, available to single issue campaigners, schoolkids, mothers, businessmen, musicians and marketeers equally.

I am indebted, though to Dominic for showing me this example (screen shot above) of a corporate blog, done by food company Whole Foods. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey clearly realised the huge threat to his brand from author Michael Pollan’s book the Omnivore’s dilemma and used the blog to take a lot of trouble in answering the detailed points Pollan had made.

Pollan had not approached Whole Foods during the writing of the Omnivore’s Dilemma. In the book he criticised Whole Foods and compared it to Wal-Mart for, he said, failing to source locally. Wal-Mart is a cuss-word amongst liberal shoppers of exactly the kind that Whole Foods targets. Pollan’s is a grave allegation and one that resonates in articles like this from Field Maloney in Slate. Worse, Whole Foods makes large in-store claims for sourcing locally. Worse still, Wal-Mart itself recently announced that it was going organic, posing a huge threat to Whole Foods key differentiator.

Here is a taster of the exchange on Mackey’s blog. Pollan writes:

Let me start by explaining why I did not seek to interview anyone from Whole Foods for my book, which you imply in your letter represents a journalistic lapse. (You should know I have interviewed people from the company several times in the past, particularly in connection with an April 2001 story I did for The New York Times Magazine “Naturally,” for which I interviewed Margaret Wittenberg. Over the years I have also interviewed several store employees of Whole Foods and a great many of its suppliers.) For the purposes of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” I approached Whole Foods less as a journalist than a consumer, since my goal was to capture how the store represents itself and the food it sells to a typical shopper: the signs and displays, the brochures, the labels, the photographs on the walls. Admittedly, this is not a systematic way to describe a supermarket chain-it depends on the sample of stores I visited and what they happened to be selling on any given day. It could be you have stores that sell substantially more local food than the stores I observed. But the fact remains that what I observed I observed, and that is what I wrote in the book. Nothing in your letter leads me to believe my account of what you sell in my local Whole Foods or the farms it comes from is inaccurate.

Mackey’s response:

It is difficult to discuss this with you here, Michael, because you are falling back upon your own subjective experience as your only reference point. I want to point out, however, that we never merely “observe what we observe.” We bring to our observations our expectations, beliefs, biases, and world views, and these serve as perceptual filters that tremendously influence our observations. One of the main purposes of my letter to you was to try to get you to examine some of your biases and beliefs about Whole Foods Market that may be filtering what you are actually observing about us. If you come into our stores (or anywhere else) looking for what you don’t like, it is all-too-easy to find it.

With all due respect, Michael, I also think your response here is pretty weak because the fact is that you didn’t try to contact us. I think if you are going to criticize us publicly to hundreds of thousands of people and are going to compare us unfavorably with Wal-Mart, then you at least owe us the courtesy of talking to us first and hearing our side of the story. You certainly spent plenty of time talking directly to Joel Salatin for the book and didn’t approach him as simply an innocent “consumer.” Quite the opposite: you went and lived at his farm for about a week. That kind of first hand knowledge and experience is the essence of good journalism in my opinion and I think Whole Foods Market also deserved to be treated fairly and with respect.

John Mackey produced chapter and verse supporting his contention that Whole Foods indeed sourced produce locally. Pollan emerges a little battered from the exchange.

Mackey was absolutely right to use a blog as a forum for publishing his response and having this debate. Pollan’s book is exactly the kind of publication that bloggers love. Judging from posts like this Mackey seems to have made his point. He is commended for his transparency. He seems to have spiked the guns of those who were setting Whole Foods up to be a corporate villain in the organic foods arena.

The Overture search inventory tool is one of the great little secrets of the internet. For those who have not discovered it, you can find out who is searching for what around your topic and use the information to drive your paid search choices.

We have been reviewing a particularly sulphurous quantity of consumer-generated feedback on behalf of a company which has incurred the wrath of consumers, and trying (on their behalf) to figure out what advice we should give them about managing the situation. The volume of complaints made us think it was worth looking at traffic on Overture, which captures Yahoo! searches. Fortunately it hasn’t quite got to that pitch yet.

But, intriguingly, several other companies figure in the context of the term “complaint”. Here they are in order of the most complaints. We have linked to the page you reach if you follow the link.

There are some observations one should make about this list. Big companies are more likely to figure on it than small ones. Yahoo! is going to be there, because it is Yahoo!’s website. Tech companies are more likely to figure than non tech companies. The two tech companies eBay and Yahoo! have even thought about this search and ensured that they have pages with information for customers there. eLoan complaint appears to be such a popular term that it is spammed, judging from the search results page. Pay Pal, despite being part of eBay, seem less well prepared and their number one result is Pay Pal warning which is a forum for people with cautionary tales of dealing with the company.

Vonage, Wal-mart, Cingular, Herbalife, Bank of America and McDonald’s would be well-advised to think about this search in the context of their web presence and provide customised landing pages answering the issues that consumers and journalists may wish to raise.

The Overture results on the word “complaint” point again to the undoubted lesson that if you are in customer service the search engines (Yahoo! in this case) are doing the job for you.

An article in the New York Times (requires free registration or use Bugmenot for a one-time password) profiles how Wal-Mart have taken on their detractors with a pro-active PR campaign, run by a number of ex political campaigners.

The PR campaign emphasises the Wal-Mart positives (good value, local employment) and looks to off-set a campaign of detraction from pressure groups like Wal-Mart Watch, run in part by trade unions who oppose the company’s employment practices and who cannot get recognition from the company. (Note their website’s heavy use of email newsletters, syndicated news, its blog and comment pages) The trigger is a new documentary entitled “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price” by Robert Greenwald. The documentary looks systematically at Wal-Mart negatives - the effect on smaller local businesses of a Wal-Mart opening up, their healthcare policies and employment policies.

Key quotes:

A confidential 2004 report prepared by McKinsey & Company for Wal-Mart, and made public by Wal-Mart Watch, found that 2 percent to 8 percent of Wal-Mart consumers surveyed have ceased shopping at the chain because of “negative press they have heard.”

To keep up with its critics, Wal-Mart “has to run a campaign,” said Robert McAdam, a former political strategist at the Tobacco Institute who now oversees Wal-Mart’s corporate communications. “It’s simply nonsense for us to let some of these attacks go without a response.”

The impact of the negative sentiment in slowing Wal-Mart’s growth is a classical demonstration of Frederick Reichheld’s net promoters theory. This theory maintains that as the proportion of your detractors grow, your growth is curtailed and that a decline in your net promoters index (the number of your promoters minus your detractors) is strongly predictive of a stock price decline.

It would be interesting to track the impact of Wal-Mart campaign, which is run by Edelman on Wal-Mart’s online net promoters index.

Thanks to Flemming Madsen of Onalytica who suggested we blogged this.